WHOOP Podcast - Ben Greenfield, coach, speaker and NY Times bestselling author shares the tools and techniques he uses to maximize his daily performance, plus what is undervalued in fitness today and the metrics he believes everyone should track to live better.

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Biohacker Ben Greenfield discusses his background and how he got to where he is today (4:39), how his routine differs at home vs on the road (9:02), 15-minute morning recovery sessions (12:17), coffee enemas (16:43), his daily workouts (18:11), minimal effective training doses (20:30), the gym as a form of meditation (22:47), benefits of nasal breathing (23:47), why his kids are "unschooled" (27:48), what goes into his superfood smoothies (32:45), hunting with a bow and arrow (30:50), his many hacks for better sleep, including 4-7-8 breathing (41:07), tests we should all take to live longer and healthier lives (50:12).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among whoop members is a passion to improve.

What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? And now that we've just launched all-new whoop strap 3.0 featuring Whoop Live, which takes real-time training and recovery analysis to the next level, you're going to hear how many of these users are optimizing their body with whoop and with other things in their life. On this podcast, we dig deeper. We interview experts. We interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the

Whoop podcast. Aside from wearing a quantification metric that at least gives you sleep in HRV, which in my opinion are the two top metrics to track, I would say that a basic way to track blood glucose and inflammation because glycemic variability and inflammation are the two best predictors of overall wellness, health, and longevity. Hello, folks. My guest today is Ben Greenfield, one of the most distinguished minds in the fitness space. He's the author of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller, Beyond Training, and his new book, coming out shortly, Boundless, upgrade your brain, optimize your body, and defy aging. In addition to being a renowned coach, author, and podcast host, Ben is also an accomplished Ironman triathlete and Spartan race. I caught up with Ben at the Spartan World Championships last month, and we recorded this podcast live from Spartan Media Fest in Lake Tahoe. You may hear some wind and other noise in the background.

Ben and I discuss how he got to where he is today, including why he came to love endurance sports and the science behind optimizing the human body for them. All the various supplements, tools, and techniques he uses every day to maximize his own performance from hydrogen-rich water to red incandescent light bulbs in his bedroom. Lastly, what he feels is undervalued in fitness and the tests he believes everyone should take to live longer and healthier lives. Ben is truly a fascinating individual, and I can guarantee you're going to learn something new about your body by listening to this podcast. All right, we are live from Spartan Media Fest presented by ATP, and I'm here with Ben Greenfield. Ben, how are we doing? It's windy and cold. I actually, I just hiked up the creek bed back behind my condo back here and opted to not take a shower in the chlorine-infused water of my lodge

and to instead go out in nature and do a little cold soak, and now I'm questioning my sanity because sitting out here in the wind that our listeners, no doubt can hear. Yeah. And Chile Squaw Valley. We're here in Lake Tahoe. It's unbelievable event. Spartan World Championships. The obstacle course looks pretty epic.

What does a cold soak mean for Ben Greenfield? A cold soak for me does not mean I'm going to like strip down to my skivies and stand next to an ice bath doing Wimhoff breathing for five minutes and then soak for 20. It means I'm going to go find a cool waterfall or a cool creek, take off my sheet, take off my shoes, jump in, activate that mammalian dive reflex by dunking my head a few times. I'm usually in there two to five minutes, right? And then I get out and go along my merry way. And that's about all this, this super duper low body fat body can handle, unfortunately. So I've been a fan of yours for a while, and you've built an amazing following around health

and fitness and nutrition. I think you inspire a lot of people. Let's start with what, what God you where you are today like did you always know that you wanted to be uh someone who has really focused their life around performance and optimization no but i always knew i wanted to teach well ever since i was a little boy and i was homeschooled but i was very self-driven i was an independent learner and i would spend hours at at the library you know grims fairy tales or tolkien or c s louis or any of these other, you know, grand books of fiction, you know, Arthur Conan Doyle, I would just eat it all up. And I would also eat up any book that my parents got for me.

But what I love to do even more was turn around and write about those things. Like I would write for, like, children's magazines, and I would teach things I was learning to the neighborhood kids. I was one of the favorite babysitters of the community, because I love to just, like, teach children and sit around and read books. to them. And nothing was really that focused on nutrition and fitness and health, even though I grew up kind of in the sticks, you know, out in Idaho. So I loved the outdoors, right? I'd love to explore and go find rattlesnakes and throw rocks at cows and, you know, find new caves to explore.

I grew up with that love for, I guess, what you might call nature immersion and movement. I've always been a mover. And recently I even had my Ayurvedic typing done, this so-called constitutional assessment that a lot of irovedic physicians will do where they monitor your pulse and they look at your birth date and your birthplace and your birth time and uh it's a form of iovetic typing and you know they they of course type me as someone who needs to constantly be moving and i said yes that's that defines me you know to the core and when i was 14 years old i really started to play a lot of tennis and even though up until that point you know i dinked around and baseball and basketball, and, you know, my parents had me in soccer every year.

