The Rich Roll Podcast - Ben Greenfield On Optimizing Endurance Training

Episode Date: January 13, 2013

Ready to get your athletic geek on? Ask and ye shall receive. The multi-sport, multi-hyphenate strength & endurance athlete / coach and overall fitness / nutrition authority Ben Greenfield joins the podcast to dive deep down the rabbit hole and get granular on: optimizing endurance training methods; periodization & setting proper training zones; the cross fit craze; using technology to monitor physiological markers & effectively bio-hack your body for enhanced performance; the importance of nutrition & supplementation for recovery; and much more. And if you have a moment, we'd love it if you could toss a quick review up on the iTunes page. Thanks for the support and enjoy the show! SHOW NOTES * Finding Ultra Excerpt * Ben Greenfield Fitness Website * Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook Page * Ben Greenfield on Twitter: @BenGreenfield & @GetFitGuy For links & to learn more about the tools, products & information Ben advocates in this podcast, click HERE.

the rich roll podcast hey everybody what's happening welcome back to the podcast episode 11 thanks for joining us thanks for tuning in thanks for listening very excited we just passed 100 000 downloads for the podcast since we started this little experiment at the very end of November, 10 episodes in, super excited about that. So really glad that there's an audience out there and very appreciative. We're all really busy. You guys are really busy. So it means a lot to me that you would devote a couple hours of your day to listening to this podcast when we put it out. And it's a responsibility, and it's a responsibility I don't take lightly. So I'm really happy that people seem to be enjoying it.

We're getting great comments on the iTunes page. So I really appreciate that as well. It means a lot to me that you would take a moment to jot something down there too. So if you're enjoying the podcast, yeah, it would be great if you could do that. If not, don't sweat it. But I appreciate those of you out there that did take the time to write a comment either on my blog at richworld.com or on the iTunes page. So thank you very, very much. A couple quick notes before we get into today's interview, episode 11.

We have Ben Greenfield on the podcast today. He's an amazing guy, a triathlete himself, a coach, and basically an expert in all things fitness and diet related. He's a very knowledgeable guy. He really knows his stuff. He understands physiology incredibly well. So if you're one of those people that likes to geek out, likes to biohack, life hack, likes all the data, you know, beyond just, you know, the watts on your power meter, but people who really want to drill down and see how their body operates and understand it better than like Ben's your guy. He has kind of a Tim Ferriss approach to monitoring how his body works and what it's doing.

And he talks a lot about it in the interview. And he was great. So hopefully you guys will enjoy it. I enjoyed speaking with him. I've known him for a couple of years. I've done his podcast or a couple of his podcasts. He's got a lot going on and really wanted to have him on the show. So I was glad that he was able to take the time and we chatted for the better part of two hours. So I don't want to spend too much time in the introductory here. I want to get right into the interview, but just a

couple of show notes really quick. And if you have not i haven't been mentioning i don't really talk about my book that much in terms of like promoting it because it came out in may it's been a little bit it's been a little while but since uh the audience seems to be increasing if there's people that are just tuning in now who don't know or or haven't checked it out i wrote a book that came out this past year. It's called Finding Ultra. And it's kind of my story to rediscovering myself through fitness and plant-based nutrition. It's a memoir. You can find it basically anywhere on the internet, on Amazon and the like. My publisher, Crown Archetype, which is a division of Random House, published an excerpt of the book. It's basically the preface and the beginning of chapter one.

So in the show notes to this podcast, I'll put a link to that. So if you're interested in the book but not ready to pull the trigger yet, you can read the first part of the book and decide whether you're interested in going further. The paperback of the book is coming out this spring, which I'm excited about. So I'm going to be gearing up to kind of launch that pretty soon as we get closer into spring. So anyway, Finding Ultra, Jai Lifestyle. What else do I have for you? What else do I have for you? Oh, yeah.

If you want to support the show, there is an Amazon banner ad on my website at richroll.com in the blog section or the podcast section. So if you're going to buy something on Amazon, it would be great if you first went to richroll.com to the blog there. There's a little black and white banner ad. Just click that first. Click through to Amazon through there and then buy whatever you're going to buy and it'll throw a couple nickels in our bucket as an affiliate thing and we're using all that money

just to kind of pay for the bandwidth and a couple pieces of equipment that we need to kind of make this a little bit more professional. We've really enjoyed doing it and like I said, I take it seriously and I want to do it as professionally as possible. I want to increase the frequency of the podcast and I want to get a dedicated, devoted space with all the proper equipment so

that we can elevate the production value of the show and really turn it into, you know, a really regular thing as opposed to kind of a hobby thing. I'd really like to make it something that I do upwards of three times a week and really be able to get the great guests in and continue to provide great content. So that's it. Let's get into Ben Greenfield. But before that, I wanted to let you guys know that at the end of the interview, Ben talks a little bit about an event that he's hosting and producing that's coming up at the beginning of March. It's March 8th and 9th up in Spokane, Washington, where he lives, and it's called Become Superhuman.

It's a great event. He's got a lot of really cool speakers lined up and it's meant to be an intensive experience to really take your fitness and your nutrition to the next level. So he's been planning this for like two years or something like that. So it's been a long time in the making and you can go and you can learn from the best of the best in the realms of health, fitness, and nutrition, and really learn more and discover how to get your body to not only look great but feel great, think better, and perform at the highest level possible.

So, again, it's scheduled for March 8th and 9th in Spokane, and it's targeted towards anyone who wants to discover the healthiest, most efficient way to get a better body, enhance the physical and mental performance, and live a long, high-quality life. Ben has been lined up, I'm sorry, Ben has lined up a really great world-class list of speakers that range the spectrum of performance to fat loss to recovery, digestion, microbes, which is one of my favorite subjects, brain sleep, hormone optimization. And it's basically an intensive two days where you're going to delve deep and get into the cutting edge of all of this stuff to enhance your human performance,

fat loss, fitness, and really walk away with health strategies that are sustainable that you can implement into your life that will take you, again, to the next level. In addition to fantastic guest lectures, he is personally going to be sharing his top body transformation techniques and secrets that he has yet to share publicly on his website at bengreenfieldfitness.com and his other social media outlets and his audio books and audio materials and all this kind of stuff. So when you register, you're going to get two full days of hands-on coaching from Ben and his team.

So if you're in the Pacific Northwest, it sounds almost like a no-brainer, especially since you'd expect something like this to cost thousands of dollars. But he is offering it for just $297 and was gracious enough to offer the listeners of this podcast $50 off. the website, the sign-up registry website for the event, which is superhumancoach.com, where you can find out all the information about what's going to happen there. And you want to register, just enter in the affiliate code RICHROLL and you'll get $50 off. So it ends up being $247, which is essentially nothing compared to what you're going to get out of it. So check that out. And so I want to roll right into the interview now. Waste no more time because Ben and I talked for quite a long time.

This is a long podcast. So without further ado. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment.

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When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, everybody, we got Ben Greenfield on the line. How's it going, Ben? It's going good, Rich. I was just telling you, I'm still warming up. I've got my hoodie and my pants on. Just got out of the hot shower because I've been snowboarding all day. So if you hear my teeth chattering, that's the reason. It was a cold one today. Well, just live in the active lifestyle, man. Yeah. As active as you can be. It seems like that you spend much of your day on the chairlift up there, but, um, you know, maybe I just need to do a little more carving and jumping to make it feel like I've had a hard day of working out. Yeah. But you're in the great outdoors, man. Spokane's

beautiful up there. Yeah. Plus I'd wind up in the hospital if I did any of that stuff. That's true. But, uh, all right, man. Well, cool. Well, thanks for joining the podcast. I've been, you know, kind of following you for a long time and I was trying to remember how we first met. I think I did one of your podcast interviews a long time ago. That might have been the first time that we talked, like a couple years ago when you had the Rockstar Triathlon podcast or program. Are you still doing that? triathlon podcast or program? Are you still doing that? Yeah. You came onto the Rockstar Triathlete Academy back in the day, like when we were just launching that. And I think you were on my Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast too. You came on

there to talk about plant-based lifestyle. And then I think you also did an interview for Finding Ultra on there as well. Yeah then I think you also did an interview for Finding Ultra on there as well. I don't remember exactly. It all just kind of blends together, this podcasting thing. Well, Ben is a guy who really has not only fitness and nutrition worked out in his coaching program, but you really have the internet wired, man. It seems like you're all over the place and you have all the bases covered. You got your online coaching programs, you have eBooks, you've got multiple podcasts. I know you're doing stuff with endurance planet too, and every man try and these different, you know, blogs and websites and podcasts and everywhere I turn, like your name comes up as the host or

sort of the front person on all these sorts of things. So you really have figured out how to use technology and new media to really create a career out of fitness and coaching and consulting and public speaking and all this good stuff. Yeah, well, Al Gore was really my mentor when it came to him inventing the Internet. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, cool. Thanks. That's good to hear. No, yeah. I mean, you really are. Yeah, you're everywhere and you're a great resource. And I go to your blog quite a bit and it's chock full of great information. Not just if you're a triathlete,

but you just want to be fit or you want to be stronger or maybe you have a diet question or whatever. Ben seems to have it pretty well covered so you can check out bengreenfieldfitness.com that's is that the best place to kind of begin the journey of understanding who you are and all the different things that you're offering yeah that's that's the hub right cool so how did it all begin i mean did you you know did you always know you wanted to be in this field or were you just an active kid who was into a lot of different sports and got into triathlon or, you know, how did this journey start and, you know, what's the story?

No, I was a total geek kid. I was into like fantasy novels and computer programming and Warcraft and totally geeked out until I was 13 years old. And my parents built a tennis court on our property and hired a tennis instructor. And I just like got, I fell in love with tennis and just played all day long. We got to get this kid outside. Got into like strength and conditioning for that. And, and started my own business after a few years teaching tennis and played high school tennis and went on and played collegiate tennis and just got into sports from playing tennis. And I began to love studying the human body and physiology. And, you know, I went out and bought

a bunch of exercise equipment and, you know and put a little TV in the gym. I'd sit there watching Rocky III and doing my workouts to get myself in shape for tennis. And got interested enough in it to where, to everyone's surprise, I didn't end up going after computer programming or anything like that in college. But actually studied exercise science and studied it for four years and then decided I was interested in being a doctor. So I went pre-med and took all the pre-med courses and did some internships in hospitals and in sports medicine clinics. And after doing that, decided that I didn't want to go into medicine and went back and got a master's degree in exercise physiology and biomechanics and went on to going to hip and knee surgical sales out of college. Why did you decide you didn't want to be a doctor?

