Ben Greenfield Podcast 216
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Transcript of Ben Greenfield Podcast 216
Podcast #216 from
http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2012/11/episode-216-6-hidden-ways-that-
you-may-be-lowering-your-metabolism-gaining-fat
[0:00:00.0]
Introduction: In today’s podcast, 6 hidden ways that you may be lowering your
metabolism and gaining fat. Also: do body wraps work for weight
loss, getting rid of diastasis recti, ways to increase your VO2max,
how to work your upper body without using your arms, and will
hyperbaric therapy work for recovery?
Brock: Hey Ben! What’s happening?
Ben: I’m sitting here in my office with my guitar in my lap. Can you
hear me? Can you hear my guitar?
Brock: I can. It sounds glorious.
Ben: Glorious! I finally get launched back into guitar lessons this week.
I’ve got this guy who’s like a MMA fighter and a heavy metal
guitar guy and he also does a lot of acoustic rock. Anyways, he’s
teaching teenagers guitar lessons at our YMCA so I approached
him about maybe letting me take guitar lessons and he said yes.
As a matter of fact, we’re gonna cancel the podcast and we’re
going to just start a band, Brock and I.
News Flashes:
Brock: All right. To get these and other interesting news flashes every
week, make sure you follow Ben on Twitter and at Google + and
you can find the links to Twitter and Google+ if you go to
bengreenfieldfitness.com and scroll along the right hand side.
Ben, what are you gonna highlight for us today?
Ben: Well, there were a couple of studies that are going to basically give
you a heart attack if you run next to busy roads just because you’d
be worrying so much about your health. I twitted why you
shouldn’t run next to busy roads and it’s not because you’ll get hit
by a car. And I also had another follow up twit after that that
talked about how we’re toxifying ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I
do not believe that people should live inside a bubble but the
inspiration for this started with the study in the Medicine Science
Sports and Exercise Journal. With the study they have in there
entitled The Sub-Clinical Effects of Aerobic Training in an Urban
Environment and they looked at inflammation, neural
inflammation and cognitive performance.
Brock: Wait…neural inflammation? Is that the inflammation in the brain
itself?
Ben: Yeah. Exactly. You can look at your brain derive the neuropathic
factor – that’s the factor that increases from aerobic exercise and
helps out with your IQ. You can also look at how much nitric
oxide you’re exhaling. There’s a bunch of different psychomotor
and memory tests that you can do for cognitive performance. And
then of course, for inflammation, you can look at leukocyte counts
in the blood stream and other inflammatory markers as well.
Brock: So, does that require them actually like peeking at your brain, you
can look for markers in the blood and other places?
Ben: No hacks are required to lift the lid of your head or something like
that. What they found was that aerobic training in an urban
environment with high traffic-related air pollution increased
inflammatory biomarkers and also didn’t increase cognitive
performance the same way that you would normally experience an
increase in cognitive performance from aerobic training. The
take-away message here is if you are in a busy high trafficked area,
you’d actually be better off exercising indoors with the filtered
room or else literally get in your car and drive somewhere where
you could exercise without being exposed to that high traffic. And
of course, whenever you have the option, stay away from the
highway trafficked roads.
Brock: So, how far away would you need to be from the highway
trafficked roads like if you’re in a city like Toronto – it’s a city of 5
million people, so I can go to a park but that park is also
surrounded by some pretty high traffic streets.
Ben: Yeah. You’re obviously gonna get some bio remediation of
pollutants just from the trees and the plants and things like that in
the park but I will just say the farther the better but I don’t have a
specific rule. I’ll just tell you just for your peace of mind, let’s just
say 50 paces, Brock – 50 paces away from the road.
[0:05:19.2]
There is a related study that says adult human exposure in an
urban center (in this case, they did the study in France in Paris)
and they were looking at exposure to what are called phthalates,
which are kinda nasty chemicals that you can literally get exposed
to through your digestive tract, your respiratory tract and they
looked at how much of this stuff people are getting from drinking
water, from food, and from ambient air. And it was found that
you could actually get quite a bit of exposure just through ambient
air from this stuff. Again, it’s another good reason to really really
be careful if you’re exercising in urban environments to try and
stay away from the streets as much as you possibly can because I
know we got a lot of runners and cyclists and folks like that who
listen in. Just a warning folks: be careful.
Brock: The air will kill you. Don’t breathe this.
Ben: Living will kill you. Got a bunch of people turning blue in the
face. Actually, you know what? It’s kinda funny. I don’t even
know for elps but I do this sometimes if I am running next to busy
road like a big semi or a truck or something goes by or a bus, I’ll
hold my breath as long as I can until the thing is off in the
distance.
Brock: I do the same thing when I pass a smoker.
Ben: Yeah. You mean a cigarette smoker?
Brock: Yeah. I do it very pointedly too like take this huge inhale and look
at them.
Ben: That’s funny! And then the other thing is that there was a cool
study that looked into the effect that putting a ton of cinnamon in
cereal has on your blood sugar levels and (this was in the Journal
of Nutrition and Diet) found the effect of ground cinnamon on
what’s called post prandial or after a meal. Your blood glucose
concentration found a significant enhancement in insulin
sensitivity, a significant reduction in blood glucose concentration.
The injection of cinnamon was about 6 grams and that was done
along with 50 grams of cereal – just plain cereal. I’m a huge fan of
whenever I have a meal with which cinnamon would actually taste
good. I’m not putting on a pad thai or anything like that but any
meal that’s got carbohydrate in it, on which cinnamon would taste
good which is typically gonna be like if you gotta have some
breakfast cereal or you an oatmeal or something like that or
morning kinwa or something of that nature, cinnamon is really
gonna mitigate the effects of blood sugar. This was a cool study
that reinforced that concept.
Brock: Very cool. So you said, how many grams or 5 grams?
Ben: 6 grams.
Brock: 6 grams. That’s a lot!
Ben: I think that comes about a couple of teaspoons.
Brock: Oh really? Okay.
Ben: Yeah. It’s not a ton. Now, you don’t have to put a cinnamon
shaker in your mouth or anything like that.
Brock: Oh…don’t even try that. That’s the worst.
Ben: Yeah. I think that’s a party game, isn’t it?
Brock: Yeah. The cinnamon challenge.
Ben: See how much cinnamon you can ingest.
Special Announcements:
Brock: All right. I guess let’s start off with talking about The Become
Superhuman Live event that you’re hosting in Spokane in March.
Ben: Coming together fantastically. By the way, if I get excited and spit,
you’re not even gonna be able to hear it because I’ve got one of
these spit filters on my microphone.
Brock: That’s so good ‘cause I spend most of the time just editing out
your spitting.