I wasn't that passionate about that stuff in terms of, like, like, hacking it, you know, hacking the fitness and the nutrition of it. I grew up in Lewiston, Idaho. But tennis, like, for tennis, I was like, okay, how can I increase shoulder power? How, you know, what physiologically length of a hill repeat should I do to optimize my tennis game? Interesting. Yeah. What kind of move should I do?

you know, the dumbbell. And so that's what got me interesting. And then from there, you know, all the reading and the research and the teaching started to get hyper-focused on exercise, physiology, and nutrition. So you fell in love with the research more than you fell in love with tennis, it sounds like. I actually kind of fell in love with my tennis instructor. She was pretty hot. But, no, I fell in love with both the science and the application, which is what I still love

to do. I mean, we're sitting here on Spartan World Championships. Like, I love Spartan World Championships. I went on a walk with the dude yesterday, and he's picking my brain for like a half hour, like, okay, what's my electrolyte load need to be, how many calories per hour, fluid intake, you know, pacing, all that stuff. And while I love to be out there on the race course, I also dig just chatting with cats about that thing, right? Like how do you actually unpack the science behind what's going on in this race,

which is why I think for the most part, endurance sports wound up drawing me in a little bit more than some of like the power sports I was doing like tennis and water polo and I primarily played tennis water polo and volleyball at Idaho and it seems like endurance sports are a harder nut to crack when it comes to the physiology and the nutrition because there's sports of attrition really and so you can argue more important too right like you can have a freak basketball player who's just really good at shooting right you can sit in the baseball dug out and eat Doritos right and maybe be kind of dehydrated and still go out there and hit a If you don't have the physiology dialed for endurance, you're, your host.

We just offended a bunch of incredible hulks who are playing football and basketball. No, I mean, I think, look, I think those guys are amazing, too. I'm just saying it's more important if your sport is purely endurance. It is more important because if you don't eat right and you don't pace right, you're screwed, more so than any other flavor of sport. Let's walk through a day in your life because I bet you have a lot of interesting things that you do over the course of the day. walk me through from the moment you wake up what's the first thing you do well it depends on whether i'm traveling or whether i'm at home let's pretend you're at home but but but really whether i'm at home

or i'm traveling the same general practices persist throughout so i take large elements of my home routine with me when i'm on the road with the exception being that i have a lot of fancy things at my house that i can't use when i'm traveling so you know whereas when i'm at home when i'm sipping my morning cup of coffee. I might be using like a photo biomodulation red light panel. When I'm traveling, I'm sipping my cup of coffee at the hotel coffee table. So you wake up in the first thing you do is drink coffee? No, no. I wish. I wish I could wake up and roll over in a piping hot cup of coffee has materialized there, but I'm not that lucky. I wake up in the very first thing that I do is I open my gratitude journal and I read an inspiring verse of scripture and I gratitude journal about

one thing that I'm grateful for that day, one truth that really leapt out to me from what I read and one person who I can pray for or help or serve that day. Wow, that sounds nice. If time permits, I will also read, like I'm reading Ryan Holiday's stillness is the key right now. Yeah, a lot of people have been talking about that book. Yeah, depending on when I wake up, because I don't wake to an alarm unless I have a flight to catch, if I have an extra 10 to 15 minutes to lay in bed and I'm looking ahead knowing that I have that affluence of time, I will also read something devotional, something like, you know, this Ryan Holiday book that I'm going through, something from scripture. So I'll spend a little bit of extra time in bed. But that's exactly how I start

my day, whether I'm traveling or whether I'm on the road. So gratitude, some reading. Okay, at that point you're going to get out of bed probably. Then I get out of bed. And if I am at home, I mean, we could get into the weeds here. So we might as well. If I'm at home, I wander into the bathroom and I wash my face with a good like oil cleansing. I'm using the one from Ali Tura right now. Shout out to my friend Danny Nilo down there. And so I wash my face just to you know, wash the oils and things off. And then I use oil pulling oil, which is a blend of different essential oils that clean the bacteria of the mouth. This is another kind of Ayurvetic practice. So. And we'll include a lot of the stuff in the show notes, by the way. Yeah, I put the

oil pulling oil into my mouth. And a lot of people just use coconut oil. But there's a lot of good blends that you can buy on Amazon that also have things like peppermint and oregano and rosemary. A company called The Dirt makes a pretty good brand that I like. And so I'll oil pull swishing in my mouth as I go downstairs and begin to proceed about the other elements of my day. So I've got oil in my mouth. So if my wife's already up and she tries to say good morning, it's good morning to my kids. But usually I'm the first one up because when I'm up, it's typically right around 6 a.m. And most of the rest of my family doesn't get up to around seven.

So I go downstairs, and while I'm oil pulling, I begin to prepare some element of coffee. I'm a big fan of coffee versus green tea or macha or anything else. And so I grind the coffee and usually I'll either be making a French press or we have a really nice coffee maker that gives a super smooth cup. It's called a Wilfa Precision. And I don't remember the actual, I don't remember how, it's not a pour over, but it kind of in, fuses the water at a very fast rate with hot water, like spraying it through the grinds. It gives a super smooth cup. So I'll either make that or French press, but as the water is heating for the French press

or as that Wilfa precision maker is making the coffee, or if I'm in my hotel room and I'm traveling and I just have hot water heating up or I have coffee being prepared in another manner, I spend the first 15 minutes of my day basically taking care of my body, meaning I take out foam rollers, lacrosse balls. I travel with small mobility tools. And my first 15 minutes are my self-love time, my me time to basically take any nagging ache or pain, anything I want to foam roll,

anything that feels like it needs stretching. And I just kind of combine breathing and stretching. And typically that oils in my mouth for a good 15 minutes or so. So sometimes I'm starting my stretching before I've even spat that out. But as the coffee is getting ready, I'm just basically moving my body and preparing it for the day, rolling out anything that needs rolling out, focusing on deep nasal breathing, just a lot of self-love. And, you know, I figure every week I'm getting a good 75 minutes of mobility work, you know,

even in the absence of a massage by starting the day off. Yeah, these little things add up. And so I get through all of that. And then by then the coffee's ready. And so I'll take my coffee and delve into morning reading. So I will follow certain accounts on Twitter. I subscribe to certain research reviews and diet. digests. A lot of times people are emailing me, you know, different things to read in terms of

