Episode #319 – Full Transcript

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Podcast #319 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2015/06/319-hypoxia-for-fat-loss-how-to-fix-golfers-elbow-or-climbers-elbow-creatine-water-retention/

[0:00:00]  

Introduction: In this episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast:  Hypoxia For Fat Loss, How To Fix Golfer’s Elbow or Climber’s Elbow, How To Keep From Retaining Water With Creatine, Can Your Fascia Store Toxins, Urinary Testing For Hormones and much more!

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast.  We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain, and hormone optimization.  So whether you’re an Ironman tri-athlete, or you’re just wanna shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill, cutting edge content from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Brock:  Welcome back, Ben!

Ben:  Feels good to be back, dude.  We’ve had a – we’ve almost had a complete withdrawal of any of our formal Q & A episodes whatsoever for like a month.

Brock:  I know.  I started to get emails: “Are you okay?”, “Is everything alright?”

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  “What happened?”, “Did you guys break up?”

Ben:  Hmm, we did and I got some withdrawal headaches.  But…

Brock:  *chuckles*

Ben:  it’s all good now!

Brock:  I just got – I got indigestion and diarrhea.  Is that from the same thing?

Ben:  Mmm.  No, that’s probably the fact that since we’re not talking, your diet has likely slipped.

Brock:  That’s true.

Ben:  You don’t have me there to hold due accountable on podcast.

Brock:  I went straight to McDonald’s.

Ben:  Mmm, yeah.  McDonald’s sprinkled with gluten powder.

Brock:  Yes, extra gluten.

Ben:  Extra.  So, can you do get McDonald’s by the way? Can you tell them…

Brock:  Order extra gluten?  Oh yeah!

Ben:  Gluten-size you?

Brock:  Super gluten.

Ben:  Hmmm.  Hey, so one thing I’ve been doing, Brock, that I haven’t had the chance to tell you much about is – I got a brand new toy in my garage.

Brock:  Hmmm!

Ben:  Hmmm.

Brock:  A new motorbike!

Ben:  I actually got two new toys: one…

Brock:  Corvette?

Ben:  Not gonna talk about ‘cause I’m working on article about it, but the other is an inclined treadmill.  Have you ever seen an inclined treadmill?  Like the one that goes up to like 40%?

Brock:  Oh, okay.  So it’s not stuck in incline, it just has a larger range of motion?

Ben:  Oh, thank God it’s not stuck in incline, ‘cause if you’ve ever been in incline at 40%, it is nuts!  So…

Brock:  I can’t even imagine 40% like most of them go to like 12.

Ben:  If I am at 2.0 miles per hour and 40%, it feels close to like a – like an all out phase on a treadmill.  It’s not…

Brock:  So you’ll like pushing on your knees with your hands like that sort of hiking kind a drop incline?

Ben:  Practically, practically.  So I’ve been doing everything from putting on a heavy backpack, and doing like uphill walking to doing like yesterday’s session was eight minutes at 20%, eight minutes at 30%, eight minutes at 40% then back down to thirty, then back down to 20.  And there’s two reasons I’m doing this: first, as I mentioned in the few podcast episodes I have a coach now who’s prescribing me training sessions…

Brock:  Who’s sadistic.

Ben:  Who is sadistic.  And then the other reason is that the cool thing about an incline treadmill is that you get all the benefits of going up without any of the joint, and the potential for tissue damage and over-train that happens when you get the pounding of going down.  So you pretty much have like this never ending mountain in your garage.  So I got the NordicTrack X11 incline trainer so for any of you other psycho masochistic hill climbing surpees out there, check it out.  It’s kinda cool.

Brock:  I hear the X11A comes with a puke bucket that you can hang from the front it.

Ben:  Nice.

News Flashes:

Brock:  In between dry heaving off the edge of his incline treadmill, Ben’s been tweeting out all kinds of stuff like normal at Twitter.com/BenGreenfield and now we’re gonna talk about all those cool things.