Ben: I know. Sometimes I get excited and I spit. Anyways, The Become
Superhuman Live Conference in Spokane, Washington, this thing
is gonna be epic. The speakers that I’ve got on board so far, I’m
super excited about, I’ll be revealing all them here in the next
month. But in the meantime, this is not just for the people who
live in Spokane Coeur D’Alene area. There are people coming in
from all over the globe for this thing. It’s filling up fast and it
literally is a 2-day conference that really geeks out on health,
fitness, nutrition, we’re doing private parties for podcast listeners,
bunch of stuff and I think we even played commercial during the
podcast so I’m going for too long. But one quick thing: if you
register by December 1, there’s a couple of things that you get
thrown in to the half for. One is a private one on one hour-long
consult with me here during the conference when you show up.
And then, the other thing that we are gonna entry into the prize
for is a free ticket to either refund your ticket or you can use that
free ticket to bring somebody else along with you. But you gotta
register by December 1st, 2012, if you wanna get entered into the
prize drawn for either of those. We’ll be sure to put a link in the
show notes.
[0:10:16.3]
Brock: Yeah. You’ve got 3 weeks people.
Ben: There we go.
Brock: All right and I guess we should also mention that if you love
podcast, you’ll probably love audio books and the best way to get
an audio book and especially for free, is to go to
audiblepodcast.com/ben and when you sign up, you’ll get one free
audio book if you’re a new member. It’s pretty good deal.
Ben: I love audio books. I’ve been listening to something called The
Philosopher’s Note. I’m not sure if you can get that on Audible
but it’s a synopsis of a bunch of different philosophy books. It’s
fantastic. I think I don’t even know the aural philosophy notes or
something like that. Brock, any books of
audiblepodcast.com/ben that you’d recommend?
Brock: Absolutely! One book that is on there by a guy named Michael
Pollan. He’s written a bunch of books…
Ben: And we say Pollan here in the United States of America.
Brock: Okay. I will try to adopt your crazy accent. The book is called In
Defense of Food (or Fod for you Americans). It’s an awesome
book. It actually has the 7 words that you need to remember
when choosing your food which is “eat food not too much mostly
plants”. If you follow those 7 words, apparently, you will eat
correctly ‘cause as Michael Pollan says in the book that we’ve
completely forgotten how to eat over the last well, close to
century, I guess. It’s really an interesting book so I suggest getting
that one.
Ben: I love it! Except that I would actually modify that. I would say
“eat food not too much, mostly animals that have eaten plants.” I
guess that’s more like 12 words. That’s more my style. Anyways,
though, check it out at audiblepodcast.com/ben and then also,
finally, getmaccax12.com. If you listened to last week’s podcast at
Ben Greenfield Fitness, I interviewed Chris McCormack. He has
some awesome workouts. I’ve got them all downloaded. It’s PDFs
to my computer. I’ve been doing one a week. They’re funky
workouts like the accordion and the lung buster…
Brock: I like the rolly polly.
Ben: The rolly polly workout…ton of sweet workouts that are pretty
easily implemented into a pretty existing training program, so if
you’re triathlete, endurance athlete or you just want some new
workouts that are gonna burn a lot of fat, a lot of calories, boost
your metabolism, give you a good injection of fitness, check out
getmaccax12.com and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Brock: Absolutely mate!
Wanna get personal access to all of Ben Greenfield’s secrets life?
This March in Spokane, Washington. Ben is bringing the world’s
best speakers straight to you. You’re gonna get step by step
blueprints for performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain,
sleep, and hormone optimization and get inside or access to
private parties special sessions for podcast listeners only. And of
course, delicious locally grown organic meals. The conference is
called Become Super Human and it’s already filling up fast. But
you can get in now at bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman.
You’ll come away from this live 2 day event completely set for life
to achieve everything you want for your body, mind and
performance. Whether you want to maximize fat loss, achieve an
ironman triathlon, or push your body and mind to the absolutely
limits of human performance. So visit
bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman and we’ll see live you live
and in person March 8th and 9th, 2013.
Listener Q & A:
Fred: Hey Ben! This is Fred. I have a question for you guys. They’ve
said a lot about wraps, so probably people selling these things are
promoting them in regards to helping you lose weight. Just wanna
know what your take is on this. I’m not a believer in it. I think
hard work and exercise is the way and the key is in that it’s too
good to be true than it usually is. Just wanna know what your
thoughts are on it. Thanks Ben.
Ben: Well, Fred (for those of you who may not have understood what
Fred said, he said “wrap”) yes, indeed body wraps are something
that are promoted as a way to help you detox and slim down or
even get rid of cellulites.
[0:15:18.7]
Brock: Wait. You’re not talking about burrito wraps.
Ben: I’m not talking about eating burritos or stopping by your local taco
truck, unfortunately. You’re using cayenne and pepper though, you
might lose little weight with those two. I’ve done body wrap. I did
a fall on like couple’s body wrap with my wife over in Jamaica one
time.
Brock: Did they wrap you to each other?
Ben: No. It wasn’t kinky like that. We just happened to be in the same
room getting wrapped. Your skin really feels super smooth and
they’ll use all sorts of different herbal treatments and mud and
stuff like that when they do these wraps. But another thing that
these wraps actually promise is that they are going to (in addition
to give you smooth skin) detox you by using seaweed or mud that
pulls toxins from your skin and also somehow slim you because
you’re getting a lot of these strips of material wraps tightly around
you and finally, reduce cellulites by using herbal remedies on your
skin. What’s probably going to happen or really what will happen
for a few days after you get one of these wraps is your skin is going
to appear more firm, it’s gonna be more toned, it’s gonna be more
hydrated. There are certainly a wide range of vitamins and herbs
that can help to improve the quality of your skin and even a little
bit of the elasticity and the collagen-like structure of your skin
because your skin is a connective tissue. However, as far as direct
removal of adipose tissue or direct removal of, for example,
cellulite, body wraps are not necessarily going to cause significant
weight loss. The best way to use these would be for example, if
you’ve got like lose skin that you wanna get rid of after a lot of
weight that you’ve gained or you’ve got some cellulite issues, you
are exercising, you’re perhaps even doing some of the things that I
recommended over on the 2-part cellulite series I wrote at
quickanddirtytips.com such as lifting weights and avoiding
wearing super super tight garments like tight panty hose and stuff
like that during the day. These may help a little bit with removal of
some of the appearance of the cellulite as well but this isn’t a quick
fix for fat loss. It’s just one of those things where you improve the
tone of your skin, yeah, you may affect the way that you look a little
bit.
Brock: So Fred’s right when he says hard work exercise and good diet are
the way to go.
Ben: That’s right but throwing in body wrap if you also wanna smell like
eucalyptus and chocolate or seaweed or whatever else.
Brock: Yum.
Jolene: Hi Ben! I have a question about abdominus rectus muscles. I have
a torn one from two pregnancies and I have quite a large diastasis
still – it’s about four fingers wide and I’m just wondering whether
something like that can be healed on ______[0:18:25.4] whether
you can train it back into the position so that gap, heals up or
whether it has to be treated surgically. My main concern is that I’m
having trouble training my core properly and as a result I’m having
occurrences of back problems and hip and knee and on and on.