I became really disenchanted with it because what I wanted to do is I wanted to marry exercise science and medicine and go on and be basically like an orthopedic surgeon. And so most of the internships and the practicums that I did were in that setting. And there wasn't a single doc that encouraged me to pursue that field. field. Every single one of them told me that I was going to be overworked and frustrated with the system and spend a ton of time with paperwork and that I'd have a lot of money but not enough time to enjoy it. And after a good year of that, I had a lot of questions about whether or not that was something I really wanted to do. So that surgical sales job that I took was kind of like my last opportunity for myself to really delve into that field

and see if it was something that I wanted to do. And it was the same thing, just standing there in the surgical ward day after day. I didn't really see what I saw going on there as my dream, as my legacy, as what I wanted to do as a career. So I just quit all that and walked into the gym that was next to the apartment I was living in and asked for a job and started working there as a personal trainer. And over time, became a fitness manager and went on to manage a few other gyms, branched off and started opening my own gyms and my own studios here in Spokane, Washington, and also over in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

And kind of during that time, I was getting into triathlon as well. And I reached a certain point where I was really doing well as a trainer. I had a lot of clients, had a lot of other trainers who were training clients for me. And I was just really loving life at that point and felt like I was making a difference in people's lives and enabling them to get fit. I had a lot of Ironman triathletes I worked with. I had a lot of people who were going after fat loss and health. And I was just really loving it. And then my kids were born, and I was never home because I was at the gym.

I mean, when you're a personal trainer, you show up at 6 a.m., and you leave at 8 p.m. because that's when people want to train. So I remember I was speaking at a fitness business conference down in California. And this guy got up and gave this long talk about how he was writing books online and how he was doing websites and blogs and working with some other partners online. And he was doing well. I didn't realize you could actually make a career as a personal trainer out of doing that type of stuff. And the light bulb kind of went off for me that that was a way that I could still spend time with my family and still kind of make that difference that I wanted to make in people's lives. back and I sold everything I got out of the gyms got out of the studios um and just shifted into writing and freelance writing and online coaching and sitting in my underwear at home and doing my work from there so very cool yeah I mean it's you know I just I had a doc Dr. Michael Greger on the

podcast a couple weeks ago who related, you know, sort of a similar experience. And I mean, he actually obviously went through medical school and became a doctor, but he did become disillusioned with the business practices of, you know, what it actually means to be a doctor and, you know, basically realized much like you realized that he could have a bigger impact and, you know, spread the message that he wanted to spread by leveraging the internet and online sources and technology to, you know, promote his message or whatever, much better than seeing patients one-on-one and being wed to kind of the billable hours, so to speak. And, you know, I think it's an amazing

time right now where, you know, if you have a certain level of basic skills and something to offer that you can do that. And you've done a wonderful job of really wiring it up. Yeah, I mean that's a good point. Telemedicine is taking off too. One of the companies I work with is called Wellness FX. And it's literally basic biomarker testing where you get a requisition form sent to your house and you take it to a nearby lab and you get your blood and your saliva and your urine and whatnot tested and sent off. And then you've got a personal dashboard with all your biomarkers and you work with a practitioner, a medical practitioner or a nutritionist or someone like that over the phone to go over your results. Right. Is that the same? I think I've heard of that. Is that the same company that Tim Ferris

is involved with? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've read up on that and he put, I saw some video also where he went to their offices and, you know, it looked like a really cool thing. And I think that that is, you know, it plays into the whole kind of, you know, biohacking and life hacking thing. body works and give them the markers and empower them to make better decisions and using doctors more as consultants rather than these people that you go to who are supposed to know everything about everything and generally can be disappointing in that context. Yeah, it's pretty slick. I mean, if you break a leg or bust an eardrum or something, you still got to go to a doctor. a leg or bust an eardrum or something, you still got to go to a doctor. But yeah, I mean, for this lifestyle management and preventive health management, you know, there's a lot of power

there in terms of being able to take advantage of technology to just follow your own biomarkers and have like, you know, an online advisor to help walk you through stuff. Right. And then you can actually really track what you're doing and the impact of whether it's, you know, a certain exercise routine or dietary regimen, you can, you can physically see the impact on that, on those markers. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's one of the things too, is there are some labs out there where you can test and just get like PDF sent to you via email of your results, but it helps to have like some kind of a dashboard or something where you can, you know, see that, you know, whatever in May, your vitamin D levels were 30 and then you got them up to 50. And then for some reason they, you know, whatever dropped down to 35 or something like that. You know,

it's, it's good information to see if you can test a few times a year. And so is that open to the public now now or are they still in kind of a beta mode? I think it's in like 20 states, something like that. So, you know, the deal is you got to have licensed practitioners in each state and make sure that you pass all regulations necessary to do the testing. And also you're practicing medicine essentially when you're doing something like that. So interesting. And so when did, when did triathlon kind of come into the picture for you? Uh, early on, uh, in my last two years of college, I was kind of getting out of, I had made a transition from tennis into bodybuilding

and it was just a, you know, this jacked 210 pound bodybuilderbuilder, and got called over to the University Triathlon Club to teach a course over there on physiology. They wanted me to come into one of their triathlon club meetings and do a physiology 101 type of thing, which is what I was studying. So I was comfortable doing that, and I went in and talked about slow twitch muscle and fat utilization and fast twitch muscle and carb utilization and all this stuff. And they invited me to do one of the local sprint triathlons that the university put on.

And so I went and did it and was just – I was wrecked. I was in a huge amount of pain because I was trying to carry and cool all this muscle. And I remember my boobs were bouncing up and down from my bodybuilding chest, and it just all this muscle. And I remember like my, my boobs were bouncing up and down from my, you know, my bodybuilding chest and it just, it hurt so bad. And I was, I was extremely sore the next day. Um, but I was hooked at that point and signed up for more triathlons and, you know, kind of started, uh, cannibalizing muscle and, and catabolizing, you know, the, the body that I'd built to instead be fast for endurance sports. And yeah, from that point on, I was doing a few triathlons a year

and started kind of shifting my knowledge of physiology into doing a little bit more coaching and training. And when I was running some of those gyms that I was doing, I would do like eight-week-long triathlon courses and take a bunch of people at the gym and bring them through the pool and swim lessons and go into the spin room and do spinning sessions. And we'd do runs, and then we'd all go to a race. And so camps and clinics and coaching and all that I got into. And at the same time, it's a huge passion of mine. I love it. So are you still training for them and competing,

or are you just focused on the coaching aspect of it? Both, both. I race for Team Timex. Oh, you do? Okay, I didn't know that. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, it's a blast. And you've been to, you've raced at Kona before, right?

A couple times, I think. Is that right? Yeah, I've done Kona four times. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So just for listeners out there who might not be familiar with Ben, Yeah, I've done little bit about my journey into learning about endurance training and understanding what your zones are and what training in those different zones accomplishes and really trusting in developing your aerobic capacity

with these long Z2, Zone 2 workouts and the like. And people seem to be sort of really respond to that and want to know more about how all of that works. I get emails and tweets and messages all the time about, you know, how do I set my zones or, you know, how much time should I be spending in zone two? And I spent a lot of time answering these questions and, you know, I know that you understand this stuff really well. So I was hoping you could speak to this a little bit and kind of addressing if somebody is like a beginner triathlete or doesn't really understand what it means to do zone training, you know, the importance of that and the difference in the physiological differences that take place when you're trying to develop

aerobic efficiency and your fat burning mechanism versus your sort of strength and speed and short, you know, fast twitch muscle glycogen burning system. Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, the basic thing, and it's really easy for anybody to wrap their minds around, if you understand this concept, then you're going to know more about basic physiology than 99% of the people out there. You've got two basic muscle fiber types and three basic energy systems. And if you know those two muscle types and those three energy systems, that can form a basis for you to be able to make some really smart decisions in your training. So your two basic muscle types are fast twitch muscle and slow twitch muscle.

And for those of you who are about to hang up on the podcast because you think this is going to be way too basic, just hold on. This will be worth it for you. And then you've got three basic energy systems. You've got your aerobic, basically what's kind of like your oxidative energy system. You've got your anaerobic energy system, also known as your glycolytic energy system. And then you've got your phosphagenic energy system. So that first one, that aerobic energy system, kind of kicks in and predominates

any time you're exercising more than about two minutes. And it uses primarily slow twitch muscle. Or it would be more fitting to say that slow twitch muscle primarily uses that aerobic energy system. And what that means is that slow twitch muscle has a very long time to fatigue and it's also going to use an energy source that provides a long steady source of fuel. Not a really fast release source of fuel, not a fuel that's very useful for explosive and short sprint efforts, but a fuel that's readily available for long periods of time,

and that would be fat. So you've got your slow twitch muscle primarily utilizing the aerobic energy system and primarily relying on fat as a fuel. And slow twitch muscle has a high, high degree of what are called mitochondria in it so that it can use oxygen fed to it by your body to turn primarily fat with some amount of carbohydrate into ATP or energy for the muscle to contract. So that's your one energy system. And this will relate to zones in just a second. And then you've got your fast twitch muscle and fast twitch muscle is going to primarily use that glycolytic energy system. Glycolytic meaning that you're primarily breaking down glucose or carbohydrate for energy.

Much smaller amount of fuel available when you're relying on glucose or carbohydrate, but it frees up energy much more quickly. You're able to produce ATP more quickly. You're able to move at faster speeds when you're using that energy system. Fast-twitch muscle fatigues much more quickly. So you're able to produce ATP more quickly. You're able to move at faster speeds when you're using that energy system. And fast twitch muscle fatigues much more quickly. You're going to primarily use fast twitch muscle for efforts, like sprint efforts up to about two minutes in duration. And then you're going to have to slow down. At that point, you're going to be making that switch just based off of the buildup of lactic acid into more of an oxidative, slow-twitch muscle utilizing format, which is why you can't sprint for 10 minutes as long as you can for two minutes. Sure, of course. And you're also going to deplete your glycogen stores as well.

You only have, I mean, my understanding is you've got about 90 minutes worth of that before that kind of runs out on you, even if you're taking in the goos and doing all that kind of stuff. Well, the average person walking down the street is going to have about 90 minutes. An athlete can usually enhance their glycogen storage capacity, their carbohydrate storage capacity to the point where they could go for two hours and sometimes a little bit more than two hours. I mean, you know, back in the day that, you know, good triathletes like, you know, Mark Allen or Dave Scott could roll out of bed without breakfast and go out and do an Olympic distance triathlon and be out there for 150 to two hours and be okay. So in a trained person, you can still be fairly glycolytic or at least use a high percentage of fast-twitch muscle on a high percentage of carbohydrate for up to two hours. But for just about anybody, once you get past that point, you're kind of screwed

and you start to rely on fat as a fuel. That's going to kind of slow you down. And like you just kind of alluded to, Rich, exogenous sources of carbohydrate, meaning like taking in gels, force drinks, and things like that, they kind of elongate the amount of time that you can last utilizing carbohydrate stores. So it just kind of makes logical sense. If you've got carbohydrate coming in through your mouth and your gut and your bloodstream, it's going to be that much less muscle carbohydrate and liver carbohydrate that your body has to tap into. And that's why someone can even do something like an Ironman going pretty fast, still using a decent amount of fast-switch muscle, still burning a lot of matches out there.