journals and research. So I always start off today by learning versus reacting and responding and even creating. I don't do a lot of writing early in the morning. The reason for that, honestly, is it's just easy to sip a cup of coffee and read. And when I'm reading, I want to start to get the wheels turning, like what's come out today in nutrition and science and fitness and exercise research. So typically it's a good 20 to 30 minutes that I'm just reading and drinking coffee and researching and avoiding push notifications, avoiding emails that I don't need to see. I have one important folder that's where all the, you know, everything filters in that I know is important, filters into that folder. So that's the only email folder that I need to check in the

morning. And I spent time drinking my coffee and going through all of that. Now why coffee versus tea. I imagine you're someone who's done a lot of research on one versus the other. Well, A, I like coffee. I grew up on coffee. It's a comfort food for me. My father was a gourmet coffee roaster, and I just, I understand coffee. I own a company that produces coffee, so I eat my own dog food. Yeah. And I find that green tea makes me just a little bit nauseous, as does matcha. I don't care for the tanic flavor of a black tea. And even though I do have a giant mason glass jar full of water when i when i i spit out that oil at some point you know i spit out the oil switch out my mouth and even before i've had my coffee i have a giant glass of water

and typically i put some hydrogen tablets in that hydrogen rich water has been shown to be a very good anti-inflammatory and have some other good benefits so i drink this giant glass of hydrogen rich water but but coffee is just for for a multitude of reasons and of course we know that uh you know when taken post workout. It can amplify glycogen restoration. We know that it can increase free fatty acid utilization if taken pre-workout. It staves off diabetes and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and it initiates liver and gallbladder, release of bile. Like there's a lot of cool things that it does for you. And it does a really good job initiating a bowel movement, which is typically where I'm off to, right? Like after I've done my reading and my research, I go and have my bowel movement,

you know, and that's, you know, usually a good 10 to 15 minutes of just, you know, the squatty potty and just completely getting myself in that state of bliss emptiness to where I don't feel as though I've got anything left in me. And actually a couple of times a week. And this is because I genetically have a higher-than-normal risk for colon cancer. And I have had several family members come down with colon cancer. I actually do a coffee enema. And so I've got coffee going up both sides.

And there's nothing to make you feel as clean as a whistle like a coffee emma. Bill, I mean, what made you start doing that? Looking into it, I interviewed a few kind of big health influencers who have that as a regular practice. I spoke with several people who just swear by it as just like a crucial part of their week to keep things moving and to stave off constipation. And there's a little bit of detoxification effect that occurs, you know, as you release a lot of the, you know, the phase one and phase two liver conjugants out into the bile. It helps to move those along. So it's just, you know, I've had two colonoscopies. I'm cleaning as a whistle.

and I think a big part of it is my regular coffee animal practice for the past three years. You've done a phenomenal job romanticizing that, which I respect. Honestly, it's nice. If you have enough key terms, you can do it. It feels absolutely wonderful, to be honest with you. Okay, so you've done that. Now, where are you in the day? What's up next?

Okay, so then I always... Do you haven't eaten anything yet, right? No, no. I always every day do a 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast. So the coffee's always black. There's the, you know, I don't consume any supplements that have any calories. in them like fish oil or anything like that. The oil that I'm pulling with, of course,

because it's full of the bacteria from my mouth, it gets spat out into the garbage can. So after I've used the restroom, I'll typically do either A, a full-on workout, if my day and my upcoming schedule dictates that I'm not going to have much time or I know I'm going to have a lot of decision-making fatigue or cognitive fatigue at the end of the day

that would leave me feeling a little bit too drained to do a hard workout. In that case, I will do typically a concurrent strength and endurance workout that involves the type of training that would prepare one for an obstacle course race like this, right? So a lot of running and aerosolte bike and burpees and kind of like cardiovascular modes interspersed with sandbag carries and mace slams and pull-ups and loaded push-ups and basically a variety of functional moves combined with cardio. That's nine times out of ten the type of workout. that i'm doing so so it's high intensity it's it's high intensity concurrent strength and endurance training not a lot of not a lot of break time almost no break time no i squeeze a lot of volume into about 60 minutes of work time and that would be again if the afternoon or evening is not

going to prove me to do that because it's in the afternoon or evening when your grip strength peaks and your testosterone peaks your post-workout protein synthesis peaks your body temperature peak. So it's better. Which is, by the way, just to interrupt for a second, that's why most athletes prefer working out in the afternoon, isn't it? I think so. Yeah. I mean, just based on that natural rhythm, let's face it, some of us are slow in the morning. It takes longer to warm up. Yeah. But if I'm able to do that workout on the afternoon or evening instead, based on my schedule, I do for the reasons I've just stated. And what I prefer to do is something similar to what I did this morning or what I'll do at home. A walk in the sunshine, an easy swim, or some

time in the sauna and you know just something very parasympathetic base something that still gets me moving something that allows me to continue to breathe and clear my head for the day but but you know if if time does not permit for that and I anticipate that the day is going to go a different way you know typically what I'm doing is that relaxation that I normally do at the beginning of the day at the end of the day right but either way I've got two movement sessions per day right one hard one and one kind of easy, parasympathetic sauna, swam walk. So no matter what, two types of activities per day, no matter what, the first one's always fasted. Got it.

And what do you think right now is underrated in fitness, just from like an athletic standpoint or a movement standpoint? Minimal effective dose of training. We talked about this. You and I were on a panel up in Vancouver recently, and this came up amongst kind of the biohacker community. And this idea of time under tension being the key versus sets and wrap. I mean, two to three minutes of time under tension for a muscle group is enough to initiate hypertrophy and muscle maintenance. So this concept of like super slow training, single set to failure, or this idea of high intensity interval training for 15 to 20 minutes versus an hour or two of steady state endurance training. It's just for people with increasingly busy lives, just an absolutely fabulous time hack.