Issues with it, so I’m just wondering if there are some exercises
that might help to heal that problem. Thank you.
Ben: So, diastasis recti – that’s basically this condition where your
abdominal walls start to separate and when they do that,
everybody’s got this little ridge that runs along the length of the
abdomen from the top to the bottom along that muscle in the
middle of the abs called your rectus abdominus.
Brock: So when you rub your fingers down the middle of your like from
your sternum down to your belly button, you can sort of feel it in
there. Is that what we’re talking about?
Ben: Yup! Everybody grab your 6 pack or your 8 pack, feel that…
Anyways, everybody’s got that – that ridge but what happens is it
can get stretched quite a bit during the prolonged period of
pregnancy and also during birth, depending on the degree of the
stretching and also the relative trained state of the abdominal
muscles during pregnancy, you can get to the point where that
stretching of that connective tissue gets the point where really
creates an actual structural abnormality and you can risk, for
example, like an abdominal wall herniation if it gets stretched too
far.
[0:20:02.3}
Now, whether or not you actually need surgery for something like
that is something that you would need to talk to your physician
about because it really really depends. There are certainly
therapies that you can do. Probably the most popular is one called
the Tupler Technique that you can do to attempt to try and
strengthen the abdominal muscles to where the separation is
eliminated a little bit by strengthening of the connective tissue.
But there is no hard and fast recommendation for example, for the
amount of centimeters or the number of fingers that you can put in
between the ridge to measure its length that would indicate
whether or not surgery was required. In most cases, however,
surgery is not necessary for diastasis recti and it’s very very
common in women who have gone through childbirth. Now, there
are things that you can do after pregnancy and also while you’re
pregnant leading up to birth to eliminate the chances of diastasis
recti being pretty significant or at least to help, again, with that
strengthening of connective tissue to help it to give a closure
together after you’ve given birth. One really important thing to
remember is that a lot of times, diastasis recti is blamed on a low
tone of abdominal musculature. And while that’s true, there are
two other components that you really need to focus on if you want
to really take care of this issue. One is the strength of your
diaphragm and one is the strength of your muscles on your pelvic
floor. In many many women, they’ll do things like work their core
and do abdominal exercises but not train the lower pelvic floor and
not train the diaphragm properly. The idea behind straining those
lateral two type of muscles is deep breathing exercises and also a
lot of the Kegel type of exercises, sitting on the floor, pressing your
low back into the ground, squeezing the muscles – the same
muscles you’d squeeze if you wanna stop urine flow, that type of
thing.
Brock: Somewhere like a contracting hold sort of thing rather than lifting
weights or doing crunches or something?
Ben: Yeah. And that’s why I mentioned this Tupler Technique because
what it does is it kinda trains you how to use the muscles around
your midsection like a corsette. It focuses on abdominal exercises
that train the entire corsette and it’s designed for moms who’ve
just had a child and they wanna tighten that say in the stomach
area or women who are just preparing for childbirth and want to
make sure that their abdominals are strong. For example, one
exercise would be kind a like a planking type of exercise where you
put your forearms on the floor with your elbows underneath your
shoulders. You interlock your fingers together, you put your toes
on the floor with your feet about shoulder-width apart and then
you just straighten your back and you pull your stomach inward
the same as you would do during like a front plank exercise and it
would just be like a hold for 30-60 seconds while also training your
diaphragm and doing deep breathing from the stomach while
you’re in a front plank position. And then right after you do that,
you can turn over, you can lie flat on your back with your knees
bent at about a 45-degree angle, same as that’d be if you’re gonna
do a crunch, you can lay your hands on top of each other over your
lower stomach so that you’re basically kinda like holding on to
your navel. And then you flex your ab muscles to try and get your
hands to move towards the floor so you’re pressing you low back
down into the ground and then you’re holding that for as long as
possible – for 30 seconds to 1 minute. And then you can literally
get back over going to the plank position and do that again. That
method, going back and forth from the front plank to the low back
pushing down into the ground can actually help with strengthening
the connective tissue and in pulling the stomach muscles a little bit
closer together. That’s another one you can do as well. There is an
article that I wrote at bengreenfieldfitness.com that has…I think
it’s like 15 different exercises that you can do. We’ll put it in the
show notes to this episode. What episode number is this, Brock?
Brock: 216.
Ben: Yeah. So Episode 216. I’ll put a link to this article but it’s basically
ab exercises that you can do while you’re pregnant that don’t put
you into like a recumbent position that would clot blood flow to the
baby and also would be considered exercises that actually do really
strength from the abs compared to crunches or sit-ups. I’ll put a
link to that in the show notes.
[0:25:08.4]
I also had a really good interview with Cassandra Forsythe and we
talked a lot about strength training during pregnancy. We’ll put a
link to that in the show notes as well. But those would be two
other good resources for you in addition to these two exercises you
can do for diastasis recti.
Brock: Is there anything that she should be avoiding in the meantime
while she has this separation? Would running be contra-indicated
or swimming or lifting weights or anything like that?
Ben: Any impact-based exercise that basically has you breathing hard
and doing impact at the same time, I would be really careful with
so yeah, that will include running and then the other thing I’ll be
careful with would be weight lifting that causes you to do what’s
called this valsalva maneuver or holding your breath as you’re
pushing against the force like a squat or a dead lift or something of
that nature. The same type of exercises you’d wanna be really
careful with if you, for example, had a hernia. So I would really
focus on, for example, that Tupler Technique that I mentioned
prior to starting into some of those other type of movements.
Brock: Also get that taken care of first and then move to the traditional
stuff. Cool!
Ben: Get your tummy strong like bull.
Rick: Hello Ben! This is Rick from Ohio. I enjoyed your podcast. You
and Brock do a great job. My question today is from my girlfriend.
She likes to drop about 15 lbs but she has hypothyroidism and
takes synthroid about 88 mg per dose. She’s in her early 50’s and a
Crossfit girl. She’s at the box at least 3x a week. She really
struggles to drop the weight. So my question is this: Besides
managing her caloric intake, is there anything else she could be
doing to increase her metabolism? Do you think she has a larger
challenge because of her thyroid problem? Looking forward to
your thoughts. Thanks a lot.
Ben: Well, this is an interesting issue because hypothyroidism, it can be
so complicated and of course we should put in our traditional
disclaimer. We may wanna just play that in fast motion right here,
Brock.
Brock: Got it.
Ben: All right. Cool. Brock’s on it.
Brock: Ben is not a doctor and the content provided on this podcast is for
informational purpose only and should not be construed as
medical or health care advice.
Ben: We’ve interviewed Dr. Fit - Dr. Roby Mitchell on this podcast
before about how to manage a low thyroid and that would be a
good episode for you to listen to. There’s also a really really good
book out there called Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms
When My Lab Tests are Normal? That book was out of print for a
while but it’s back in print now and I’ll be sure and put a link to it
in the show notes. But the thing to understand about thyroid is
that there are many environmental triggers that can act on your
thyroid gland and affect your thyroid activity that your girlfriend
should know about because all of these, by affecting thyroid
activity can of course, affect metabolism because your thyroid is
one of the master regulators of your metabolic rate or your calorie
burn.