As long as they're taking in some source of fuel, can maintain a fairly decent speed. Then that last energy system is also used by fast-switch muscle, and it's called your phosphogenic energy system. Anybody that's heard of creatine or like using a creatine supplement might be familiar with this but basically creatine kind of like glucose kind of like fat it can be used as energy but it is a fuel source that predominates for efforts

that are under about 25 to 30 seconds in duration it's a really short explosive effort so this would be like explosively doing like a bench press for five reps or something like that. And that's why creatine is a, you know, it's a popular supplement among weightlifters, especially or powerlifting athletes, just because it lets you do it, you know, a few extra reps. And interestingly, there's some research coming down the pipeline that shows that it may have some use for endurance athletes,

kind of a almost a glycogen sparing effect, meaning if you supplement with creatine, it may actually help you last a little bit longer. That's interesting because, yeah, I've heard conflicting things about that in the endurance sports context, and it's interesting to hear you talk about it as an energy source because I always thought of it as sort of a more of a recovery-oriented supplement, like a muscle-building kind of thing, as opposed to something that's going to give you a burst of energy in the weight room. No, think of it the same as glucose. It is simply an energy source. It's not really going to do a lot for recovery or do a lot for soreness as much as it's

going to give you a source of energy outside of glucose and fats. And in a lot of folks, they're creatine non-responders because they genetically hold decent amounts of creatine in their muscle anyways, and they don't need that extra creatine. Is there a water retention aspect to taking that? There is. And that's also something that's highly variable you'll you'll find some people really tend to bloat when they take creatine and some have no issues at all um and and the interesting thing is that you you got to realize i just explained these three energy systems the oxidative the glycolytic and the phosphogenic but the any any given energy system is not going to be the only energy system that you use for 100%.

You're bleeding into one or the other at any given – it's more like the predominant one that you're using. Right. So, you're running a marathon at a decent pace. You might be 70% oxidative, 25% glycolytic, and 5% phosphogenic. So, you're going to be tapping into any of these. So you're going to be tapping into any of these, and that's why you can't, for example, just use 100% fats or just rely on 100% carbohydrate. It's always going to be a mix of these fuels. And that's where we kind of get into this zone thing that you brought up. In any given triathlon book or exercise training book or endurance book, you're going to find heart rate zones or power

training zones. There's usually like five to seven of them typically. I tend to coach with five just because I think seven is, it just starts to get confusing. And sometimes three is almost too basic and doesn't give you enough different variables to coach with or to train with. Basically your first two zones, zone one and zone two, those are going to be primarily aerobic. They use primarily slow twitch muscle, usually fat as a fuel. Usually you don't need a lot of carbohydrate as you're exercising in those zones. And they're used to either enhance blood flow and help you to recover

or else help you to do like a long exercise session without fatiguing. Like zone two, you should be able to just go all day long using fats as a fuel. And you'll never deplete your fat stores, by the way. I mean no matter what you do and how lean you are, you still have more than you would ever need to go all day on burning fat. Yeah. I mean when you are out on an exercise session, like a long exercise session and you're not eating anything

and you bonk and you're wondering why because you've kept it really low intensity and you've stayed in zone 2 and you've stayed aerobic and shouldn't your slow twitch muscle be able to utilize your tens of thousands of calories of fat for all day long? What's bonking is your brain. Your brain does need trace amounts

of glucose. Just about everybody has basic glucose requirements for your kidneys, for your liver, for your heart, for your brain, for your basic physiological function. You usually need right around 600 calories of some form of glucose. Your body can make some of it from protein and some of it from fatty acids, but at least, and it kind of varies from person to person, but about half of that, 200 or 300 calories or so of that, have to come from some form of carbohydrate. What that means is if you're completely void of carbohydrate, you can go out on a zone two session and be trying to utilize fat as a fuel,

and you're still going to bonk because your brain runs out of glucose, and at that point it just starts to shut everything else down. Then you've got your zone three, which is kind of like a mix. It's kind of like the – it's not the no-man's zone, but it's a combination of oxidative and glycolytic energy systems. It's a combination of oxidative and glycolytic energy systems. This is the zone at which you're starting to make that switch from using primarily slow twitch muscle into using more fast twitch muscle. The way I like to think about this is that's your racing zone for a lot of Ironman events and for marathon, for beginnerman, kind of around in that range. Zone three is kind of the money zone for racing. But hardly the money zone when it comes to training. I mean it's really the gray zone in terms of training, is it not?

Well, there was that talk going around. I think it was because in one of Joe Friel's books, he said something to that extent. I think maybe he was misinterpreted, but the thought for a while was that zone three training was kind of just hard enough to beat you up, but not hard enough to give you a training response. and you know while it is true that you get a little bit more bang for your buck out of doing interval training rather than just like going out and doing a long moderate session in zone three because it's your race pace it is a zone that you need to do some training so for example for an ironman athlete training for marathon you know i'll i'll prescribe a 90 minute zone three run with like a two to one work to rest ratio. So you go out and you warm up and you do 20 minutes zone three race pace, 10 minutes zone two. And you do that and you do that three times through and

trains you how, how to eat at race pace, how to, what race pace feels like, what your pace at race pace is if you're using your, you know using your heart rate zones. So there is some benefit. Zone three training, if I'm writing out a program for an Ironman triathlete, for example, they're usually going to have in their buildup to a race, at least one workout in each skill per week, like for swimming, for biking, and for running, that has a zone three workout in it. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but every workout has a purpose, right? And if you're not training with that frame of mind, you're probably wasting some time because what I'm hearing you say is basically a zone three workout is more sort of getting

used to what that feels like and acclimating the body to what it's going to feel like in a race and training your digestive system to be able to you know digest the foods that you're going to need to take in an iron man but it's not the optimal zone to do what and like for example a zone two workout you're trying to uh increase those blood pathways to the mitochondria build more mitochondria increase the efficiency with with which your body can burn fat for fuel and utilize oxygen, et cetera, et cetera. And in zone four and above is more about strength and speed and all of that. When you're in zone three, you're not really developing your aerobic engine as well as you could if you were in zone two, and you're not really getting that much stronger or faster. but what you are doing is learning what

it feels like to be in that zone and getting your body acclimated to that. Is that accurate? Exactly. And what happens is a lot of athletes go out and they do every session at zone three. That is the, that's what most amateur athletes do. Every workout is a zone three workout and that's why they plateau. Yep, exactly. Every workout is a zone three workout, and that's why they plateau. Yep, exactly. Every run is either outdoors or on the treadmill at 75%. So you feel like you're doing something, but it's not so hard that you're totally uncomfortable. And every single day, you go out and you have a moderate training session. And that's where the zone three training is overused or misused.

zone three training is overused or misused. It's like you only really need to do a zone three session and think of it as like a race prep session once per week for each skill that you're training in. Yeah. And of course you are getting, I mean, there is an effect to doing that zone three. You will reach a certain level of fitness proficiency, but you will hit a glass ceiling pretty quickly that you're not going to. So many, you know, sort of middle-aged athletes or amateur runners or whatever, you know, they run the same time every year, every year, every year. And they don't know why am I not getting faster? Why am I not getting better? And it's, I think a lot of it is because of this very reason of just sort of thinking, Hey, I'm getting a good workout. And, um, you know, why am I staying the same year in and year out? And I think it's this

zone three kind of focus without really knowing any better. Yeah. And some of it is that. Some of it, as you know, because I know you really understand nutrition, it's not optimizing the diet or micronutrients. Some of it is perhaps not weight training or not building a foundation properly. But yeah, a big, big part of it is just too many moderate sessions. It's not enough combination of easy aerobic sessions and hard sessions.

And it's a concept that came up in research recently called polarized training. You heard of that before? No, no. What's that? Polarized training is the concept of most of your training is either done at very low intensities or very high intensities. And they've compared that with training where you've kind of got more of the training done in the moderate intensity with a little bit of aerobic and a little bit of high intensity. And the polarized training wins every study. And if you look at the stories that have been told about Kenyan runners, for example, they're doing a lot of really like low intensity, easy runs. And then they're including very, very hard, high intensity intervals kind of sprinkled throughout that type of training

and getting fabulous results versus going out at, you know, race pace for each of their training sessions. And interestingly, you know, I think this, this adaptation really has almost like an ancestral type of flavor to it, to where if you think about like a hunter-gatherer or a farmer or something like that, you're running from a lion or you're chasing down game. And it makes sense that the human body responds pretty favorably to that type of scenario versus say, just like, you know, tracking an animal at a moderate intensity all day long, which would just beat you up after like, you know, a good, you know, 48 hours or even just a day of that. So I think it's interesting how, how the type of training that we respond to most favorably possibly reflects just almost like, like what we're well adapted to from an evolutionary perspective. I mean, I've always been somebody who does really well with lots of volume, lots of zone

two. And I don't know if I'm... I realize everybody's different and that seems to work well for me. And when I try to do programs that are more quality oriented and less volume, I end up not performing as well. And I've learned that about myself through swimming in college and my experiences in triathlon and that, that just works for me. But I also think people misunderstand. I talk a lot about the importance of zone two and slowing down and, you know, the discipline that it requires to kind of not speed up when you want to feel like you, you, you need that workout or

whatever. And, and sort of readjusting the focus on efficiency as opposed to speed, especially in the context of an Ironman. I mean, most people, it's like you don't have to run that fast. You just have to train your body so that you don't slow down as much. And when I'm sort of training with that in mind, especially since I'm doing ultras or whatever, where speed just isn't really that important, that really works for me. or whatever where speed just isn't really that important.

That really works for me. But I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this kind of new movement that's going on with CrossFit and these guys like Brian McKenzie who are advocating really truncating volume and doing this high-intensity work to prepare for things even like a marathon. When I was flying back from Hawaii the other day, I got the new Outside magazine, and there's a whole article on this guy and his sort of 12-week program to crush your marathon PR and never run longer than 13 miles and how this is controversial. And, you know, the typical runners or endurance bloggers or whatever are saying this is anathema and this guy's crazy.

And yet he has all these people that are following him that seem to be doing really well. And for me, I think it is that polarized training. You've got to get those. You've got to work both systems responsibly. And this guy's telling people kind of what's nice to hear, which is not that it'll be easy because it'll be very difficult to do his program with all this high intensity. It will wear you out and rip you apart and all that kind of stuff, but you don't have to do all that long stuff and you can save time. And you seem like a guy who probably has, I know you have a really good grip on this,

so I'm interested in knowing what you think about this guy and what he's advocating. Yeah. And I think I've had Brian McKenzie on my podcast wants to talk about this a little bit too. Just so I don't leave people hanging in case I bring up these terms at all, as we're talking, we didn't mention zone four and zone five. Oh yeah, sorry. I interrupted you and got you on a tangent. No, that's okay. I love tangents. Sorry about that. Go ahead. I love tangents. But to come full circle on those, zone four is when your body starts to use more fast twitch muscle as a fuel and starts to build up lactic acid more quickly than you can actually remove it.

And the reason for that is that when you burn glucose for fuel, as fast twitch muscle does, the byproduct of that is lactic acid. Lactic acid isn't bad. A bunch of it gets shuttled back into the liver and kind of reconverted to glucose, and you get to use it again. But it kicks off these acidic hydrogen ions in that process, and that's what creates that muscle burn. It creates a lot of ammonia, and basically your brain starts to sense that things are building up a little bit too quickly. And there's a lot of damage occurring and a lot of acidity and a shift in the body's pH. And things start to shut down if you stay at that intensity too long.