And I incorporate a lot of those concepts as well. Meaning that, for example, if I were doing concurrent strength and endurance training, I might do one single super slow, three-minute chest press, you know, set to failure of some kind of a push-up or a chest press or a dumbbell-press or something like that, and then go on, do a set of high-intensity cardio, right? Like, say, to bat a set or two minutes as hard as I can go, like a 500-meter row, then come back and do one single set to failure for shoulder, one single set to failure for pulls or pull-downs, one single set for squats or deadlifts, et cetera. And I think that this idea of minimum effective dose is very useful.

And there are, of course, technologies, you know, for me, you know, I'm often labeled as a biohacker, and I do like some of the technologies that have been created to make this attainable for people, like, you know, that VASPR machine that combines cold, blood flow restriction training, a full body exercise machine, and 21 minutes of high intensity interval training that gives you strength and cardio in the equivalent of like a three hour workout in 20 minutes or the ARX fit machines which are basically motorized driven machines that produce a massive eccentric load that completely exhaust you over that course of two to three minutes and it's one set for each of those muscle groups so you get what you get in a 60 minute strength training

session in 15 to 20 minutes so so sometimes I think people might feel as though they need to needlessly spend too much time at the gym that being said there are some of us probably a lot of people walking around here at this race, a lot of people in the fitness culture, a lot of people who might listen to our podcasts, who, like, the gym is their happy place, right? That's their place. For me, for me, I love to go to the gym

and spend like an hour at the gym, just doing stuff, right? Just moving stuff, listening to a good audiobook or podcast. I find for me, it's just as stabilizing, if not more than meditation. You know, I'm constantly focusing on body awareness and mindfulness while I'm at the gym. I'm breathing through my nose. I'm using my breath, my prana to drive me through movements. I'm not watching TV. I'm not on my phone. I'm not chatting with people. I'm in this

very deep focused space. So, you know, I need to couch that idea of minimal effective dose of training with the idea that if, you know, if the gym is your happy place, or that longer workout is your happy place, then don't feel guilty about that. Don't overtrain, but don't feel guilty about that. Talk about your breathwork through your nose and the importance of bringing through your nose versus other areas. Well, there's a few interesting areas to explore regarding this. When you look at the animal kingdom, you know, the naked mole rat, the bowhead whale, many long-lived species, they've found to have a very high CO2 tolerance, meaning that they maintain high levels of CO2 and high levels of oxygen simultaneously. And based on something called the bore curve and exercise physiology, we know that when you have high levels of CO2, when you're not breathing off CO2 through something like hyperventilation, oxygen disassociates more readily into tissues, such as muscle tissue and heart tissue. And so you're actually able to more readily oxygenate tissues when you have simultaneously elevated levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

One of the best ways to do that is to breathe through your nose. Another very good way to do that is to focus on your exhale, lasting slightly longer than your inhale. And there's a very good book about this called The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McCown. And to be clear, right, it's exclusively through your nose, right? Ideally, because the nose allows you to breathe out in that slow manner versus pursing your lips, which can be a little bit difficult to remember to do when you're exercising. And furthermore, when you breathe through your nose, you are humidifying the air, which allows for more oxygen dissociation in the lungs in the alveolar space. In addition to that, you actually tend to breathe more diaphragmatically.

When you breathe through your nose, when you breathe through your chest, there are barrel receptors in your chest that can activate the endocrine system that can cause a higher release of cortisol. And so by breathing through your nose, you're actually keeping yourself in a slightly less sympathetically driven state while you're exercising. Which is really important because your sympathetic system is what goes into overdrive when you're exercising. So if you can decrease that and still have the same output, you're making your body more efficient in a way. Right. And for anyone who has not attempted to, let's say, do whatever strength training session that you would normally do, but either breathe through your nose the entire time or use a device. Like I recently discovered a device. It's a mouthpiece that pretty much makes it impossible to breathe through your mouth.

You have to breathe through your nose. It's called an Opti-O-2, I think is how it's spelled O-P-T-I-2. And if you do this, if you try this, I guarantee you will come out of your strength training session or your time at the gym or even your run, right? They used to have the Spartan boys, right, the actual Spartan boys. Not the low ones running on orange t-shirts here, but like thousands of years ago, the Spartan boys would actually put gravel or water in their mouths and be forced to run a rigorous trail while only breathing through their nose and then they would need to spit out that gravel

or that same volume of water at the end yeah but if you have if you're listening and you haven't yet tried this the number one thing you're going to experience is what I described earlier a feeling as though you've just meditated for an hour because your sympathetic nervous system is far less driven than it would normally be when you're breathing through your mouth and furthermore you are more mindful of your entire body because your body is driven by your prima right your your you're your prana, your life force, your breath. And so by being constantly in tune with that during your entire workout, you really do feel as though you're in an elevated state when you finish.

Really fascinating. Okay, so let's go back. You've now finished some kind of an activity session, could be high intensity workout, could be more, you know, something more parasympathetic. What are you doing now in your day? So at that point, typically I'll go in, I'll visit with my family for a little while. You know, the boys typically are up by then, making themselves breakfast. I'll chat about the day.

Usually we have like a little family kind of team meeting. You know, what's going on today? What's the schedule looks like? You know, when's jih Tzu, when's soccer, when are we going to have dinner? Just like, you know, just kind of getting on the same page with everybody. How old are your kids? They're 11 years old. So homeschooled?