Brock: Actually Ben, it’s been a good time to clarify or I wanna ask so she’s
got hypothyroid? Now that’s not having enough thyroid or your
thyroid’s not producing enough of the…
Ben: Your thyroid isn’t either producing enough of the T3 or the T3
isn’t getting converted into T4 properly in the liver or in the gut or
perhaps the thyroid stimulating hormone is not being produced in
adequate quantities or you may have thyroid antibodies circulating
in your blood stream. There are variety of reasons that
hypothyroidism may occur and that’s something I’ll get into here
because I would say that there are basically 6 main things that you
should be aware of that are gonna affect your thyroid, that I think
everybody should be aware of. The first would be the
hypothyroidism in most cases is what would be called an auto
immune disease. What that means is that there are certain
components in your diet, in your blood stream, etc. that can cause
your body to mount an inflammatory attack against your thyroid
tissue. And one of the main components that can cause this auto
immune attack is gliadin. Gliadin is the protein portion of gluten
which you find in wheat and gliadin really closely resembles
thyroid gland tissue so if you are eating a lot of wheat and this
gliadin breeches the protective barrier of your gut and enters your
blood stream which is very easy for that to happen, your immune
system will tag gliadin for destruction and it will create this
antibodies that bind to gliadin but these same antibodies can also
cause your body to attack thyroid tissue.
[0:30:25.3]
That means that if you have any type of propensity for this type of
auto immune reaction, a lot of people do, and you eat foods that
contain gluten, your immune system can attack your thyroid and
this is not one of those cases where you’re just like “oh I try to
avoid bread, never once in a while I have it.” The immune
response to gluten in this case in this attacking your own thyroid
tissue case can last up to 6 months each time that you eat gluten.
That’s why for anybody who has hypothyroidism or anybody who
even has done lots of tests that suggest that that may be the case,
you gotta be 100% gluten-free. You need to eliminate it completely
from your diet. Probably really the best test I would say to find out
whether or not you’re gluten-intolerant or whether or not you tend
to produce this type of auto immune antibodies would be a test
from Cyrex Laboratories. They do a really good one and so I would
speak with your physician about using that method to test for
gluten intolerance. That would be one thing is get gluten out of the
diet because that can have an effect on your metabolism by
attacking thyroid tissue basically. That would be the first thing to
take care of.
I would also consider vitamin D because vitamin D is specifically
associated with the same type of auto immunity and
hypothyroidism and intake of vitamin D or higher levels of vitamin
D has been shown to benefit the same kind of thyroid dysfunction.
Vitamin D does a lot of cool stuff – it can regulate your insulin
secretion, it can balance your blood sugar, but it can also help out
in people who have low thyroid function. The problem is that in
many cases, people who have low thyroid function also have a
leaky and inflamed gastrointestinal tract. So, a lot of times,
absorption of vitamin D can be reduced because of that. The other
issue is a lot of times, people who have hypothyroidism also have
issue with the levels of vitamin A and the levels of vitamin K2 in
their bodies and both of those need to be present in adequate
quantities in order for you to properly use vitamin D. So, a vitamin
D deficiency is another thing that can really precipitate or worsen
the hypothyroidism. And getting just vitamin D from a supplement
source like going out and getting vitamin D capsules, isn’t enough.
You need to make sure that you get vitamin A and vitamin K2 as
well. And that’s why I’m a big fan of something like cod liver oil in
this case because that’s gonna give you a really really good source
of vitamin A. And then also working something like grass-fed
butter, for example, that’s a good source of vitamin K2 like a good
organic grass-fed butter. Nato which is the Japanese fermented
food – that’s a really good source as well but it’s harder to get.
Brock: It’s kinda hard to eat too.
Ben: Yeah. I actually really like it. I had a ton of it when I was off in
Japan. Lot of people think it’s like tastes like beans covered in
snot.
Brock: I was gonna say slime but snot works.
Ben: I like beans and I like snots so there you go. Kiefer is also a pretty
decent source of vitamin K2 if you can get your hands on some
kiefer. And even egg yolks (whole egg yolks) are pretty good
source as well. So, get cod liver oil, egg yolks, grass-fed butter,
nato (if you can get your hands on it) and then try and include for
that vitamin A, some cod liver oil in your diet in addition to
supplementing with vitamin D. That would be another thing to
really focus on in this case.
The third thing that I would take into consideration, I mentioned
your gut and how there’s a real real link between your gut and your
thyroid and one of the issues here is that in many cases when
you’ve got increased inflammation in your gut, issues with
infection in your gut, a lot of times, that’s precipitated by low
stomach acid and many many people do have low stomach acid
and that’s something also that you can look into if you’re dealing
with hypothyroid or you wanna make sure that you’re healing this
gut thyroid access is to look into utilizing some type of like an axia
with pepsin type of supplement or at least if you’re getting heart
burn, consider doing that. So, if you have a lot of gut issues, a lot
of digestive issues and you also have hypothyroidism, I’ll really
take care of the gut.
[0:35:24.3]
Hypochloridia or low stomach acid is not the only thing that you
can do. We’ve really geeked out on the show before about ways
that you can heal your gut. I’ve got an entire recommendations
page over at bengreenfieldfitness.com that goes into a bunch of
other supplements that I recommend for healing your gut. But
understand that a lot of T3 to T4 conversion takes place in the
liver. You get a ton of thyroid activity that occurs in your gut and
so you really wanna take care of your intestinal bacteria, you
wanna take care of your intestinal lining. And inflammation in
your gut can really reduce specifically T3 levels by raising cortisol
and about 20% of T4 is converted to T3 in the gastrointestinal tract
so that’s another area or another thing that can be decreased when
you’ve got inflammation in your gut so taking care of your gut,
making sure that you have adequate stomach acid and also looking
into some of the other gut healing protocols that we’ll make sure to
link to in the show notes would also be something you can do.
Another thing to think about is your blood sugar and there’s a real
real link between thyroid and blood sugar because if your blood
sugar is constantly high, what happens is your pancreas is always
secreting all these insulin to move the excess glucose from your
blood into your cells where the glucose can be used to produce
energy. But studies have shown that when you get repeated insulin
surges, that increases the destruction of the thyroid gland
especially in people who have auto immune thyroid disease. So
you gotta be careful with high blood sugar levels and higher
amounts of carbohydrates not physical activity (that type of thing)
but on the same type of level, you also have to be careful with
chronically low blood sugar levels. And this is especially the case
for people who are going on low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
You need to be careful because when your blood sugar levels are
constantly dropping below normal, your adrenal glands will
respond to that by secreting cortisol and as I mentioned earlier,
high high amounts of cortisol can affect the proper activity of
thyroid hormones. The reason I’ve to get back it’s produced when
you have blood sugars, it tells your liver to produce more glucose
that causes what’s called glycogenolysis in your liver to bring your
blood sugar levels back to normal. But too much cortisol gives
your body that fights or flight response, it causes a lot of stress and
that can suppress pituitary function so your thyroid can’t function
properly and it can also affect inflammation in your gut. So, that’s
another thing to take care of – making sure that you’re regulating
your blood sugar levels properly.