It also rapidly depletes carbohydrate stores. But you get a really, really great training response when you're doing intervals in zone four. And so that's the idea behind that one. And then zone five I just call sustained speed, meaning that you're going pretty much as hard as you can without hurting yourself, meaning like a 100-meter sprint. You're using almost purely fast twitch muscle, and those are the type of intervals I'll pull out quite a bit and someone

as we're getting ready in those last you know several weeks leading up to a race to just get that top end speed and to also train the body how to literally pull on as many muscle fibers as possible because what you get when you get up into that zone is more what's called neural activation of muscle tissue meaning you you build new nerves, nerve pathways in the muscle tissue, and you activate more what are called motor neurons at that speed. So that's zone four and zone five, and that's kind of like the high-intensity interval stuff. And like you mentioned about this CrossFit or Cross crossfit endurance they're really predominantly going after not only those two pathways but and i think that this is fourth for basically zone four

and five zone four and zone five ton of training in zone four and zone five but and i i think this is important mixing that with a very very high amount amount of eccentric muscle damage, meaning that when a muscle lengthens under load, that's called an eccentric load. And that is when a muscle fiber tears. And there are some very significant recovery implications from that. You build up quite a bit of what's called HSCRP, which is your body's primary inflammatory response and a lot of cytokines, which is your body's primary inflammatory response, and a lot of cytokines, which are your little inflammatory messengers, because everything in your body is rushing to heal those damaged muscles. And where that occurs is during the actual CrossFit workout itself, during the clean jerk and the push press and the muscle ups and the pull ups and the jumps on and off the tires

and the sledgehammers. And I've done quite a bit of CrossFit, and I know what it feels like after you do a CrossFit workout properly. And there are recovery implications that mean that not only does your risk of injury go up when you're combining this with Zone 4 and Zone 5 efforts, but you never really reach your peak because your body is always beat up. And that's why we mentioned earlier, Rich, about so-and-three intervals and people doing too much of that and just getting into this rut. You can get into a high-intensity rut too.

And in those WellnessFX consultations that I do where I'm looking at people's biomarkers, I see a lot of CrossFit athletes. And it's a classic scenario every single time. It's high levels of inflammatory markers, high levels of also creatinine and blood urea nitrogen, which are also markers of muscle damage and indication that the body has not had a chance to recover properly. And I think that the biggest issue with a training system like that is there is simply way too much intensity, not necessarily with the swimming and the biking and running, but with the weight training. And that combined with the intense swimming and biking and running creates this this over training scenario that's highly catabolic

meaning that the muscles uh and the energy systems never get that chance that they're supposed to during rest and recovery to grow more fit and yeah it's i mean it's advocated as sort of an alternative to people who have persistent you know overuse injuries from running too much or whatever. Like this is a way, a different way that will help you avoid those. But you're saying there's a different kind of injury and overtraining, you know, kind of equation that you have to look at if you're going to entertain doing something like this. Yeah, and, you know, I do anywhere from a 9.30 to a 9.45 Ironman, and I train 8 to 10 hours a week. But I don't do a lot of that.

For the uninitiated, that's not very much training for going that fast in an Ironman. That's impressive. But the thing is I stay physically active throughout the day. And what I mean by that is I have a standing workstation. I'm always on my feet. I've got a pull-up bar installed in the door of my office. I do a few pull-ups every time I walk underneath that. I'm always walking around.

Everywhere I go, I'm moving. I don't really have a sitting desk job. So I'm physically active throughout the day, which I think helps quite a bit. I don't do my intensity with weight training per se. I do weight train two times a week, sometimes up to three times if I throw an extra core session or whatever in there. But these are not CrossFit-esque box workouts where I'm competing with 10 other people for a time. It's me, my body, making sure that I don't beat myself up so much that I'm not able to swim, bike, and run properly. And then I do

basically interval training. I use a lot of that zone four and that zone five training. I have one completely full rest day per week that's basically foam rolling and some yoga. And then I have one high-quality long workout. And what I mean by that, by high-quality long workout, is my Ironman bike is usually around two to three hours long, and it's a lot of those zone three intervals that I talked about, training at race pace but backing off enough to where I'm not, you know, digging myself into a hole. My runs are typically right around 90 minutes in duration for my marathon training runs.

And I have one, it's just one. Whereas a lot of, of Ironman triathletes put these in throughout the whole year. I have one 18 to 20 mile run that I usually put about four to five weeks prior to the race. That's the only time I ever run long just to give myself that mental feeling of having that time spent on my feet. And then my swims are 20 to 30 minutes in duration. Usually I go for more time in the water or more frequency in the water than splitting it into longer sessions throughout the week. So 20 to 30 minute swims, it's usually four to five times a week. Again, with a big, big focus on interval training with some skills and some drills thrown in. And that's how my

training scenario works. Interesting. So you never go out and do the four, five, six hour Saturday morning rides? Never. I don't even know how to do that. I wouldn't know what to do without doing that. Now, one of the things that I do have typically every single year because I teach camps and I teach clinics is there's usually at least one five to seven-day period where I do have a week where I'm out there training athletes and we're doing, you know, a three hour ride in the morning and, you know, maybe a swim session and a run session in the afternoon, you know, typical camp week. That's higher volume. And I think that maybe that helps mentally a little bit. You have to be comfortable with being that uncomfortable for that long of a period of time. Just like you were talking about with your zone three workouts, there's a certain physiological physiological adaptation and a mental adaptation i mean maybe because you've been doing it you've

done it so many times that you don't really have the need to train it that much anymore but you know certainly you have to get to a place where you can be at peace with you know being in that uncomfortable situation for you know the better part of 10 hours. I think for me, it came down to a stupid mistake followed by, you know, trust at that point. Stupid mistake meaning that I signed up for Ironman Coeur d'Alene without knowing what I was getting myself into and did not train adequately for that race at all. into and did not train adequately for that race at all. Um, you know, my long ride was right around 80 miles. Um, and I'd, I'd run 16 to 18 miles and had never swam 4k before. And so, um, you know, I went out and did that race and, and just basically I had my, I had a heart rate monitor

on the bike and I had a heart rate monitor on the run. I had a heart rate monitor on the run and I just tried to stay in that zone that I knew based on my exercise physiology training would be my fat burning zone, zone three intensity. And I didn't really pay that I was at about 957. And I ran in and, and did it in 959. And kind of realized that I didn't have to train that much to actually do Ironman. And at that point, it was simply a matter of every single time I stood at the starting line of an Ironman, knowing that even though I hadn't done it in training, you know, ridden 112 miles or ran a marathon or anything like that, that the human body is capable of endurance feats that don't require it to necessarily do the same thing in training. And so from that time, you know, that's the way that my training has been going high intensity, squeezing a lot into a short period of time, making sure I'm not, you know,

sitting around a lot during the day, and really taking care of my body. I really take care of my body from a nutritional and kind of a supplement standpoint in terms of doing things like that biomarker testing and paying attention when my vitamin D levels are down or when my inflammatory levels are up. I use quite a bit of heart rate variability testing too. I'm starting to use more pulse oximeter testing, testing my oxygen saturation values in the morning.

So how do you do that test? Well, I've been using a pulse oximeter. So it's just this- So explain what that is. A pulse oximeter basically uses like a light to test your oxygen saturation on your fingertip. I'm not sure if it's like a laser or exactly how it takes the reading, but it's the same thing they use in the medical setting when they put that thing on your fingertip when you go in to the hospital or to the ER room or whatever, and it tests your oxygen saturation,

and you'd ideally like that to be at 96% to 99% in the morning when you test. If it's consistently dropping below that value, that's a pretty good sign that you might be overtrained or that you might have some type of a nutrient deficiency. You know, anything that would be involved with your red blood cells like B-alverfolate or ferritin or anything else when it comes to your oxygen saturation. Or it could simply be that your red blood cell turnover is too high because you're beating your body up too much without giving it enough rest. So I'll test that.

In the past, I've done it with the pulse oximeter, which you can get off Amazon or wherever else. They're not expensive. I just got a device, though, in the past couple weeks. It's called a – now I'm going to blank on it it's made by a company called Nomadics I think it's like a tinkst or something like that it's one of these things

like a MyBasis or a Fitbit or any of these other portable devices but it's a little dongle that you plug into your iPhone and it's a pulse oximeter that they have in your iPhone just like an appendage so you can just do it yourself and it will read it right on your phone? Yeah, so you can upload it to your dashboard.

But the cool thing is that it takes my heart rate variability at the same time, and that's another huge value that I track. Basically, you've got the vagus nerve is the nerve in your body that feeds into your heart, and that is innervated by the two branches of your nervous system your sympathetic nervous system your parasympathetic nervous system so if if both of those branches of your nervous system are communicated properly then your heart rate variability which you can think of as your heart rate responsiveness tends to stay very high you get a very high heart rate variability score meaning that your body's ability to react to a certain stimulus, whether it's exercise induced or otherwise. Exactly. So if you've over-trained your sympathetic nervous

system, as might be the case with somebody doing CrossFit endurance, then your heart rate variability tends to jump around a lot from day to day in your measurements. It's typically a sign that your sympathetic nervous system is overworked, your fight or flight nervous system is overworked. And if you tend to have consistently low heart rate variability values, it's typically a sign that your parasympathetic nervous system is overworked or perhaps you've been doing too much of that zone three training just day after day, painting yourself into an aerobic hole. So you test your heart rate variability and this is something I just do for a few minutes

every morning and you keep track of that and when it starts to dip low, it's a very, very good predictor of whether or not a few days later you're going to get injured or ill. A lot of the athletes that I coach also just track their heart rate variability and upload it to a dashboard that I'm able to log into and see. But that's a great way to gauge what your workout should look like for that day or gauge whether you need to take a full rest day. So those are two values that I pay attention to quite a bit as well. You know, in addition to just the normal things like sleep and stress and soreness and those qualitative variables. Right. So you've really embraced this sort of biohacking approach

to coaching and it's pretty cool. And I want to talk about the supplements in a minute because I know you're a big proponent of those and and and i'm still learning a lot and have a lot you know i'm interested in your thoughts on that before before we kind of close the chapter on the training stuff you know i it it is interesting that you're able to go so fast in an iron man with with so little training i mean i you know maybe it's just my own insecurity like if i didn't train that much i'd i'd be nervous that I'm not doing what I need to do. And I've always – there's different ways to skin a cat. So your way works great.

My way has been a different path and obviously a much more time-consuming path because I'm much more zone two focused. Yeah, so it's like a Maffetone approach. Yeah, exactly. And just so, just for the listener out there, like when you're in that zone two focused kind of approach to training, you're going to end up spending a lot more time out, you know, on the bike or on the run. And yes, that could lead to certain overuse injuries for people that have, you know, chronic running problems or whatever. But for me, it's always worked because it's kind of the reverse. It's kind of the bottom-up approach to building your body as opposed to the top-down.