They're not homeschooled per se. They are unschooled, meaning that we do not use a curriculum. There is zero structure. They wake up in the morning and they do whatever they want to do. And, you know, my job as a parent is this. simply surround them with as many proactive activities and people and teachers and tutors and things that keep them from waking up and flipping on the TV and playing video games all day and they stay very busy, you know, building tree forts and playing in the woods

and shooting bow and arrow and meeting with their Spanish teacher and their jihitsu instructors. They have a fantastic day. It's like a childhood dream. And how do you know that they're developing at a rate that's better than say their 11-year-old equivalents. Standardized testing. They still need to take standardized testing. Yeah, the state of Washington requires them to take standardized testing. And in terms of, they do well. And in terms of practical hands-on experience, I mean, they are amazing chefs. They have a cooking podcast. They run a business. They know woodworking skills. They know how to use a skill saw. They built a tree for it. They can hunt and kill and fill dress an animal. Like, in my opinion, all that is far

more important than how do you match up on you know standardized test so so their their life skill their experiential skill is just through the roof like you could drop my kids in the wilderness and they're going to come out alive and i think i think that as a base foundation that's important they'll they'll figure out their way around a you know around an iPhone later on so okay so family time and uh at what point now are you uh eating i typically and this this is around 930 or 10 so i i have my entire team uh so i own a supplements company, Keon. And then I also do a lot of consulting. I do a lot of coaching through Ben Greenfield Fitness. I record podcasts. I write. I spend typically about 10 hours each week just

visiting with my private coaching clients or people who have hired me to review their blood, their biomarkers, et cetera. But my team knows that nothing gets scheduled before about 930 to 10. Right. So I have that morning available. That's awesome. And then typically starting at about 10 is when I'm like a horse, with blinders no push notifications no emails no text messages it's just like four to five hours of deep work to 1 30 or 2 in the afternoon but it's at about 930 kind of while i'm visiting with my family tooling around the kitchen i'm usually just making a smoothie like just a like a superfood smoothie okay and uh and that four to five hours of work that could be anything from business related to research yep it's it's it's whatever happens to be on the task for that for that day but for

me. It is consults and phone calls with clients who have hired me to manage their health or their sleep or any other element of their performance. It is writing, uh, meaning writing articles for Ben Griefeld Fitness.com, editing articles, uh, working on articles from magazines or working on book chapters, uh, or it is recording a podcast, uh, either being interviewed or interviewing someone from my own show. So, uh, you know, I'm a big believer in kind of Cal Newport's. idea of deep work and I spend those four to five hours just immersed in non-reactive work right like the emails those get saved for the afternoon or the early evening the reactive hey ben can you shoot a quick quick video for this or two minutes of this three minutes of that all that stuff gets saved

for later on the day because that's easy to do even when you're cognitively fatigue like you you can respond and you can react but my time is my time from about 930 or 10 up until about 1 30 or 2 nothing distracts me it's all deep work time and do you do you do take any kinds of supplements or brain enhancement tools at this point? So I have my cup of coffee in the morning. And in many cases, that will have like some four-sigmatic mushroom extract in it, like some Lions mane or some Chaga or something like that. Sometimes I'll take a neotropic, like qualia mind or qualia focus.

Typically, to keep my appetite satiated as I'm going through that morning of work, I am chewing gum. Sometimes it's nicotine gum, often with sparkling water or zivis. and so yeah usually there's some kind of stimulant kind of keeping me going during that time in addition my my office is just littered with all these pieces of biohacking equipment that I use while I'm working out so I'm standing on a grounding mat to reduce inflammation while I'm at work I have you know light panels these red light infrared panels that kind of shine light on me while I'm working I have a walking treadmill you know a standing treadmill desk a little balance board I have a kettlebell

So I'm kind of constantly moving at the office. I mean, technically, even if I don't get a chance to work out during the day, I'm taking like 15,000 steps a day, just talking to people and, you know, moving around and doing things in my office. And one thing I didn't mention, by the way, was, you know, when I say I'm having a smoothie for breakfast, my smoothies are pretty damn extravagant. We're talking like bone broth, collagen, coconut milk. It's a meal of a smoothie, sea salts, and I blend it all up to like an ice cream texture,

so I can eat it with a spoon, almost like an asi bowl, and then I'll top it with like spirulina and Chorella and cacao nibs and coconut flakes and all these. I bet your kitchen cabinet's pretty epic looking. It is pretty epic. There's a lot of good stuff in there. And really, you know, most of everything else I eat, it's very almost like, I don't describe it as paleo, but it's almost like a bastardized version of the carnivore diet. Like, so I eat a lot of, a lot of organic wild meat.

I hunt, so, you know, we have a freezer full of meat that I've hunted, and I also will order good organic meats. One of my favorite companies is... What do you hunt? I hunt white-tailed deer, elk, turkey, access deer, pig. And what do you kill with? Kind of a naive question. A Hoyt.

Oh, wow. So you're not even using a gun. You're out there with a bow. No. No, I like the challenge of spot and stock with a bow. That seems amazing, actually. That's got to be fairly old school, and that's got to require a lot of technique, I would think. I practice every day.

I practice shooting every day when I'm at home. With a bow. And I travel with this little, like, handheld device that allows me to kind of practice while I'm traveling without my bow. If someone wanted to get into, would you call it archery? Is that the right way to describe it? If someone wanted to get into archery, how would they go about doing that? My method was to visit my local bow shop and to visit with them, to get fit by them, to have a bow built. Then I began to shoot in some archery competitions and also some hunting competitions called Train to Hunt.