And very very similarly or down the same line is that the fifth thing
to bear in mind is your stress and your sleep levels because not
only can a lot of stress and really stress at your adrenal glands
causing them to produce a lot of, for example, cortisol, that can
cause depression of your pituitary function as I just mentioned
which directly affects your thyroid hormone production. The other
thing that can happen though is that can reduce conversion of T4
to its active form of T3, it can promote auto immunity by
weakening your immune barriers, meaning that you’re gonna be
more likely to produce a lot of this auto immune destruction of
thyroid tissue, it can cause resistance to thyroid hormone because
when you’re stressed out, your body produces a lot of
inflammation and these inflammatory called cytokins have been
shown in studies to suppress the actual receptor site on your cells
to thyroid hormone. So, that’s another issue. The last issue with
adrenal stress or being constantly stressed out or not getting
enough sleep or having these high levels of inflammatory cytokins
from being stressed out or not getting enough sleep is that that can
cause hormonal imbalances. And specifically, when you have a lot
of cortisol circulating in your blood stream, that decreases your
liver’s ability to properly clear estrogens from your blood and when
you have a lot of estrogen rolling around, that increases levels of
something called thyroid binding globulin and those are the
proteins that attach to thyroid and cause it to be in its inactive
form in the blood stream. So, if you’re constantly stressed out, if
you’re not getting enough sleep, that’s another issue that can really
really aggravate the low metabolism that can be caused by low
thyroid activity or aggravate auto immune attack of thyroid tissue.
[0:40:15.1]
And I know I’m going on and on here on this question but there’s
one other thing I wanted to mention and that would be
inflammation. Excess exercise, not recovering properly like I
mentioned earlier - stress and lack of sleep – all of that can
increase inflammation. And there are a few different things that
inflammation can do. There’s one study that showed that one
injection of inflammatory molecules, basically inflammatory
cytokins, was able to reduce your blood levels of thyroid
stimulating hormone, your T3 your free T4, your free T3 for five
days and inflammation completely disrupted the production and
regulatory mechanism of thyroid hormone. The other thing is that
inflammation, as I just mentioned, can decrease the number and
the sensitivity of your thyroid hormone receptors and then the last
thing that it can do is it can decrease the conversion of T4 to T3. In
most synthetic hormone medications are T4 like synthroid that she
is on. If you give synthroid to somebody who’s got a bunch of
inflammation, it’s not gonna work because the body just can’t even
convert T4 to T3 when it’s in an inflamed state and the patients
who don’t really do a good job converting T4 to T3 actually do a lot
better on bio identical thyroid hormone anyways like armor
thyroid, for example. I’m not a huge fan of synthroid anyways just
because it’s got cornstarch in it, it’s got lactose as a filler. Cytomel
which is another kind of popular synthetic T3 hormone has
modified food starch in it which has gluten, ironically as a filler.
I’m a bigger fan of bio identical hormone replacements using a
compounding pharmacist or else using something similar to like
an armor thyroid. A lot of stuff to bear in mind but the main
things to wrap this up would be get gluten out of the diet, get on
vitamin D and make sure you get vitamin A and vitamin K2 along
with it, take care of your gut, look into stomach acid and also look
into some of the other recommendations that we’ll put on the link
in the show notes to healing your gut. Monitor your blood sugar,
make sure it’s not too high or too low, eliminate stress and get
adequate sleep and then just make sure you’re not overworking
your body, creating too much inflammation, not recovering
properly.
Brock: And I guess she should be able to…Rick doesn’t say how long she’s
been on the synthroid but if she hasn’t noticed any improvement
since she started taking it, then maybe that would be a good
indication whether to continue to take it or maybe switch to one of
the different sources like you were saying.
Ben: Yeah. That’s something she’d wanna talk to her doctor about but
there are definitely some cases where synthroid really isn’t gonna
work. Again, if you’re not properly converting the T4 to T3 since
synthroid is just synthetic T4, it’s not gonna do anything for you.
There are other things that can interfere with the actions of T3 too,
for example, if you’ve got estrogen dominance which is really
common when you’re hypothyroid, high levels of estrogen like I
mentioned those increase the levels of thyroid-binding globulin
and that would make it so that synthroid doesn’t really work. And
then of course, you could be sensitive to the fillers in synthroid so
you’d be aggravating an auto immune condition in that case.
We’re getting into stuff that you’d really have to talk to your doctor
about. I’d recommend you look into armor thyroid. Dr. Roby
Mitchell and I geeked out on this a little bit in my discussion with
him so I’ll link to that in the show notes. I’m definitely not
convinced that synthroid is the best solution for people with
hypothyroid.
Bill: Hi Ben! This is Bill from Nevada. I need some help on getting my
endurance back. Last spring, I was in my best Ironman shape
when I had a bike crash and did some serious damage to my
shoulder. After surgery, I spent 4 months on the sofa watching TV.
Then, it hurts so much I could not even lean on a standby or
tolerate a jog. Now, I’ve been back to training for a month and half
but my endurance is gone. After 45 minutes to an hour on my 6-
mile bread-and-butter run, I am gassed, completely out of breath,
and about 5 minutes slower than before. Interestingly, my heart
rate is staying down between LT and AT for the entire run. Before
the crash, I had a respirator treadmill test I was told I was in the 99
percentile of VO2 max for my age group. I’ve finished 6 long
course tries with the help of your excellent Dominator Program,
each one a little faster than the last. Sleep, temperature and
nutrition are all the same. And as you remember from the 2
Phuket races we’ve done together, I’m not lacking in heart and
desire. Any suggestions on how I can get my mojo back? Also,
what body fat percentage do you like to have during taper week
before an Ironman or half Ironman? Thanks for the help and the
podcast.
[0:45:39.3]
Brock: So, I guess if anybody has any questions about any TV shows over
the last 4 months, I guess Bill is the one to talk to if that’s what he’s
been doing.