Ben:  All of those cool things.  So one thing I’ve been doing quite a bit of when I’m not walking on treadmill is nature walks, and I have made it a goal to actually learn every plant that’s on my property.  And you don’t have to necessarily…

Brock:  Like know them by name?  Like, “Hey Bob! Hey Susan!”

Ben:  Yeah, exactly.

Brock:  “Good morning, Ben!”

Ben:  *chuckles*

Brock:  “That’s quite neighborly of you.”

Ben:  Their usage, their edible characteristics, their medicinal characteristics, what you can do with the root, what you can do with the leaves, what you can do with the stems.  And I’ve been making my kids a part of this where we’ll walk out and we’ll find plants that we can identify.

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And one thing that I ran into was that it’s a real pain to actually use like a reverse Google image search or even – you know, even any of these apps out there like Plants Snap or Google Goggles like none of them seem to work all that well because their purely….

Brock:  Google Goggles.

Ben:  They’re automated.  Google Goggles is actually an app that you can use if you google Google, I got goggles.  You’ll find it.

Brock:  *laughing*

Ben:  Say that ten times fast.

Brock:  I know.

Ben:  So anyways, what I have been using is this app and I tweeted out about this.  It’s called the FlowerChecker App and it’s a free app that allows you to identify plants, but the unique part about it is there’s a live botanist or a team of live botanist – I highly doubt it’s just one single live botanist although it may be just a morbidly obese…

Brock:  Super overworked dude.

Ben:  …botanist who sits on the couch and is overworked.  But what they do is they review within twenty four hours the photos of the leaves, the stem, the plant, etc.  You have your location settings turned on when you upload it so it’ll also identifies where you are, and then they give you the plant, they give you the Wikipedia page for the plant as well as more links to find out interesting things about the plants where you’re at.  So I have identified every single day, I have indentified the plants.  Some of the cool ones that are around me is, one is yarrow which you can use very similarly to like mint or chamomile.  Another one that I have is wormwood or absinthe which you can use for everything from mind-altering drinks to kind of a mild detox.  I’ve got mullein and Oregon grape and one called ocean spray which you can actually use – you can use the sticks to make things like arrows because their extremely, extremely straight and rigid.  All sorts of plants you know, Canadian ______ [0:07:04.6], and I found out that you kinda like shave the edges off of that and eat it almost like celery as a water source and you can eat the little purple floweret.  You can cook them up like artichokes you know; it’s very, very cool.  It’s a great way to get in touch with nature, and it’s good way to do without wasting all your time like taking a picture, and then holding it up in some like field guide with that they would’ve done it back in the day before the internet.  But if the Lewis and Clark Expedition had Flower Checker, probably few of them would’ve died or they would have at least had less of propensity to eat one another.  So there’s that.  We’re the donor party.

Brock:  *chuckles*

Ben:  So, another thing that I tweeted out was a new study about gluten intolerance and the fact that there is… there’s an enzyme, it’s derived from something called aspergillus niger.  And what it does is – it digest gluten in the stomach of what they describe as healthy volunteers, and these healthy volunteers were actually given a meal that contain about four grams of gluten which is a pretty significant portion of gluten and what they found was that when the gluten was accompanied by this unique new gluten digesting enzyme, that there were no deleterious GI effects and these folks were able to completely digest the gluten, you know, the storage protein that’s present in things like wheat and barley and rye.  And it was able to take what would normally be a gluten peptide that is resistant to digestion and causes all the things like inflammation, bloating and a lot of the things that people who are gluten intolerant associate with gluten consumption and was able to allow these folks to actually digest the gluten.  So…

Brock:  Hmm.  Now I can finally go back to McDonald’s and get my super gluten meal.

Ben:  That’s right.  Wonder bread is back in business.

Brock:  Hooray!

Ben:  No reason to avoid gluten because we now have…

Brock:  Just for we always want it.