I went out hunting with some people who kind of mentored me and guided me through my first hunts. I subscribed to Peterson's Bow Hunting Magazine. There's a few really good bow hunting podcasts out there, like my friend John Dudley's knock-on archery is a good show. And so, you know, a little bit of magazine, a little bit of podcast, and then just immersing myself in the local hunting community. That's amazing, man. That seems like such a pure passion to be good at archery. Yeah, and it allows you to put the meat in the freezer. And so, you know, I'm like a nose to tail, so a lot of organ meats, liver, heart, kidney,

a lot of good grass-fed wild meat, like wild-caught salmon and, you know, elk, bison, buffalo, et cetera. And then just lots of, like, small berries, tubers, like sweet potato, pumpkin, yam, et cetera, coffee in the morning, a little bit of wine in the evening, and a little bit of raw honey as another carbohydrate source. And so, you know, my diet is very, very simple, aside from that very complex morning smoothie. Okay, so after you've done all this work, it's late afternoon, are you now going to do another type of activity? You mentioned you kind of like to do two things. Yeah, I break and have lunch, right? And lunch is typically something like I've just described, like a little sweet potato with some leftover steak from the night before.

Sure. I'm a big customer of wild planet sardines, so I order all their herring and mackerel and sardines and anchovies. So a lot of small, cold water fish. So I get a lot of omega-3s. A lot of times I'll have those for lunch with a little bit of like a pumpkin mash or something like that or a squash. And then I always take a nap for about 20 to 45 minutes after lunch. I go and it's a recovery nap. Like I have one of these things called a biomat that makes like a heat that, like an infrared heat.

So I lay on that. I have some of these Normatech boots that will use gradated compression to a lot of legs to recover while I'm napping. So you put the NormaTech on while you sleep. Yeah, well, I'm on the biomats. I put the normatech on. I lay on my back and then I have this thing called a new calm. It's a vagal nerve stimulator. So it just shoves you into parasympathetic mode very quickly.

And it has like a gaba cream that goes over your carotid artery on the other side of your neck. And then you put these pads on and kind of drives the gaba cream in, stimulates your vagus nerve. I put on a sleep mask. and technically the new column has like a 20 minute power nap function and so most days all I have is around 20 minutes available so I should do the 20 minute power nap function I'm good to go but if if I've got luxury of time a little more time that day I'll like run the 20 minute power nap function twice

or else I'll use there's another really good app called brain FM and I'll put on brain FM for a while and just kind of fall asleep to that and are you actually setting this thing to 20 minutes or does your body just naturally it automatically is on 20 minutes And it kind of like, it's designed to simulate a full 90 minute sleep cycle, which is really cool. And they've done studies on the military of this thing. And it's, it's the real deal. What's it called again?

It actually works, the new calm, NU calm. Huh. And so it will bring you through a full 90 minute sleep cycle in 20 minutes. But because it brings you out of that sleep cycle at the end, it kind of like has these twinkly sounds like, that kind of wake you up and pull you back into, you know, I think it brings you from beta to alpha to theta. and then kind of back up and I think that final twinkling at the end kind of is a little bit of a beta release.

So it wakes you up and you don't feel groggy afterwards. So I wake up from that and then after that I've got like typically another couple hours of work like till around 5 or 5.30. And you won't have drunk more coffee at this point. No, no. I don't do a lot of coffee afternoon. Sometimes if it's the afternoon,

I'm still a little bit of groggy, like I'll have another piece of nicotine gum or um talk about nicotine gum it's just like a good little cognitive pick me up and nicotine actually has some good benefits for the mitochondria as well um it's it's uh you know you might be familiar with vitamin b3 you know and and some of these other forms of nicotinamide it's kind of similar like you can actually assist a little bit with with the health mitochondria and the electron transport chain and you do it and it sounds like you do it infrequently enough where you don't feel craving for it no no i mean it's it's mildly addictive the same way that coffee is or

same way that exercise is, but I'll typically do that. I've, you know, I've always got some kind of weird, like, adaptogenic herb blend or something somebody sent me. So sometimes the afternoon is my time to just experiment. Try something. You know, try something that might happen to be sitting in my pantry at the time. But usually I'm a one cup of coffee kind of guy, unless it's a very demanding, like today at, you know,

Spartan World Champs, you know, today I'll be go-go-go. I'll probably swing into Starbucks and, like, grab a cold brew or something later on today. Got it. That'll be two-cover. So, anyways, I wake up from the nap, kind of pick myself up again, do a little stretching like get my day going again and i find that nap gives me almost two days because then i'm like super productive for two hours like all the emails all the phone calls all like the little fires that need to be put out i'm doing that all the way up until about 530 or so and then it's

time to either a do that hard workout on an ideal day or b i've already done the hard workout because i know that day was going to be super stressful i'm just like out for a walk or you know an easy bit of time in the sauna and then once that's done once that workout is done uh there is one final dip into the email inbox to make sure there's no additional fires to put out and then from then on out the entire evening is with the family we have these amazing family dinners we gather around we cook dinner we take out games like table topics or uh exploding kittens or unstable unicorns or chess or whatever else and we have an amazing family dinner sometimes we have people over uh we finished dinner we will sometimes like what time are you finishing dinner

in the day. Usually we finished dinner around 8, 8.30, sometimes a little bit later. And then we play music, like we play piano or guitar, and play the kids a song, we read, we go through our gratitude journals for the day. It's just like, you know, sometimes, I mean, honestly, aside from that meet and greet in the morning, I'm not seeing my family that much the rest of the day. But I just, like, when the evening rolls around, that's just like the protect, that's just the way my day is structured, right? That's the protected family time. You know, on the weekends, like a Saturday or Sunday, you know, we'll be off, you know, whatever, going to the museum or doing some fun together. But weekdays, like, nobody sees me from like,