And when you're working that aerobic system, you are building those additional blood pathways and you're stimulating your muscle cells to produce additional mitochondria. So you're improving that mitochondrial density. And that leads to, it doesn't make you faster, but it makes you more efficient. And so what I found is that if I'm just doing, let's say I go out and I just, I'm really meticulous about staying in zone two. When I first kind of started doing this and I talk about it in the book, you know, I couldn't run faster than when I was out of shape, I can run faster than, you know, nine 30 miles or something like that without my heart rate going over my zone two. And then just by sticking with that and not doing any

interval work and not going into zone three, you know, fast forward a couple of years later and I can run, you know, seven minute miles at the same heart rate. Um, so it's just a different way of kind of getting to the same place, I suppose. Yeah, I don't think that you do have an increased risk of injury or overuse syndrome using that approach. Well, you're not going to. If you're staying away from zone three, then you're a better chance of not overtraining if you're doing it properly.

And the overuse injuries have to do with things beyond training. It's, you know, the way your foot falls, it's your stride, it's, you know, it's running mechanics and what kind of shoe you're wearing and all that kind of stuff. Right. That, that Maffetone style of, of predominantly aerobic training come out with, with some, um, some high intensity thrown in here and there that can work very well, especially if you've got the commitment and the time to do it. Um, and the idea behind the philosophy for the listeners is that you find out what your aerobic zone is. And it's typically about 20 beats below your, your zone for, you know, the point where your legs start to really burn and you start to breathe really deeply.

You subtract 20 beats from that, and that's approximately kind of like the top end of your aerobic zone. And you're generally doing much of your training in that aerobic zone. And like Rich said, your aerobic capacity, your mitochondrial density, the capillarization of this slow twitch muscle and all the muscle really tends to favorably respond to that. And it can be a very good way to train many, many pro athletes, pro triathletes, pro marathoners, like the Kenyan marathoners I was talking about earlier. They respond quite well to this approach. And I actually have nothing against it.

Phil Maffetone is actually coming up to speak at my live event in March. And he's actually not talking about the aerobic zone. He's talking about music and sound and how to use that. He's an interesting guy. You go to his website and it's like one half is like him as a musician and the other half is him as an endurance genius. And it's like, well, who is this guy? He's a renaissance man, I guess. But the issue with the long training is when people venture into going above that zone two,

and like we already mentioned, hopefully we're not kicking this horse to death, getting into just doing that moderate zone three training and thinking that that's the way that you do long aerobic training. Usually everybody who does it, not everybody, but the majority of people who do it, do it too hard. So you can do it correctly in the way that you've just described rich. And I actually, if I, if I had the time or let's say I wanted to be a professional, like a professional triathlete, I would use that approach because really, if you want to get down to like, you know, closer to say like an eight hour Ironman, you do need to begin going more after that type of training scenario. But what I've found is... Yeah, it also takes not just time,

you know, out of your day, but it takes years. You know, this is a multiple year process to getting to where you want to go. Yeah. So, uh, so your diesel engine is going to be bigger than mine with your approach. And, you know, if I, if I ever wanted to, to go and be much, much faster in Ironman, I'd have to start doing that. But for me, it's, you know, it's a, it's a family, it's a career, it's a, it's a hobbies thing. You know, I, I like to play the guitar and cook and do all these other things. And so I don't have the time to be able to use that training approach. So what research has shown is that the higher intensity intervals give you a similar training adaptation in terms of mitochondrial density and capillarization and all that. What they don't give you is that same diesel engine to where if you really wanted to get super, super fast at aerobic exercise,

you'd have to get to that level. But what I'm trying to get at here is, like you said, there's more than one way to skin a cat. There is that approach that you just described, and then there's the approach that I'm using, what you don't want to do and where the chronic injuries come in, where the plateauing occurs, and where a lot of the frustration comes in for endurance athletes who just can't seem to, you know, whatever, get below a 12-hour Ironman or a 13-hour Ironman is doing that zone three workout, moderate intensity day after day after day. So, yeah, it's interesting how there's a few different ways to do it.

There's definitely a wrong way to do it. Sure, of course. So, you know, short of going and getting a proper lactate test, I mean, not everybody has sort of those labs at their disposal or the kind of facilities. I mean, I like to go in and, you know, get on a bike and use the power meter and get a really specific test done where, you know, I'm getting my finger pricked for lactate and it's reading heart rate and watts and all that kind of stuff and really drill down specifically to what my zones are. But not everybody either can afford that or is able to do that. So what is a good way if somebody just on a DIY level wants to figure out what their zones are? What is the best way for them to do that? I mean, I usually point people to like Joe Friel's book or his blog or whatever,

cause he has some simple tips and tools for people to do that. But you know, what would you recommend? Two ways to do it. Um, the, the first way, if you're a geek and you're a biohacking type of person,

you just go to lactate.com. And, um, if you like to own nice things, you won't mind doing this anyways. You pay $400, $500 and you get a blood lactate meter. It comes with full instructions on how to do it. You or your spouse can sit there while you're on the bike for 20 or 30 minutes doing slightly harder efforts every four to five minutes. That's about how long you need to go for your lactate

levels to stabilize. And you just prick the finger every four to five minutes and you take the blood or you just prick the ear once and take the blood kind of in a steady stream from that. When the values reach four, you look at your heart rate and that's your lactate threshold. The other way to do it, slightly less invasive or expensive expensive would be you warm up well and that's very important you want to warm up for a good 10 to 20 minutes prior to doing a lactate threshold test because otherwise what you're going to find is that your heart rate tends to rise throughout the test because you were you were insufficiently warmed up but then you do a time trial for the run i like to use about 20 minutes for the bike bike, I like to go closer to 30 minutes.

And you want to exercise at the maximum sustainable pace that you can hold with good form. What that means is that if you are slowing down throughout those 20 minutes on the run or 30 minutes on the bike, you're going too fast. If your cadence is decreasing on the bike, you're going too fast. If your cadence is decreasing on the bike, you'd want your cadence to be ideally between 80 to 90 for this test. But if it's dropping and your legs are getting rubbery and things are getting slow and you find your form is suffering and your breathing is becoming labored, that means you're going too hard. So it's maximal sustainable pace. Start at that 20 minutes to the end of that 20 minutes, you know, at that same steady pace.

And sometimes you've got to do this test a few times before you really nail that pace. But what you do is for the run, you take your average pace for your average heart rate rather for that 20 minutes. And for the bike, you take the average heart rate for that 30 minutes. And that's going to be a pretty good approximation of your lactate threshold heart rate. So to explain how understanding what your lactate threshold is, what your heart rate is at that level, or what your watts are, how that applies to setting the zones. Exactly. So now you're equipped to set your zones. if you really wanted to look at this from a simple standpoint, what you do is you look at that heart rate, that average heart rate that you're able to sustain over that time trial or that maximum

sustainable pace effort. And that's going to be your zone four. And I like to add and subtract three beats to that. So let's say you ran for 20 minutes and the average heart rate for the test was 155. Then subtracting three at 152 152, adding three, you get 158. So your lactate threshold heart rate zone is going to be 152 to 158. As we mentioned a little bit earlier, if you subtract 20 beats from that 155 and you get that value of 135, then that's going to be about your aerobic training money zone. So you can add and subtract around three beats to that and get 132 to 138, and that's going to be kind of your aerobic zone. And that area in between the 138 and the 152, that's kind of like your zone three,

that area where you've got to be kind of careful, but that's going to be more of like your race pace zone. You go below that zone two range, which we just established would be like 132. If you subtracted three beats from 135, that's going to be more of your zone one recovery. So during like a really easy workout, you'd go from your, you know, your resting, walking around heart rate up to 132. And you wouldn't go above that for, for recovery workout, like an easy swim. And then for your zone five sustained speed, we jumped back up to where we found that lactate threshold range. And that was 158. And we would

basically have your zone five be 158 up to about the point where you are, you are really feeling that you can't go much harder. And then anything higher than that would just be like, you know, power workouts on six, whatever you want to call call it but that's how you would use something like a lactate threshold test to set up your heart rate zones really easily and and kind of elegantly and and then you whatever you write them down on a on a little you know laminated note that you they stick on your bike or or that you uh you know i don't i don't think you have to get a quarterback a football quarterback's um wrist sleeve to put up on your wrist. Or you could set your garment to beep every time you go above it.

You set your heart rate up. Exactly. And that's how you do it. And as a rule of thumb for people out there, if you do one of these DIY lactate tests, like let's say you're doing it running as opposed to cycling, and you get all these values that Ben just explained, then what does that mean on the bike? Well, the rule of thumb, and Ben, let me know if you subscribe to something different, is to subtract, excuse me, 10 beats.

So if you did, if you're, you know, that 155 number was done on a run test, well, that would be 145 for cycling. Yeah. And the issue, the only issue with that is a lot of times your, your running threshold, um, tends to be, or that, that range tends to be even higher because we're very, very efficient on a bike. Meaning that if you find out that your lactate threshold is 155 on the bike, um, and then your, your lactate threshold, um, you know, let's say we use your, your scenario and we say it's going to be 165 for the run. That's, that's pretty good for the average person, but for really good runner, who's really efficient, really economical, sometimes their lactate threshold is the same as or just a few beats above what they're at when they're cycling because they're a very, very efficient runner.

And a runner who is overweight or who runs with poor form or who maybe swings their arm too much and moves around and huffs and puffs when they run, I've seen values as high as 20 beats over and above what their bike lactate threshold is when we're doing lab testing. So if you really want to geek out, if you want to super geek out and just biohack to the hill, you would do a full lactate test in both disciplines and really get the exact values. You could do that. Or I mean, a lot of labs that you go to like a sports performance lab or sports medicine lab, they'll try and get you to pay for the full meal deal, the VO2 max test and the lactate threshold test. But kind of the dirty little secret is that if you do a VO2 max test, you're going to know

your lactate threshold because during that test, you get a point where there's a sharp spike in what's called your ventilatory output. It's called your VT, your ventilatory threshold, and that's pretty much your lactate threshold. So you'll get that point where you start to consume a lot of oxygen or more specifically breathe off a lot of CO2 because that's how your body gets rid of all these hydrogen ions from the lactic acid. So you're blowing off all that CO2. That's your ventilatory threshold. And you don't even have to do a blood lactate.

If you do a VO2 max test, you can save yourself a few bones and, you know, just do the VO2 max. What is the VO2 max of value? I mean, is it really that? Like, why is, I've never had a VO2 max test. And my understanding is that your VO2 max is pretty much what it is. I mean, you can, through, you know, long, you know, many, many years of training, you can, you can sort of move the notch a little bit up on that or whatever. But I mean, what is that a predictor of really? I mean, it's interesting to know what it is, but in a sort of a real world context, like how valuable is knowing what your VO2 max is? Well, here's where the real value of the VO2 max test comes in

because you are correct. It's something that can't be increased a whole lot. So your maximum oxygen utilization, if you're an athlete, is not something you're going to be able to increase a bunch. If you're untrained, and you'll see this all the time, somebody who's untrained, they decide they're going to do an Ironman triathlon, and they come in and they do a VO2 max test, and they find out their maximum oxygen utilization is, let's say, 35 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute. Well, after a couple years of training, you can see numbers up in the 55s to 60s.