Ben: Hi Bill! By the way, if you’re listening in, Bill has gone to the
Thailand trip the past couple of years. I’m assuming he’s not going
this year ‘cause he hasn’t let me know if he is. But yeah, Bill and I
had fun going out on the beaches in Thailand quite a bit. Anyways
and by the way, big shout out to Bill because he actually…and I
don’t wanna scare you, Brock or anybody else who’s doing that
race in Thailand but Bill broke his neck when we were in Thailand
in the first race that we did and stuck around and did the second
race and didn’t even realize that he broke his neck until he got all
the way back to the states. But he’s one tough cookie and
apparently, accident prone. First of all, Bill used a couple of
phrases though that if you’re not familiar with them, he mentioned
his LT and his AT and how he’s going out on his runs and he’s at
his LT and his AT. Your LT is your lactate threshold and your AT
is your aerobic threshold. Lactate threshold is the point at which
you start to produce more lactic acid during exercise than your
body can actually get rid of. And your aerobic threshold is your
peak fat burning zone. It’s the point at which your body is using
maximum fat for energy. It’s a very very efficient intensity for
exercise at which you could go for a long long period of time. You
can measure LT and AT with a laboratory test or just like a self test
to way that you should go as you exercise your maximum
sustainable pace and that maximum sustainable pace, whatever
heart rate you’re at during that maximum sustainable pace that
your LT and then your AT is typically about 20 beats below that.
Now, when you’re de-trained or you have a loss in fitness, a lot of
times, you can still buffer lactic acid pretty well and a lot of times,
your lactic threshold may not change too much. They’d actually
done studies (there’s an interesting study where they looked at the
effects of de-training) on responses to sub-maximal exercise. Mr.
Zeus’ study that was actually done way back in the 80’s, what they
found was that your mitochondrial enzyme activity levels and also
what’s called your lactate dehydrogenase which are 2 of the ways
that your body buffers lactic acid, those can actually stay fairly high
for as long as 4 months after you stopped training. The thing that
does decrease though pretty significantly and fairly quickly after
even just 72 hours of de-training is your VO2 max. So, what Bill is
experiencing here is more than likely, a fairly significant drop in
his VO2 max and he mentioned that he began at the 99th
percentile VO2 max for his age group. One thing to remember is
that that percentile (if you’re to go get a VO2 max test and they tell
you, “hey, you’re doing great, you’re an 80th or 90th or whatever)
most fairly active individuals (the type of people who listen to this
show or triathletes or marathoners or whatever), they’re all in the
90 – 100 percentile. It’s just like we are so far and above the
average population. No offense to Bill. It doesn’t take a lot to be in
the 99th percentile but understand that if your doctor tells you that
or if you go and test that you’re in that percentile, that doesn’t
necessarily mean you’ve got what it takes to be a super athlete. It
just means that you’re kinda kicking the butt of the general
population. Anyways though, now that I’ve completely insulted
Bill, there are ways that you can increase your VO2 max. And
that’s what I would be focusing on hard core if I were Bill would be
increasing VO2 max. So, let’s talk about some of my favorite ways
to increase VO2 max, shall we?
Brock: Yes, please.
Ben: All right. Cool. First of all, studies have shown that aerobic high
intensity intervals improve your VO2 max more than moderate
training.
[0:50:02.2]
Studies state training going at long slow distance for 30 minutes or
60 minutes at 60% or 70% does not hold a candle to intervals. And
one study that they did compared long slow distance at 70% vs.
doing 15 seconds on 15 seconds off with the 15 seconds being really
really hard and the 15 seconds off being really easy and then also 4
minutes hard and 4 minutes easy found that the best type of effort
of all those different efforts I just mentioned for increasing VO2
max, number one was 4 minutes on, 4 minutes off, such 4 minutes
really really hard followed by 4 minutes of active rest like jogging
or whatever. Second best was a shorter effort like 15 seconds on 15
seconds off. And the least effective method (no surprise here) to
increase your VO2 max would be just like steady stay training.
So, use intervals and preferably use longer intervals. I’d like to see
the intervals be longer than 2 minutes to increase VO2 max.
Nothing is gonna hold the candle to training like that but there are
other things that you can do, for example, deep diaphragmatic
breathing - big big part of your VO2max is how much oxygen you
can actually get into your lungs. That’s a significant component of
your VO2 max. So, I would be doing some breathing technique
and some breathing exercises – I love yoga for that. That’s really,
in my opinion, one of the best ways to teach yourself to breathe
properly is to just do a weekly yoga class. You can also use (and
we’ve talked about these in the show before) those power lung
trainers like if you’re driving in your car and you tend to be in
traffic a lot, you just keep one of those in your car. And those
trainers that literally provide resistance when you breathe in and
out and strengthen your inspiratory and expiratory muscles. So,
focus on your breathing – deep diaphragmatic breathing and the
strength of your inspiratory and expiratory muscles. A few
supplements that you could look into – one would be Cordyceps.
There is one cool double blind placebo-controlled study where they
took a Cordyceps herbal extract and it significantly improved the
maximum amount of oxygen that folks were able to assimilate.
Now, the caveat to this is that this study was done in older
individuals (I believe they were 70+ year-old men) but other
studies have shown that Cordyceps also increases your cellular
oxygen absorption by up to 40% and can improve your heart
functioning. It’s something that’s been used in Chinese herbal
medicine for thousands of years. There’s a lot of endurance
supplements on the market right now that include Cordyceps in
their formula. A lot of them throw rhodiola in there as well
because it falls into that same family of herbs that are purported to
improve your VO2 max. One supplement that I personally really
like made by Millenium Sports (we’ll link to it in the show notes
and also in the MyList for this episode over at the facebook page) is
Cordygen VO2 by Millenium Sports. That’s a really good one. It’s
one that I’ve used in the past prior to sprint and Olympic distance
triathlons where you’re working really hard. A couple of other
supplements that can really help with stroke volume or cardiac
output which can also have a nice effect on VO2 max would be Fish
Oil. That’s another one that you’d wanna look into if you’re vegan,
a little bit of that with flax oil (not quite as good) but I would
definitely include fish oil in the diet. And then you also may wanna
look into a supplement for helping your red blood cells to carry
oxygen. You’d wanna be careful with just a straight up iron
supplement because toxicity with those can be kinda significant if
you’re not careful but ferritin which is a crucial iron-storing
protein – that tends to be deficient in a lot of folks and there’s a
good supplement called Floradix out there that I really like for
increasing levels of ferritin for getting your iron-storing protein. A
couple other things to think about that would be altitude training
or altitude tents. If you got access to those, those actually can
increase your number of red blood cells. It also makes the red
blood cells more efficient at unloading oxygen to your tissues so,
that would be another thing to look into would be, if you got access
to altitude tents or even just going every once in a while and
training in a high area, that can help out with your VO2 max. And
then, last thing would just be blood doping. You could call up your
friendly neighborhood illegal performance enhancing pharmacy
and get your hands on some erythropoietin or some epo to get
yourselves some new red blood cells growing or you could just like
donate your blood and freeze it and then concentrate the red blood
cells with the centrifuge and inject them back into your body.
Brock: That’s a great idea. Why don’t people do that? That’s fantastic!
Ben: I have no clue why people don’t do that more. Anyways, that
would be an idea as well though. Be careful there. Probably people
are gonna shout at us. I’m kidding.
[0:55:13.1]
Brock: Yeah. We’re joking.
Ben: Yeah. The only thing I’m joking about was that last thing. All the
other stuff actually works pretty good.