you know, 930 or 10 until that workout's done, like in the evening. And I break. And it's finally all coming together as a family for the rest of the evening. I'm pretty much inaccessible to anybody, including my family during that time. And so now we're at the end of the day. What is your whole process for sleeping? What kind of tools do you use? so I have installed in my bedroom I've replaced all the bulbs all the artificial LED flicker with red incandescent bulbs which are very close to like torchlight or firelight right so there's no blue light in the bedroom it looks like a strip club looks like a strip club my bedroom does which is great because I mean like we're all adults here and actually red light

does make people look better during sex too like it actually there's a reason they use it in strip club so it does make sex better too but these red incandescent bulbs. When I'm tooling around in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, whatever, at night, I have, like, wrap-around red glasses. I use a brand called raw optics. It blocks, like, the 400 to 480 nanometer wavelength of light, which is the one that's most likely to suppress melatonum production while you sleep. I have a chili pad that I turn on that circulates 55-degree cold water under the bed while I'm asleep to keep my core temperature down and assist with my deep sleep levels. I have an essential oil diffuser that diffuses like lavender essential oil into the

room. So I have like this nice relaxing scent while I'm asleep. And typically, you know, the kids are in bed after I've played them guitar and we've read and stuff. Usually, you know, they're asleep around 9.30. So then it's, it's time for mom and I. So between about 930 and at the latest 1030, you know, it's reading. It's sex. It's chatting with my wife. It's just, you know, very passive non-business-based activities and yeah just just basically you know very you know the room is cool the room is dark there's blackout curtains uh it's it's only lit by red lights uh there's no business there's no tv in our bedroom and that's just my time to kind of put put an end cap on the day with reading and romance and any supplements at this point uh do

melaton magnesium what i what i use to assist with sleep is uh i typically even though kind of like that afternoon picnic companies are always sending me whatever you know here's our new blend of kava or you know try this new uh you know whatever blend of valerian cammill or whatever nine times out of ten my go to is i take uh about 60 to 80 milligrams of CBD and i take a few capsules of this supplement called sleep remedy which is made by uh my friend dr kirk parsley who designed like this supplement to help navy seals get to sleep at night and it's like a gamma immunobutriac acid precursor I use that when I travel too. The only thing I add in when I travel is extra melatonin

for the circadian rhythm cycles because when you cross over to different time zones. And I like this brand from Quicksilver. It's like a liposomal melatonin that just knocks you out. Like you put a few sprays of that under your tongue. It gets absorbed super fast because it's this liposomal formulation. And so I'll add that in with the sleep remedy

and the CBD when I travel. How much like A-B testing have you done on your own body around CBD? Because I know there's a lot of products. out there? Well, with sleep quantification, it definitely enhances deep sleep but only in high doses. And only in the absence of THC. THC seems to disrupt deep sleep cycles.

That's such a good point. Like, there's so many products that also have THC, so you have to figure out what's right. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing, of course, less, I give people the impression that you got just like pop a bunch of pills to get to sleep is the other thing I do a lot of, especially increasingly since I

interviewed Dr. Andrew Weil on my show and we talked for a while about this, is this four, seven, eight breathing. Like, once your head hits the sack and the light is off, you start going into this breathwork. It's four count in, seven count hold, eight count out, and my latency has considerably improved since adopting that breath cycle. I'll fall asleep, you know, you fall asleep, but you don't remember falling asleep, like that type of thing.

I'll start into that breath cycle, and I'll just fall asleep and not remember when I fell asleep. And do you wear a sleep mask? I do. I use one called a mindful. It's interesting because that particular sleep mask was first designed for people who were doing, like, psychedelic journeying, you know, like laying on their back and taking a megadose of psilocybin or whatever. And one of the reasons for that is because it does such a darn good job blocking out all light. I used to recommend this silk wrap-around sleep mask made by sleep number, and then I found this mindful thing, and it's like it's next level.

And you mentioned blocking out light. Do you do stuff with the blue light blocking glasses? Well, I wear them, like I mentioned, at night. I wear the raw. Raw has a really good wraparound red pair that I wear at night. And then during the day, if I've got a lot of screen time and monitor time, or for example, again, when you and I were just up in Vancouver at that event, you know, I was on stage.

There were bright lights. It was inside, like, the Vancouver Convention Center. So it's all LED fluorescence. We know those produce a flicker that's mildly damaging to the retina. we know that those during the day can disrupt sleep cycles, even if it's not 5 p.m., or if you're walking around at 2 p.m. under bright LED as you would find in a mall or in a grocery store at a convention center,

that can disrupt sleep cycles later on. So when I'm traveling, and I know I'm going to be in those kind of situations, you know, because I'm going to have my house. My house is all natural, incandescent lighting, large windows, et cetera. But what I do when I'm traveling, and I know I'm just going to be exposed to a lot of this fluorescence in LED is I wear clear blue light blocking glasses. And that same company, raw optics, they make like a, like kind of a fashionable looking clear ones.

I don't know if you saw me wearing like those black thick frames. Like those are the ones I wear during the day and then I switch to the ride light ones at night. I do the ones at night. I haven't gotten into the ones during the day, but I should check that out. They help if you're an unnatural artificial light settings for a long time. Like I've especially found on at conventions and conferences where a lot of times you're indoors on an expo floor the whole day. Yeah, that's tough. They help so much with sleep later on.