I mean, you can see significant increases in VO2 max. Part of that is not a true increase in VO2 max. Part of it is learning how to actually push yourself during the VO2 max. Part of that is not a true increase in VO2 max. Part of it is learning how to actually push yourself during the VO2 max test where you're supposed to. And part of it is a significant increase in the stroke volume of your heart, the filling capacity of your lungs, and then also the ability of your muscles to grab oxygen as it rushes past in the bloodstream. So there is a training response that is significant with VO2 max when we're talking about untrained to trained. And we're talking about trained to

elite, it's a pretty small shift. But the value of the actual test is, there's a few values of going in and doing a test. One is that you're able to see how many calories your body is deriving from carbohydrates versus fats during every single heart rate and speed during that test because you're breathing carbon dioxide out and breathing oxygen in. So you know your caloric utilization or more specifically your macronutrient utilization and your caloric utilization during any given heart rate. So you could technically walk out of there with all these values and look at it and see, okay, I went for a bike ride. My average heart rate was 140 beats per minute while I was burning, you know, 300 calories of that from carbohydrate and 400 calories of that from fat during that workout. And, and you can, you can

set up your, your refueling or your fueling scenario accordingly. So that's one significant thing. That's interesting. I didn't know that. That's very interesting. Yeah. Another one is that ventilatory threshold value, meaning that you don't have to go out and test your blood lactate because that will tell you what your lactate threshold approximately is. And then the last thing that is important that you get from it is your lactate threshold as a percentage of your VO2 max heart rate. And that is something that I really like to see if someone is going in and testing is if someone's below about 90% in terms of the heart rate at which their lactate threshold occurs as a percentage of the heart rate at which their VO2 max occurs, then they need to be doing some more intervals.

They need to be doing some more zone forward to push up that lactate threshold to get it above 90% of VO2 max. You'll usually see someone start to perform very, very well and race very well once their lactate threshold exceeds about 90% of VO2 max heart rate. So that's another thing that you can look at and that you can't get unless you find out what your VO2 max heart rate actually is. So there are some good reasons to go test. Another thing that I found pretty informative in terms of lactate testing, when I do do like the formal test and I do it on the bike or whatever, and you get the

graph, right? And you can see the increase in your, they have different lines for the increase in your heart rate and the increase in the Watts, the, you know, period over time on the X axis and, and then how your lactate increases with, um, you know, with each four minute interval and the Watts going up on the bike, et cetera. And what's important important not just are the increase in values and and sort of identifying where those zones you know those where you're going from one zone to the next but also you know how how much those numbers jump within a certain period of time like when you're trying to develop your aerobic capacity you you know that curve it's going to curve upwards on the y-axis but you don't want like a massively,

you know, a super incline. You want kind of a gradual increase, you know, that as the intensity goes up, your heart rate goes up gradually, the lactate goes up gradually. And, you know, with the greater aerobic capacity you have, you're going to have a flatter curve as opposed to one that's going to jump. And then there's the, this sort of how much space between your aerobic threshold and your anaerobic threshold and trying to increase that space so that, you know, when there isn't very much room between your, your aerobic and your anaerobic, well, you might have a great aerobic engine, but you don't have very much top end strength or speed because as soon as you go above your zone two and kind of get into your zone three, you're kind of starting to fall apart already. Yeah.

You should be an exercise physiologist first. I was pre-med too, but I abandoned it like you. Yeah. And full credit to, I think it was Bob Sibahar who first kind of brought this to light or gave it a turn. kind of brought this to light or gave it a turn but when it comes to metabolic efficiency the other thing that you can see during that test since you know how many calories you're burning how many of them are derived from fat and how many of them are derived from carbohydrate you can see that point of peak fat utilization kicked out from the from the nutrient utilization of a test like this and so you can also get a gauge of your metabolic efficiency or your, you know,

kind of the point at which your body reaches its peak fat utilization. And ideally that's going to occur if you're doing multiple tests at a higher power or higher speed for, you know, subsequent tests. So that's a cool number to track too. All right.

Well, we're getting super geeked out on this. We should probably shift gears. I think we beat this horse down as much as we could. Take off our propeller hats. Well, we're getting super geeked out on this. We should probably shift gears. I think we beat this horse down as much as we could. Take off our propeller hats. really kind of a great, you know, sort of physical receptacle for that because you can drill down and get so detailed and get into the data and just get super geeked out on this stuff. And I love doing that. So, yeah. Also you tend to be a social outcast and everyone wants to hang out with you. So all you can do is go out and ride, ride your bike anyways. So, well, except there's guys like

Tim Ferriss who are making it cool. So yeah, exactly. Lean into that a little bit, I suppose. Anyway, I want to talk about supplements a little bit. We're into like an hour and 20 here, so I don't want to take up too much more of your time. But why don't you – well, first of all, let's do this. I want you to kind of – in your experience experience as a coach what do you think the biggest mistakes are we'll get into nutrition in a minute but what do you think the biggest mistakes are that most amateur kind of runners and triathletes make in their training training you know we we have talked about one we talked about we already talked about you know the one probably the biggest

one already yeah and that is a big one. Another one, and it falls into a similar vein really, is not periodizing the training. and building your engine to actually doing race-specific efforts and backing off on that foundation building to actually prepping with higher intensity efforts that grab more of those motor neurons that I was talking about. And then finally where the taper begins. You've got to have that stair-stepping style build up to the race rather than just doing what a lot of people are doing.

And for typical Ironman, it's, well, I have the, I have my group that does the four hour ride on Saturdays. And then every single Sunday I do my, my two to three hour run and either on Saturday or Sunday, I go and I try and swim for as long as I possibly can in a horizontal position. And then I rinse, wash and repeat until I get like two weeks out from the race. And then I try and sit around as much as I can. And there's a better way to do things. So that's a biggie in addition to doing primarily the Zone 3 moderate intensity training. And then the other thing that's huge is not paying attention to your nutrient status and to your biomarkers and to what's going on with your

internal biology. Um, and, and a lot of athletes simply do not, they do not track this using, you know, methods like I was describing, like heart rate variability or, or, uh, or, um, pulse oximetry, or they do not pay any attention to their, their lab values or what's going on with their blood, with their cholesterol, with oxidized cholesterol, with inflammation or any of those values. And usually a big, big part of that is because they're not paying attention to what they eat. They're typically eating a very acidic diet, high amount of processed foods, sugars and starches and typical endurance athlete fare. And it's very, very easy to do even if you think you're eating health food. It's very, very easy to be still doing lots of canola oil and vegetable oils, lots of gluten-free quote-unquote health foods where you're pulling foods off the shelf that have a really high

glycemic index and still throw your blood sugar levels into a roller coaster ride and, you know, doing, you know, lots of big boxes of sugar-filled cereals. And, you know, there's quite a bit of food damage that can occur out there if you don't know what you're doing from that standpoint as well. So I would say those are three biggies. Right. I mean, to interject on that, I think it's almost even, it can be at times even worse with triathletes because there's, there's a little bit of an entitlement. Like I've been out training so many hours, like, you know, I deserve, I, you know, I, I can eat this because, you know, that's part of why I train. So I can come back and eat whatever I want. And, and, you know, they end up overdoing

it or not paying enough attention to what they're eating. And interestingly, I had, um, last week on the podcast, I had Garrett Weber Gale on who's a Olympic swimmer and two-time Olympic gold medalist. And he's, uh, he was in the midst of a training camp out in Colorado Springs at the Olympic training center out there. And I was asking him about nutrition and how to elite, you know, professional swimmers eat these days. And it's very much of the same thing. It's sort of we're training all the time, so we don't have to worry about it.

And part of that is they're young or whatever. You can get away with that. But you would think that there would be more attention paid at that level for those kind of people than is what is actually going on. And to hear them speak about what they're actually serving in the commissary and the cafeteria at the Olympic Training Center,

it's really kind of embarrassing, actually. And so I think that there still is a lot of work and understanding that needs to go into, you know, the nutrition aspect of performance. And nobody questions that you need to train in order to get better, but not enough people really understand that eating is just as important in many ways.

And there's just a lot to be learned. And I'm glad you touched on the acidic diet thing. I mean, I think that that's a huge part of it. And I think that that contributes the inflammation, which leads to getting sick or overtrained and all these kinds of things. And, you know, most people eat processed foods. That's what's in the grocery store. And it's hard to avoid. And, you know, it's hard to not eat an acidic diet with what's being offered to us.

Yeah. I mean, you want to quantify this stuff. Two simple ways you can do it. They're still slightly geeky, but simple. One is test your urine pH for a month and just basically track what your acidity or alkalinity of your body actually is and how it responds to food intake. That's literally how my wife used to get a bunch of migraines, got rid of her migraines, is she got her body alkalinic by shifting to, you know, she just basically worked out almost all omega-6 fatty acids from crackers and roasted nuts and nut butters and things like that. And, you know, started doing a lot of alkalinizing greens and things of that nature and completely got rid of

her migraines with that kind of dietary shift. So that's one thing that you can do is pH measurements. The other thing that you can do is, you know, I mentioned heart rate variability and paying attention to how balanced your nervous system is and how that affects your heart and it also affects your brain as well. But basically, you can use an app, like one app that I use is called the Sweet Beat app and it has a food sensitivity setting in it. And so I can measure my heart rate variability at the beginning or at the end of each day and also input my food into

the app. And if you take your heart rate variability after a meal as well, you can see how your nervous system is responding to food intake. And that's a very, very easy way without going out and doing a blood test or a stool test to see what type of food sensitivities you might have and see how your body is responding to something that you thought may be healthy to it. And if you notice that your heart rate variability consistently drops after a meal, maybe that meal isn't good for you. So for you geeks out there, that's another cool tool that you can use if you're trying to figure out how to eat the right way. Interesting. Yeah. And I'll put a link in the show notes to that, to that, so you guys can check it out. Supplements. Let's talk about supplements a little bit. I mean, what do you

think are, you know, where people are missing the most and what should they be focused on? I mean, it seems everywhere you turn, there's this supplement, that supplement, you need this, you need that. You know, you can't trust the marketing messages on any of this stuff. And there aren't enough people, you know, who are providing kind of objectivity here. Yeah. I mean, it all comes down to biomarker testing. And I'm at the point where I've literally seen hundreds of athletes labs, you know, a lot of people who are CrossFit or triathletes primarily, and gotten a chance to look at what biomarkers tend to across the board be affected from heavy training. And the basics here that I see without throwing any weird fringe supplements out there would be number one,

HSCRP levels of inflammation to be high. Um, and so explain what that is a little bit. HSCRP is basically a protein C-reactive protein that the body, uh, kicks out as a repair mechanism. And so when your body's in a high, high state of repair recovery, fixing things, so to speak, you're going to see high levels of HSCRP. It's a response to the cytokines from inflammation that are produced from anything such as heart damage or heart injury. So you'd see this super elevated in someone who is about to or had had a heart attack to people who have done a bunch of heavy weightlifting or run an Ironman triathlon or even just done too many hard workouts. One of the reasons that HSCRP can be high, however, even in people who haven't done a hard exercise session, when I talk to someone and I see their HSCRP is high and then I find out they haven't been exercising for two or three days leading into that test,

usually the body doesn't have enough anti-inflammatories on board to actually help shut down inflammation properly because HSCRP shouldn't be elevated in someone who's been resting and recovering for a few days. So for that, I do like to see people taking some type of an anti-inflammatory blend and that can be from real food sources. So you can do ginger, turmeric, cherry juice, curcumin extracts, garlic, things of that nature. Blackberries. Yeah, exactly. And you can also take supplements that have those types of things in it. There's a variety of kind of natural anti-inflammatory supplements that are out there. But that's something that on hard workout days, like there's basically one that I take that's a mix of glucosamine and chondroitin

and just like ground up turmeric and cherry and ginger and all that jazz. That's one that I think helps out quite a bit. Vitamin D tends to be low across the board. It's interesting. Even in endurance athletes that are outside all day training. Yeah, it's just because of the high turnover of cellular membranes and the high amount of what's called pregnenolone, which is a hormonal precursor being shifted to cortisol production from a lot of training and a lot of stress. That tends to deplete and turn over vitamin D very quickly, even if you are spending lots of time in the sun.