Brock: Well then, the last thing works pretty well too. Just google Lance
Armstrong and you’ll know why we’re joking.
Ben: Yeah. There was a cool study that showed use of an echinacea
supplement at about (if you get your hands on echinacea tincture
which is like the oil extract of echinacea) 1.5 ml of that per day can
actually boost your erythropoietin pretty significantly too.
Brock: You’re gonna try that out, weren’t you?
Ben: I did. I went through a whole bunch of it and I didn’t notice
anything at all but I wasn’t measuring my EPO levels. I wasn’t
actually going to the lab measuring them. I did notice though, I
really like the way it made me feel. It’s just kinda interesting. It
almost gave me a little bit of almost like a brain buzz after I’d used
the stuff. I ran out a couple of weeks ago but I haven’t noticed a
drop in my performance so, there you go. But the studies show
…maybe my EPO’s already tapped out, who knows-from all that
blood doping I do).
Brock: Now, Bill, did you have that final little sort of afterthought
question about the percentage of the body fat that you would look
for during taper week? Do you have any thoughts for that?
Ben: I’ve no clue. I’m so bad at measuring my body fat. I’ll tell you
what I do. I pinch a little bit of fat that’s right above your hipbone
kind of in between your belly button and your hipbone. If I pinch
that and I can only get a little bit, I know I’m doing a good job and
I’m ready to race. And if I can pinch and I get a whole bunch of fat,
then I know that I’m quite doing a good job. That sounds silly but
that’s literally all I do.
Brock: I’m pinching like crazy right now.
Ben: I can tell you when I was body building, I was at 2.5-3% body fat
and felt like crap for anything aerobic or anything high intensity
and from the few times that I’ve measured myself during the year,
I think I’m around 7-8% body fat now and I feel way way better so,
there you go. Less is not better.
Brock: There you go. Okay, let’s move on to a question from Kayla and I
actually have to do some reading. How exciting! Kayla says, “I am
5’3” and 116 lb female who has been going to the gym for the past 6
months attempting to gain muscle. I’ve made good progress so far.
However, I recently started experiencing pain in both of my
forearms. I saw my doctor who diagnosed me with forearm shin
splints (How does like that sink in – forearm shin splints?) and
have been taking …
Ben: When you say forearm, you mean f-o-r-e arm.
Brock: Yes. She has that forearms coming out of her shins so,
Ben: That’d be more of like a churn elbow radiation issue.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Okay. All right.
Brock: So, she says she’s been taking the naproxen and resting her arms.
“I’ve been instructed to not lift weights for a minimum of 2 weeks,
probably more, depending on how my arms heal.” She says, “I’m
worried about losing all the muscle I’ve worked so hard for.
Without the use of my forearms, I can’t seem to work my bi’s tri’s,
shoulders and back. Do you have any suggestions for keeping my
upper body in shape and of course, healing faster?”
Ben: Bomber. Yeah, forearm shin splints are actually...if you look at a
typical skeleton, you’ve got your shin splints that you can get down
in your tibia and fibula which is basically inflammation of that.
That’s syndesmosis – it’s called between your tibia and your fibula
but I mean you’ve got your own and your radius up in your upper
arm and those 2 bones similarly have some connective tissue in
between them that can get inflamed when you’re overusing your
forearm muscles. And it can feel like shin splints the same way as
you get shin splints in your legs. It’s pretty common if you’re using
your wrist a lot doing a lot of curls, a lot of extensions, a lot of
weight lifting. It’s just like micro trauma to the muscular
attachments that attach the connective tissue to the bone. You’ve
got what’s called this periosteum that covers the bone and that
stuff gets inflamed from micro trauma. First of all, make sure that
you’re doing the right stuff to get rid of this. Don’t just rest, also do
the same type of stuff you do the shin splints – free some dixie
cups in the freezer and roll some ice up and down the arms 5-10
minutes few times a day. You can use a compression bandage to
reduce the swelling or even use some of this kinesio tape. That
kind lifts some of the skin away from the surface of the body and
can assist with reducing swelling as well. Make sure you get some
good natural anti inflammatories like a high dose curcumin extract
or phenocane is another good one as my recommended alternative
to ibuprofen to help with pain, with inflammation.
[1:00:07.1]
Sports massage helps a ton with this stuff in terms of relaxing all of
those tight muscles and breaking down adhesions, breaking out
scar tissue. I’m a big big fan of that too for shin splints or for these
forearm splints. But as far as stuff you could do, like how you
could literally work your upper body without using your forearms,
first thing that you gotta realize is that in the same way that if you
work your right side of your body, you can strengthen your left side
or vice versa. It’s called the lateral training effect. So, if you broke
your right arm, you could still strengthen the right side of your
body by doing weights with your left arm. Same thing happens
between upper body and lower body so you can still do squats, you
can still do leg press, you can do leg extension, leg curl, you can do
lunges but instead of holding weights when you do the lunges, you
could have like a barbell on your back or dumbbells up on your
shoulders and you’re still gonna get a really really good core and
upper body training effect by working your legs. So, I would do
that. A lot of gyms, it’s mostly like Crossfit gyms or sports
performance studios that have sleds but sled pushing, actually you
don’t use your arms that much. You’re more using your shoulders,
your chest, your torso and your legs if you’re doing sled pushing so
that’s another option – to do sled pushes. As far as direct upper
body work, you could do things like any planking activity. It really
isn’t gonna put a ton of repetitive motion stress on your forearms
so you could do front planks, side planks, you could even do like
the yoga forearm stance. They’re called the forearm stance. It’s
sounds like you pull out the stress in your forearms but really most
of the stress is on your neck, your head, in your core. You could do
the machine at the gym where you’re doing lat extension with your
shoulders except you’re literally moving the weight with your
humerus – with your upper arm bone, not with your lower arms
that shoulder lat extension exercise at work, you could use ab curl
machines at the gym. Again, I’m not a huge fan of machines but
when you’re injured, sometimes, that can come in handy to isolate
the joint where you’re literally like sitting in a chair and
contracting your abs and like almost going through a bowing
motion or an abdominal flexion motion and never turning back to
the starting position. I’ve got this contraption at my house. It’s
called the FIT10. I think I’ve mentioned it before in the show. You
can attach that to a door and do really really kick butt standing ab
curls and that’s pretty cool for core work as well. So just use the
FIT10 for something like that. Any of that stuff – planking, ab curl
machine, shoulder lat extension machine, doing planks to forearm
stance, then working your legs, you could easily keep yourself in
kick butt shape for a couple of weeks doing that kind of stuff.
Granted your guns may decrease in size just slightly but just don’t
worry, you’re welcome to the gun show T-shirt. It should be okay
as far as that goes. As far as cardio, a lot of times, swimming, in
cases like this, zero stress in the forearms, you can still get yourself
looking like Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte or I guess since you’re
female, Kayla, maybe Amanda Byrd and just use swimming which
can actually be easy on the forearms. If your forearms and it really
hurt, you’re using them too much, close your hands into fists and
that tends to make use a little bit more of your upper arm and your
lats and your shoulders wherein you open your hands, a lot of
times, you can tend to use your forearms a little bit more when
you’re swimming. That’s a good swim drill actually, just swim with
fists. It’s also a good way to look like you’re drowning.