Ben:  …to biohack gluten.  And interestingly, there were no other deleterious GI effects, no explosive diarrhea or anything else that seem to occur at least in during the length of time of the study.   I’m not quite sure of any long term studies that have been done on the use of these enzymes that efficiently degrade its gluten.  But the abbreviation for the enzyme if you wanna look this up on Amazon or wherever else you tend to you know, your local friendly supplement provider, it’s A-N-P-E-P which stands for aspergillus niger prolyl endoprotease.

Brock:  *curse word*

Ben:  I will… and I found some capsules etc. of these gluten digesting enzymes on Amazon and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes if you go to the bengreenfieldfitness.com/319.

[0:10:04.4]

If you want to experiment with this, maybe have a meal comprised of bread, beer – what else?

Brock:  Pasta.

Ben:  Maybe some soy sauce, some pasta – anything else that you’ve been avoiding because of its gluten content, knock yourself out, go to town, have a gluten party.  So that was actually an interesting study.

Brock:  So they didn’t mention anything about the cognitive effects of eating gluten they’re just talking sheerly or specifically about gut issues.

Ben:  Ah.  Watson, keen observation.

Brock:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  Yes, gluten can have a neurotoxic effects that are completely separate from any type of a gastro-intestinal effect.  This is why a lot of times people who use gluten or taken gluten who happen to have an intolerance to it will have problems with everything from brain fog to stuttering, to not being able to grab words you know, the right words that they need when and this is because of the neurotoxicity.  And you are absolutely correct, the enzyme does not *clears throat* excuse me…

Brock:  Excuse you.

Ben:  …does not diminish the neurotoxic effect, so there is that.  But you know, let’s say you’re whatever, you know you got to a party, you have a couple of beers and maybe in a little ziplock bag in your pocket, you have a couple of gluten digesting enzymes to help you out a little bit so, there’s that.

Brock:  Yes.  Nice.

Ben:  So another thing that I tweeted out, the last study that I wanted to mention was one that… that appeared in Clinical Physiology and Functional Imaging.  Odd journal for this one to appear in but it looked into the effects of exercise training under hypoxia.  And what they actually found was that when you exercise in the state of hypoxia – meaning low oxygen availability – which would be everything from the use of an altitude chamber, to one of these like resistant training masks, to like hypoxic underwater training sessions.  It actually triggers a release of adiponectin.  Adiponectin is a hormone mobilizes fats specifically from adipose tissue and allows you to burn those fatty acids for energy.  And what they found was that circulating adiponectin levels significantly increased when exercise was performed under hypoxic conditions, and in this case it was aquatic exercise.  So pool-based exercise like swimming and aquarobics with a little dorky foam dumbbells – that type of thing.

Brock:  *chuckles*

Ben:  Ultimately though, you know hypoxia and hypoxic training sessions is something that I do quite a bit of you know, at least a couple of times a week I’m in the pool going back and forth underwater while holding my breath.  Then actually on the recent trip to Arizona, I with a group of three other guys wound up doing a couple sessions like this where we would do things like drag dumbbells underneath the water back and forth through the pool holding our breath.  And not only it’s the fantastic workout for your lungs, it’s great for stress resilience and focus, but it turns out it also burns more fat, too!  So I’ll link to that in these other studies if you want to peruse them over in the show notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/319.  And there’s one last thing I wanted to mention since it’s “Ben” a little while since we’ve had a podcast.  I had a two post that kinda went viral that if you’re listening to this episode and you haven’t had a chance to check out yet, you may want to check out and they both involve what would be considered sin substances.  So one post was on how to get all of the effects of weed from a 100% healthy and non-addictive alternative to weed called cannabidiol and quite a monster of a post going all…

Brock:  Yeah.  Oh man, it took me days to get through that thing.

Ben:  …all the effects of CBD but one that send to your Kindle or the Check Out because it’s certainly something I’m using quite a bit of these days you know, you don’t get some of the potential for some of the gray matter damage and the things like that that can occur with weed, with edibles, with things that contain THC and you get all the anti-anxiety and anti-inflammatory effects when you use this CBD component.  So…

Brock:  And also the anti-going-to-jail.