That or a day where I'm doing a ton of writing and I'm just got a lot, I have a lot of monitor time. One thing I love that you're describing, which I think people take for granted, is how all these things, even eight hours before you're even thinking about bed, affect your sleep. And it's a really important phenomenon that I don't feel like society's really grasped. Sunlight exposure for the first few minutes of the day when you get up is important, or at least simulating it, right? So, you know, if I'm in Seattle or Iceland or somewhere, I'm not. just not getting out of the sun. They're freaking veas or whatever. They make it impossible to get outdoors. I always travel with this pair of glasses that emits light, similar to the greenish blue light wave spectrum that you would get exposed to by staring into sunlight in the morning.

They are called re-timer glasses, because that's exactly what they're designed to do to re-time your circadian rhythm. And I also travel with something called the human charger, which is in ear light therapy. So I blast my eyes and my ears with light if I cannot get out in the sun in the morning, because, because that's when your circadian rhythm starts with that blast of sunlight in the morning. So, fascinating. Yeah, it's, it's important, as is red light at night, right? That's why, like, getting an infrared sauna at night or using, like, those red photobiomodulation panels at night can be very effective for enhancing your sleep.

Now, we both share a passion for measuring a lot of stuff on our bodies. Talk about just why you think it's important to measure things like sleep and recovery and exercise and how you use that data in a positive way? Well, it's two reasons. A, it allows you to make informed decisions. Like, you know, if I smoke weed before bed, I fall asleep, but my deep sleep cycles suck. But if I take some CBD oil, my deep sleep cycles are better, right? I wouldn't know that, really, without a quantification device.

Or I have a rule for myself that I take 15,000 steps a day. And if I finish up dinner, like tonight we're going to, you know, plump Jackson, restaurant for the, you know, VIP media dinner, et cetera, I guarantee if I look at my phone and my step data and I'm sitting there at dinner and it says 14,000 steps, I'm going for a 10-minute walk before I go to bed, right? So, you know, it allows me to keep track of that stuff, but it's also highly motivating, right? Like, I protect my sleep more now that I measure it. I protect my step count more now that I measure it. I protect my, my HRV more, right? Like how sympathetically driven I am now, now that I measure it. Uh, and,

And so I pay attention to a lot more. You know, the same thing with blood, biomarker, saliva, anything you test, it not only gives you a ton of insight, but it also, I think, just as importantly, keeps you accountable. If I know that two months from now, I'm going to take a look at my omega-6, omega-3 fatty acid balance, I guarantee that I'm going to be much more careful about my mono-unsaturated fat intake, prioritizing fish oil, prioritizing omega-3s, maybe not putting the spoonful in. to the can of almond butter quite as frequently or mindlessly chomping away in pistachios or you know or vegetable oils just because I know I'm going to have to stare at my omega-3 omega-6 fatty acid index two months from now and I want it to look good totally totally what are some quick tests that you think everyone listening should do aside from wearing a quantification metric that at least gives you sleep in HRV which in my opinion are the two

top metrics to track you know and I would say overall heart rate rate and overall step count would be pretty high up there too as far as metrics that I think are important to track. I would say that a basic way to track blood glucose and inflammation because glycemic variability and inflammation are the two best predictors of overall wellness, health, and longevity. So for example, a quarterly test of all your inflammatory markers like CRP, fibrenogen, homocysteine, et cetera, right, like a really good glance at what's going on from an inflammatory standpoint,

and then a regular measurement of blood glucose and what is considered to be a three-month snapshot of blood glucose, your hemoglobin A1C. There are continuous blood glucose monitors you can wear, such as the Dexcom. They make a very good device called a Dexcom G6, and you can actually, you can monitor blood glucose in real time, and I've done that. It's incredibly insightful for overall health. nothing exists right now comparably for inflammation

but I would say if there's two things you're going to track and you just myopically want to focus on the most important variables it would be blood glucose and inflammation both of which are affected most dramatically in my experience by your level of processed carbohydrate or what would be considered

a cellular carbohydrate intake you know starches processed sugars etc and vegetable oils got it now where can people find you Ben Greenfield Fitness.com and I am putting the finishing touches on a massive new book

that I'm incredibly excited about so I'm going to name that too it's called boundless and that is at boundless book.com it's 608 pages jam packed with this shit and a lot more. I'll definitely include that in the show notes

what's a give me the quick plug on the book what's going to be in the book it is a complete manual to mind, body, and spirit optimization. It is everything. I've been deep in the trenches for the past three years, like very advanced anti-aging and longevity stuff. You know, I cover everything from peptides, SARMs, and hormones

to a lot of what the blue zones are doing and other longevity hotspots from around the world, a lot of minimal effective dose of exercise stuff, a ton of new biohacking tools and tips and technologies. A lot of stuff in there, you know, that there's two big chapters on just like sex and lovemaking and romance and relationships. Like my goal with that book was for anybody who has a body to be able to pick it up and have a complete blueprint to what makes them tick and how to optimize themselves, live a long time.

And the subtitle of the book is upgrade your brain, optimize your body, and defy aging. And that's what the book's about. I love it, man. Well, this has been such a pleasure having you on. I think everyone should check out your book. You've got a ton of credibility in the space. You do the research. You do a lot of testing on your own body, which I think some people don't do.

So I've got a lot of admiration for you. Thanks for coming on. And you're going to do an enema now. I know it. I can see it in your eyes. We'll get there. All right. Thanks, Will.

Thank you. Thanks again to Ben for coming on the show. And best of luck to him with the release of his new book. If you're not already a Woop member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to again. We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data, as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more. The membership comes with a free Woopstrap 3.0. We offer 6, 12, and 18-month memberships. The more you sign up for, the more you save. If you enter the code Will Ahmed at checkout, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, will give you $30,

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