So vitamin D can be another supplement that you can take. I like to encourage people to include lots of healthy fats in their diet and also to do something like, for example, you can do a cod liver oil or something like that. You can do vitamin D as well, but I'm not one of those guys who says 10,000 international units of vitamin D a day or something like that. I like to make sure that food sources of vitamin D are as high as possible, and then in most folks, 2,000 to 4,000 international units of vitamin D, right around in that range. That's kind of another supplement that across the board, that value tends to be low in a lot of folks. Magnesium is another that's depleted in almost anyone who goes out and gets like a – it's called a spectra cell analysis or a red blood cell analysis of magnesium values.

I almost never see it within values. And it's because of a very high rate of mineral depletion in exercising and perspiring individuals combined with low rates of magnesium in commercial and fertilized soils and where a lot of the vegetables and fruits are grown that should be high in magnesium and they aren't. and fruits are grown that should be high in magnesium and they aren't. So I like to see folks using, preferably if they can afford it, a topical transdermal source of magnesium because it bypasses gastric absorption and just goes straight through the skin.

But also, you know, like a magnesium citrate or a magnesium glycinate, you know, 400 to 600 milligrams a day around in there. It's actually calming. Like I take a magnesium citrate in like a powder and just put it in hot water at night with some lemon or whatever and it it helps me go to sleep at night yeah a ton yeah i use it for my naps i use about 400 milligrams of uh this thing called natural calm magnesium yeah that's exactly what i'm talking about is that citrate or is that just natural magnesium it's it's citrate the one you want to stay away from is oxide. Magnesium oxide is the one that's not well absorbed at all.

And then I just rub the transdermal magnesium into my legs after a workout to get a little bit extra. So magnesium, vitamin D, a good anti-inflammatory. If your diet is low in fruits and vegetables, I tend to see Apple B, which is a marker of potential for cholesterol inflammation, as well as very high levels of oxidized cholesterol being an up in terms of keeping cholesterol from getting oxidized like that, either a diet that's very high in natural antioxidants like pomegranate and kale and mustard greens and things of that nature, or else using a full-spectrum antioxidant. I'm not talking about high-dose synthetic vitamin C, which is basically just ascorbic acid, or high-dose synthetic vitamin E. I'm talking about using like a, like a whole food source of antioxidants that's derived from typically seeds, nuts, berries, you know, you'll find these things in powdered form a lot.

Resveratrol or grape skin extracts. Grape skin extracts. Yeah. There's, there's a variety of different powders that you can get that you can use when you're having a difficult time just eating enough of the fruits and vegetables to get the amount of antioxidants that you're needing when you're kind of unnaturally tearing your body down. So that would be one. And then the last thing that I'd look at, and this is another value that when you look at labs tends to be really affected in folks, is the omega-3 index, meaning your levels of essential omega-3 fatty acids tend to be affected. either like a good triglyceride-based fish oil or like a fermented cod liver oil. And in vegans or vegetarians, I like to see preferably like an algal source. That's going to be the best absorbed form, allow you to get the EPA and DHA. You know, like flax, nuts, seeds, things of that nature, they tend to really not give you the omega-3 fatty acids in a highly absorbable or utilizable form that's converted into what you need. Yeah, and flaxseed oil is problematic anyway for other reasons.

But yeah, an algae-based one for the vegans out there is fine. And when it comes to the cod liver oil or the fish oil, you just have to be a little bit wary of toxicity issues and make sure that you're getting them from a clean source and you don't want to go low rent on that stuff because there's problems with that yeah with with any with anything fat-based you get what you pay for and you're generally going to do more damage than good if you're just like grabbing you know fish oil out of the bargain bin at super supplements or you know off the shelf at at you know costco or something like that so but yeah those those are the basics basically Basically, an omega-3 source, a vitamin D source, a magnesium source,

and then if you're really working hard, an antioxidant and or an anti-inflammatory. All right. Well, that's a lot of information, man. Good. So this has been awesome. I'm conscious of the time I could talk to you all night and geek out on this stuff forever, but you got a family and twins. So I'm going to

let you go in a minute, but I wanted to kind of wrap it up and just say, I need to thank you because I think you actually allowed me to skip out on bath time tonight. Get a little quiet. Well, we can keep talking, man. If you want. We'll go as long as you want. No, I've still got wine to drink, Rich. All right. Well, you can drink it while we're talking. That's fine. Then we'll see where it goes.

It could spiral out of control. I'd like to see. No, you're a very measured young man. I'd like to see you get a little bit out of control and where that might go. You have not been at triathlon after parties with me, apparently. All right. No, I guess I haven't. All right.

Well, I'll have to put that on the bucket list. There you go. So, you know, let's talk a little bit about – well, let me let – is there – there boy you're really articulate right now rich aren't you um is there anything else that you can that comes to mind that would be helpful for kind of the amateur and most of the people that are listening to this are you know they're they're marathon runners they're triathletes or they're looking to get faster but they're people with families you know men and women both kids are time crunched are there any other kind of tips that you can leave people with to kind of that they could take with them and incorporate them either into their dietary regime or their training regime that would be helpful and help them kind of be more efficient with the limited amount of time that they have to, you know, prepare for a race? prepare for a race?

Yeah, the biggest thing is to recover as fast as you possibly can from your workouts so that you can train as consistently as possible and so that you're never sidelined. And there are a few different things that you can do in addition to what we already talked about from a nutritional or supplement standpoint to do that. a nutritional or supplement standpoint to do that. Some of the things that I use, number one, electrostimulation. If you can get your hands on what's called an EMS or an electrostimulation unit, it's something that you can use just two or three times a week while you're sitting around watching TV. You hook the electrodes up to muscles that you worked pretty hard, and you just basically run a light current through them. And it really helps to improve blood flow. You don't have to get something fancy.

Usually the fancy $1,000 units were designed to give your muscles a workout too, which is fine if you want to work out that way, sitting on the couch, eating bonbons and doing squats with your electrodes. But for recovery, I like an EMS unit. Is there a particular one that I could put a link to for people and make it easy for them if they wanted to pick something up like that? You know what? The Compex is good. You just don't have to buy the high-end version necessarily. Don't think that you've got to get the, I think it's like $1,300 or something like for that. And I mean, you can't, if you, again, if you like to own nice things, um, it's a fun toy to play with, but you don't have to go all out with electro stimulation,

just get something that's going to give you a little bit of a, uh, a little bit of a blood flow. Um, uh, when you, when you ice muscles for recovery, it's okay. but what you tend to get is a lot of backflow when you ice meaning that you can actually get backflow of some of that lymph fluid as you're icing and that can actually inhibit recovery and cause swelling in an area when you ice after you've finished icing so it's best when you can to combine ice with compression. And, uh, there are a couple ways you can do it. There are tights that, that you can get like compression tights that you can put ice sleeves into so that the muscles being both iced and compressed at the same time. Um, the ones I use are called 110%. You can also, uh, if you like to geek out and you want to go buy something, you can get

what's called a game-ready device. A lot of physical therapists have these, and these are literally sleeves that will not only compress a muscle, but they'll do a pumping action, you know, like these recovery boots that you see at triathlon expos sometimes where they pump and release. But this one not only does that, but but when it pumps and releases it's pumping icy cold water through the boot and then as it releases that icy cold water flows back out so those are it's not enough like so what about wearing compression gear like in the in an ice bath like you would wear tights while you're in an ice bath or is it would it be okay to just take your ice bath and then put the put the tights on afterwards or that's not so good? So think of it in levels of geekdom, Rich.

Yeah, we're talking about the final.005% here, aren't we? Yeah, but I mean a lot of the age groupers that I coach, I teach them these techniques. And it sounds like it's something for lead athletes, but when you can just go have a smile on your face and be training, you figure out how to work this stuff in your day, right? Like a lot of times I'm doing electrical muscle stimulation while I'm recording a podcast or I'm doing the, the ice, like I mentioned the ice with the compression tights. I can wear those while I'm walking around the house doing stuff. I can wear those while I'm cleaning the garage versus sitting in an ice bath, wearing compression tights. You're sitting in an ice bath wearing compression tights.

You're sitting in an ice bath wearing compression tights, and there goes 20 minutes of your day. Well, you could do a podcast from the bathtub. You could. Sorry. You could wind up in the hospital. I couldn't resist that. You could do it. Just make sure it's audio only.

Right. So that's another thing you can do is combine the ice with the compression. And, you know, a few different ways that you can do that. You can get cold, low-level laser units, and these are very, very effective at helping to shut down tendonitis, shut down inflammation in an area. You can buy handheld units if you were to do a search for infrared like on Amazon. Handheld units aren't quite as powerful as what they can give you in like a physical therapist or an alternative medical practitioner clinic. But they still are efficacious. I have one, and when I've tweaked something, for example, if I've tweaked a knee during a bike ride or a snowboard session or something like that, I can use that infrared on it for about 10 to 15 minutes at you know, at night and, um, you know,

basically feel, feel a market improvement the next day. I'm a full believer in the laser therapy. I've had great success with it. And what it does also is it, it really, it sort of breaks up the, the, you know, the sort of the tissue that starts to accumulate around, um, you know, muscles that are, uh, how, how do I articulate this? Like I've had calf problems, right, with running. And so I go in and I do laser therapy, and you can actually break up those where the tissue starts to accumulate and it's causing a problem like a muscle knot or what have you.

It really helps loosen that up, and it works. It sounds crazy. You point this little red light at your muscles, but it really helps loosen that up and it works. It sounds crazy. You point this little red light, you know, at your muscles, but it really does work. Yeah, it works very well. And then from recovery standpoint, one of the things simple, but it's highly effective is I foam roll two or three times a week and I don't just use the cheapo foam roller at the gym. I have a really hard roller that has these deep ridges sticking out of it. It looks like a medieval torture device, but it works. It's called a rumble roller, and that's something that I'll do foam rolling with a few times.