Ben:  And the anti-going-to-jail where you at plus kids can use it completely safely as well which is nice.  And then the other one was on booze and I’m now drinking a wine that is lower in sugar and the same in alcohol, that’s a must for me.  I refuse to drink any wine that has a lower than normal amount of alcohol in it.  But this wine also has enhanced amounts of flavonols and polyphenols and resveratrols and the active anti-oxidant components in wine.  It’s called the FitVine wine, but I wrote the article not just on this FitVine wine but on wine in general and what kind of things to look for on wine, how to control like this the sulphite and the amine-based headaches you know, some little biohacks – how to biohack your wine and all sorts of interesting things like that when it comes to booze and specifically wine.

 [0:15:16.2]

So I’ll link to both of those articles as well on the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/319 so now you can go and enjoy your weed and your booze.

Brock:  Paaarty!

Special Announcements:

Ben:  Well Brock, this podcast is brought to you by non-other than Audible.

Brock:  I love Audible.

Ben:  I love Audible too.  If you’re listening in, you can go to AudiblePodcast.com/ben.  And when you go to AudiblePodcast.com/ben, you can get any audio book that you want free with the 30-day trial unless you’re already an Audible member in which case you’re screwed.  Already use your free book so you can’t do it multiple times unless you have multiple email addresses ‘cause I’ve got like twenty different email addresses that I’ll occasionally use to like sign up for extra Netflix accounts, ‘cause you can just keep on signing up for those free whatever you do in Netflix account over and oh, you need multiple credit cards, too.  But as long as you’ve got multiple email addresses and multiple credit cards, you did kinda gain the system.

Brock:  You can save eight bucks!

Ben:  Anyways though, I am reading a book right now on Kindle that is pretty amazing and of course, I’m reading and I’m not listening to it but I would listen to it if I were to go get a book on Audible.  This one is written by Christopher McDougall.  You know Christopher McDougall is?

Brock:  He’s the guy who wrote “Born to Run”, right?

Ben:  Yep, he wrote “Born to Run” and this book…

Brock:  Isn’t that McDougall?

Ben:  so far in my opinion, maybe it’s just because I’ve gotten dis-infatuated with the whole like obsession with barefoot running.  This book is called “Natural Born Heroes” and…

Brock:  Oh! About the Cretan runner?

Ben:  Yeah.  I think it’s…

Brock:  Oh yeah!

Ben:  better than “Born to Run”.  The subtitles…

Brock:  The Cretan’s are badasses.

Ben:  Yeah, the subtitles “How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance”, and essentially it goes into how this group of resistance fighters during World War II on island of Crete actually resisted the Nazis, held back the Germans and potentially changed the entire course of the wars specifically in terms of the Germans progressed towards Russia by using things like natural movement, endurance principles specifically focused on like fat-burning and metabolic efficiency, and efficient nutrition principles.  And it’s amazing; it’s just goes into how we as modern day athletes can hone these ancient skills but the book itself you know, it covers this group of super athletes that I never knew existed.  And it’s pretty amazing how they basically evade Nazi pursuers for months and months on the tiny island of Crete using like this classical Greek heroism combined with amazing physical fitness principles, so…

Brock:  It’s like the Spartans still existed on the isle of Crete in the 1930s.

Ben:  That’s the perfect description.

Brock:  Super cool.

Ben:  Well-worth checking.  It’s called ‘Natural Born Heroes’ and if you wanna listen to it, you can go to AudiblePodcast.com/ben.  Great one to listen to during your next – I don’t know – run through the mountains or the next time you’re evading the Nazis, so check it out: AudiblePodcast.com/ben.  As far as any other special announcements, there’s really not a whole lot to go over.  The Quarterly Box launched and is ready and you can still get it on the next Quarterly.