Brock: Yeah. Good way to have your upper body sink.
Ben: And then, when you start back into things maybe use yourself anew.
Grab some of those weight lifting gloves that have the wrist wrap-
arounds that kinda do some of the grip work for you and that’ll help
you get back into things that help overworking your arms right
when you get back in. And those are just basically weight lifting
gloves with wrist wrap-arounds. Those work well also. Hopefully
that stuff helps you and best of luck getting your guns back.
Brock: Yeah. Definitely, it’ll steer you clear of the kettle bells.
Ben: Yeah. I wouldn’t be doing many kettle bells or dumbbell curls.
Brock: All right. Well, let’s move on to our final question that comes from
Richard and Richard says, “I have been looking into trying out a
hyperbaric treatment for no other reason than just my well-being
and recovery. I like the idea of getting higher oxygen levels to help
cell repair and general healing. I’m a 25-year-old male who’s been
known to over train just due to the fact that I feel like I can I keep
going. Can hyperbaric chamber sessions allow me to train harder
and more often?” Richard, are you looking for a reason to over
train?
[1:05:19.7]
Ben: I wanna buy one of these for my house. You can get them for 10-15
thousand dollars if you got a lot of good nice tax return but these
huge chambers and this is way different than the exercise with the
oxygen therapy we talked about a few weeks ago where you’ve got
this pretty little oxygen mask that you’re wearing with oxygen
container and you’re breathing in and out while you’re standing on
a vibration platform or running on a treadmill. The hyperbaric
oxygen therapy (this is the hardcore stuff) – these are like fall on
chambers that can put multiple pounds of pressure per square inch
of your skin of just saturated oxygen. And the idea…
Brock: Is this what Michael Jackson slept in?
Ben: I have no clue. Anyways, the idea is this is supposed to push
oxygen deep below your skin surface and super saturate your
muscles or whatever without you actually having to breathe hard
and exercise. You can find hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers in
different recovery units in hospitals and stuff like that and there is
some evidence that they may help people who are healing from
injuries, have a little bit more speedy resumption of activity. Try
one. I’ll put a link in the show notes. You can find the directory of
hyperbaric oxygen providers in the US and just go pay the lying
chamber for a little while. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes if you
wanna do that. But it is different than pressurized air. So, the idea
is that its pressurization inside this vessel and it can increase both
the content of the oxygen as well as, unfortunately, the content of
nitrogen that is around you as you’re lying in this chamber. So,
increasing the content of oxygen is the area that most people focus
on in terms of its potential effects for improving the respiration of
your mitochondria or the speed with which your muscles can heal.
The unfortunate part is that when you increase the partial pressure
of air inside the chamber, you’re increasing the partial pressure of
all gasses in that chamber and since none of them are really gonna
push out 100% oxygen, if you’re increasing the partial pressure of
nitrogen, that can actually aggravate inflammation especially in the
lungs and increased nitrogen can affect your brain tissue. It’s
something you wanna be careful with. I would make sure that
you’re being easy on the pressurized air if you’re using one of these
hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers and that’s something you’d
wanna be careful with just the effect of nitrogen balance on your
brain especially if you ever had a headache and you’re something
like that. So be careful with these things. They do have their risks
but there is a lot of primarily anecdotal evidence that they may
really really help with injury repair and they may help with muscle
repair. However, a lot of it is anecdotal or experimental and there
was a recent study in the Journal on Strength and Conditioning
Research. Literally, just this past month, they looked at the acute
and chronic effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy on blood
circulation of human muscle and tendon tissue and interestingly,
they found out that oxygen saturation of the muscle didn’t increase
at all during or after 6 weeks of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
However, there actually was an effect on the tendon and the oxygen
concentration at the tendon level did increase which suggests that
while this may not be all that hot for increasing your recovery after
you’ve done a hard weight lifting session or something like that, if
you strained or sprained the tendon or you’ve got a lot of connective
tissue issues with your tendons, it may actually help with that in
terms of increasing blood flow and increasing oxygen delivery to
actual tendons. But as far as actual experimental evidence that it
helps with muscle recovery or that even helps with sport
performance, all that is pretty anecdotal and you do wanna be
careful with the amount of pressure that you use on these things
just because of the nitrogen component.
Brock: I’ve never heard of using it for anything athletic before.
Ben: Yeah. And you could go to the PubMed website and look at some of
the studies. I’ll put a link to that recent study on the acute and
chronic effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It’s one of those
things wherein this is just fringe stuff. If I had the chance to use the
chamber, I’d probably try it out and see how I feel but I’d be really
really careful in terms of the amount of pressure that’s used. I
believe they measure pressure called ATA units and what I was
looking at online was once you exceed what’s called 1.5 ATA units,
that’s when the level of nitrogen comes fairly significant as far as
the partial pressure.
[1:10:40.2]
So, I would be careful with the amount of ATA units. Again, I’m not
an expert on hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Maybe a listener is and
they can leave a comment on the show notes but it’s one of those
things where you just wanna be careful on something like this and
understand that there may be risks as well.
Brock: Cool! Well, that does it for today’s list of questions and I just wanna
let everybody know if you do have a question for the podcast, you
can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and you just click on the little
tab on the right hand side of the page and you can record an audio
message right there. It’s really simple or you can call 1-877-
2099439 or you can skype to PacifiFfit or you can scroll down to the
bottom of the page again at bengreenfieldfitness.com and fill out
the Ask Ben form. Whew!
Ben: Yeah and we do get some weird questions that we don’t
_____[1:11:32.5] show. We get some people calling in who I think
don’t realize that speakers are on or something but yeah, there are
some funky stuff out there.
Brock: We’ve heard some weird conversations in what sounds like
somebody’s kitchen. So, yeah, be deliberate when you’re recording
your question.
Ben: Don’t take your laptop in the bathroom. You don’t wanna subject
Brock and I to that. We’ll put links to everything we talked about in
the show notes to Episode #216 at bengreenfieldfitness.com and
also we’ll put links to any of the resources that we mentioned during
this call from supplements for VO2 max enhancements to books
that I recommended about thyroid, etc. at the MyList for this
episode which you can access over at facebook.com/bgfitness and
those are pretty fun in terms of being able to check out some of the
stuff that we talked about as well. So, until next time and check out
audiblepodcast.com/ben for Brock’s Michael Paulin book.
Brock: In Defense of Food.
Ben: In Defense of Food and eating plants and animals that are real, not
fake. All right, what’s in this thing? Thanks for listening.
For personal nutrition, fitness or triathlon consulting, supplements, books or
DVD’s from Ben Greenfield, please visit Pacific Elite Fitness at
http://www.pacificfit.net