And again, I'm always multitasking. Usually I'll do that while I watch a TV show or listen to a podcast or something like that. So I'm trying to get something at least done while I'm doing my foam rolling. So in terms of recovery, those are some ways that you can really step up recovery. A couple of the last things that I do that really I've found to affect me hormonally when I'm testing my hormones and also I've found really affect the way that I feel throughout the day in terms of my focus and my productivity and also the quality of my workouts. One would be utilizing intermittent fasting on a consistent basis, meaning that I try and insert 12 to 16 hour periods during each 24 hour daily cycle that I'm

not eating food, meaning that I might go to bed at eight and, or not go to bed at eight. I'm not that much of a social outcast. Go to bed at 10, but eat dinner at eight and wake up at 6 a.m. and not eat again until 9 or 10 a.m. and then stop eating again at 8 p.m. There is what's called a hormetic response to fasting where your body upregulates cellular error and recovery. Not only that, it also teaches your body how to utilize fatty acids more efficiently

as a fuel, which is a great tool for endurance athletes to have in their toolbox. It's like that calorie deprivation workout that you do once in a while. Yeah, and you can even on your full recovery days, you can work in almost a full fast day where you're just using green supplements, maybe a little bit of amino acids so that your body isn't going into a full catabolic muscle teardown state, and then just like some green tea and some coffee thrown in here and there.

That'll help you get through a day of full-on fasting easily. And that can just be a good way to hit the reboot button on your body. Your body does shut down inflammation pretty well when it's in that fasted state. So that is one thing is fasting. And the other thing that I use is cold, cold thermogenesis. So what I mean by that is I never, ever, ever take a hot shower, except I take that back. When I got back from snowboarding this evening, I took a hot shower. But it's very, very rare.

Wow, that's hardcore. I see cold shower for three to five minutes when I get up, and again at the end of the day. There's some evidence that there may be a testosterone response to that but i also find that it seems to help me recover a little bit faster and also shut down my body's core temperature towards the end of the day so i get a bigger release of melatonin and i sleep a little bit better so i'll do that and then i also wear a vest that has ice packs in it when i'm working in the morning when i've woken up in that fasted state and I haven't eaten anything to upregulate the amount of brown adipose tissue activity. And again, kind of helped me stay lean without exercising as much as I would normally need to, to stay lean

and also to get that fat burning response from the cold. So those are a couple other things I use quite a bit is fasting and cold thermogenesis. So those are a couple other things I use quite a bit is fasting and cold thermogenesis. So those are some other little things for listeners to try if they'd like. Right. Cool. Well, that is more information than I was expecting to get from you. I mean, that's an amazing amount of stuff that are easy things that you can incorporate into your day. So thank you. Yeah, yeah. Again, I'm wearing that.

Each one is a little thing, right? Yeah, like I'm wearing the vest while I'm working on my computer. It's not like any of these things I'm taking up time in my day because that's super important. At the end of the day, you could add up all this stuff and be spending three or four hours of non-productive time or time away from family just being selfish with recovery. But if you can find out ways to just work this into the day, it just becomes a lifestyle habit and it's super easy. And you feel like a million bucks during the next day's workout and knock on wood, I rarely get injured. And I think a big, big part of it is because of these little things that

I do. And you don't get over-trained, you don't walk around like a zombie feeling tired all the time, all that kind of stuff, which, you know, all relates to quality of life. So it's not, you know, if, if you go, you know, eight, 10 in the Ironman, but you got to walk around like the walking dead, you know, for nine months, like, and you have a family and you're married and you have kids. I mean, is this, you know, is this really what you want to be doing? Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that, that's a, that's a whole other can of worms. Maybe we can talk about some, sometime, but the issue of, of endurance and the trade-off between health and performance when you get to a certain level. And there are, you know, some of the things I just

outlined help you to achieve that balance a little bit, a little bit better. But that is one of the reasons that I'm not full on going after the pro triathlon type of scenario is because there's that health performance trade-off when it comes to libido and how long your skin's going to last and how soft your hair is and all that good stuff. Well, and also just the balance you want in your life and the quality of life, and what's important to you and what your priorities are. No, I think hair is more important. All right. Well, that's a good place to stop.

But before we do that, I want to hear about your upcoming conference, the Superhuman Conference. It's called Become Superhuman, right? Live event up in Spokane. So tell us what that's all about. Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's not a conference as much as it is really an event. Um, what I wanted to do was create something really, really special for folks where they could show up here in my backyard for a couple of days and just get hands-on instruction about how to do things like fix their gut, optimize their hormones, enhance their performance, recover a lot faster,

even do things like think better and improve IQ and mental performance. And so I hunted down the experts in each of these areas and paying them all and bringing them all out here to Spokane to be available to folks for a couple of days to teach sessions, to do some after-hour party type of scenarios where people can come up and rub shoulders with and talk to a lot of these folks. Um, and also a chance for somebody who really wants to get inspired to take things to the next level, whether they want to, you know, change their body, transform their body, or whether they want to do an Ironman triathlon faster, or, you know, whether they just want to learn how to, how to feel the way that, you know, the human body is capable of feeling to be able to, to learn how to do so in just a really intensive 48 hour time span and come away knowing everything that they need to know, kind of being equipped and inspired with what they need to accomplish that for themselves.

So yeah, it's called Become Superhuman. I'm kind of nervous because it's the first, aside from camps and clinics and all this stuff, the first big live event that I've put on. And I'm trying to make it as special for people as possible, way different than just listening to a podcast or reading a blog post. I really want to make it an event where people come away with all these connections and relationships that allow them or enable them to get what they want out of life. So yeah, it's March 8th and 9th coming up here pretty soon. There's still seats available, and there's a whole page for it up over at superhumancoach.com. Superhumancoach.com is where I train a lot of other personal trainers to get better results for their clients, to be able to basically help them lose fat faster, perform better.

to be able to basically help them lose fat faster or perform better. And all the people in the Superhuman Coach network that I work with, they're coming out to the conference as well. So there will be a lot of coaches in the room too. And, yeah, that's the website though, superhumancoach.com, where people can get in. All right, man. Well, everybody check that out.

It's an impressive lineup of speakers, and it seems like a super cool event. So if you're going to be, if you live in Spokane or you live nearby or you are going to be there or you're interested in going there, I highly recommend you checking it out. So superhumancoach.com. And usually things like this cost like thousands of dollars, man. You're offering it pretty cheap. It's like 300 bucks, right? Yeah, it's $297. I'm taking a significant personal financial hit on this one. But my goal in life is to equip as many people as possible with what they need to kind of defy the status quo of what we accept as health and performance parameters and instead be able to tap into the true potential of their bodies. And it was one of the things I really wanted to do, was put on a special event for people.

So lots of people coming from around the country, a few international folks coming in, and it's definitely not just for people in Spokane. I've worked with a hotel to get us some discounted room blocks for people flying in. And, um, yeah.

So, so if you've got that weekend free from March 8th and 9th, uh, it's, it's going to be pretty cool. All right, cool. So as you heard in the intro to,

uh, to this podcast, Ben's been kind enough to, uh, offer a discount code to the listeners of this podcast. So if you want to go to the event, space is limited. The seats are going fast, so you got to jump on it. But go to superhumancoach.com. If you use the promo code RICHROLL, you'll get 50 bucks off the already super low price. What does that make it like? 247 bucks. So pretty good deal. so go check that out and uh ben there's a couple ways for people to

learn more about what you're doing you have your bengreenfieldfitness.com website and on twitter you're at bengreenfield but you also have are you get fit guy too you got two twitter guys up there yeah there's a there's a few podcasts up there because you have multiple podcasts and multiple things that you're doing right yeah i also run endurance planet which is another podcast if they want to and and the rockstar triathlete academy podcast if you want to learn the sport of triathlon yeah there's a few out there for you all right so podcasts you've got ben greenfield fitness that's one podcast endurance planet and uh rockstar triathlon academy and get fit guy and get fit guy okay dude how do you have time to do anything else you're ready for a podcast you're like a network

i've got a little little recumbent bicycle and i just ride my bicycle while i'm podcasting did you hear the pedal squeaking while you're rolling along no i didn't i'm just kidding i don't know well listen based on what everything you just told me i would not put it past you you could be doing anything right now i have no idea um no i am not i'm not wearing a an ice vest or walking a treadmill or riding a bicycle or any of the above like you have electrodes all over you right now riding a bicycle or any of the above. Like you have electrodes all over you right now. About,

about the, the extent of my biohacking was I, I downed a glass of homemade kombucha while we were talking. All right. Well, good. I can live with that. Um, and you're also,

you, you're on Facebook too. Ben Greenfield fitness. Is that the best place? I mean, where, where do you want people to find out more about it? Just go to Ben Greenfield,

fitness.com. Okay. You know, that's where all the free stuff is. Cool. All right, man. Well, you are a font of information and I appreciate your time. You're doing great work and, you know, educating the masses, man. I love it. I always love talking to you and this has been great, man. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for what you do, Rich. I love your message and your books and everything you produce, so keep up the good work. Cool, man.

I look forward to crossing paths sometime soon. I don't know where that'll be, but I'm sure it'll happen sooner rather than later. Yeah, I hope so. Alright, man. Take it easy, Ben. Thank you. Later, Rich. Alright, peace. Hello? Hey.

Still there? Yeah, I'll just cut it off there, but I just want to thank you after the thing. That was cool. Yeah. So if you think of anything, you know, in the next – I'm going to get this up probably late tonight. So if you – anything in the next couple hours you want to email me about or a link or anything like that you want me to include just shoot me an email yeah um i think the only things that people might need um that i think may not have been clearer was the uh that heart rate variability thing that i was using because i couldn't remember the name of it off to go check and um yeah i'll shoot you an email with that. Okay, cool.

If you have links to particular products of some of the stuff you mentioned that you have affiliates code links with or whatever, I'm happy to put that in the show notes. Okay, cool. I'll ping something over. Alright, buddy. Thank you.

Go get my wine. Go back to your family. Thanks, Ben. Take it easy. All right. All right. Later. All right. That's it for the podcast today. Hope you enjoyed Ben as much as I enjoyed speaking to him. Got lots of great guests lined up over the next two weeks. Uh, I had hoped to get Brendan Brazier on the show, uh, this week, this weekend, but, uh, he was super busy trying to get outndan brazier on the show uh this week this weekend but uh he was super busy trying to get out of town the guy travels all the time so we had to reschedule that he's going to come back uh at the beginning of february for sure but not to worry got lots of great people that are going to be coming on i'm really excited about what's to come with the podcast so thanks

again for stopping by and listening. You want to support the show, click the Amazon banner at richroll.com and the podcast or blog page. Click through there and it'll throw a few nickels in our bucket to help keep this thing going and it won't cost you anything else. So if you're going to buy something on Amazon anyway,

just consider doing that first. It would really help us out a lot. Of course, Jai Lifestyle for our supplement products and nutritional products, check that out. You can find me on Facebook. It's Rich Roll Fans. It's a fan page. That's the best way to find me on Facebook. On Twitter, I'm at Rich Roll.

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Instagram as Srimati. S-R-I-M-A-T-I. Srimati is the name that she goes under for her music. You can check out her music at srimatimusic.com. What else? I think that's it. Let's wrap it up. It's been going on too long anyway. So thanks a lot again. Until next time peace plants Thank you. you you you you you