Brock:  Are the first one go out?

Ben:  Yeah, the first one – the first one is out handpicked, box jam-packed with fitness gear and supplements, and nutrients and little biohacks, and it’s a fun little deal you know, it’s like Christmas once every three months.  But you can get in on that at bengreenfieldfitness.com/quarterly and get a bunch of crap from me sends straight to your front door along with little letter about how to use it all.  I thought the funniest part was actually writing the letter to everyone telling them how to use what I was sending them.  That was kinda the cool part.  And then also, for any of you who are in Northern or Southern Idaho the next couple of weeks, look for me at the – at the Train to Hunt Competition.  I will be there competing with my bow and everything from the meat pack to the obstacle course, to see whether or not I can hang with some of the fittest hunters in America.  So, you can get all the details on that over at traintohunt.com but that’s where my journeys are taking me during June in case you happen to be in Kellogg or Tamarack.  Kellogg, Idaho or Tamarack, Idaho where I’ll be competing…

Brock:  The throbbing metropolis of Tamarack.

Ben:  Throbbing metropolis.  We gotta be careful how we use the word ‘throbbing’ but in this case it’s quite appropriate.

[0:20:05.6]

So again you can check all that out over at bengreenfieldsfitness.com/319.  And I don’t know, Brock.  What do you think?  Shall we answer some questions?

Brock:  Yes, please.

Did you know that Ben Greenfield personally mentors trainers, coaches, physicians and nutritionists from around the globe? From business building tips to advanced team and performance and health concepts.  It’s all part of a product mastermind called The Superhuman Coach Network.  When you join, you get instant access to monthly workshops with Ben, a Q&A forum, over 40 hours of cutting-edge audio and video education, and much more.  Check it out today, and become one of the world’s leading health and fitness experts at superhumancoach.com/podcast.

Listener Q & A:

Eric:  Hey Ben, Eric here.  I developed soreness on my – inside my elbow.  Not tennis elbow but I guess they call it golfer’s elbow and I believe it is from kettlebell cleaning.  I was wondering what you recommend to help heal this up, my right arm but I believe it’s from the kettlebell clean as you’re coming up it feels like that muscle it’s not going away, it’s a slight pain but I never had tennis elbow but now I have golfer’s elbow.  So, any tips on how to get better?  Thanks!

Ben:  Well you may hear a dog barking in the background there, Brock.  That’s my sister-in-law’s dog that we’re watching.

Brock:  If my ears don’t mistake me, it sounds like a fat dachshund.

Ben:  Yes, it’s a fat, little wiener dog that frankly I’m not a huge fan of, and I would love to just like eat it for dinner.  I hope she doesn’t listen into this podcast but the dog is not among my favorites.  I like big, majestic wolf-like dogs, not little – not little dogs that have been bred to fit into purses.  So, but that’s just me.  Anyways though, to turn to Eric’s question about the elbow, you know this is actually a problem that I‘ve been running into quite a bit with folks who are doing like obstacle racing, Spartan racing, American ninja warrior style stuff, cross fit with all the pull-ups – you get pain and you get pain not in the outside of your elbow where folks would traditionally get pain associated with like tennis elbow what’s also called lateral epicondylitis.  But you instead get it on the medial, on the inside of the elbow and it’s basically a tendinosis of the medial epicondyle of the elbow.

Brock:  Let’s get the placement.  So if I’m standing there with my hands turned, so my palms are facing forward.

Ben:  Yeah, it’s on the inside.

Brock:  The part closest to my rib this is where the pain is.

Ben:  Yep, exactly on the inside not the outside of the elbow.  So it’s also refer to as climber’s elbow, sometimes it’s called pitcher’s elbow, it’s this case – in Eric’s case…

Brock:  Kettlebell elbow?

Ben:  Kettlebell elbow.  Golfer’s elbow of course like I mentioned.  And it’s actually – it’s associated with anything where you are gripping and pulling simultaneously, and so you see a lot in grip intensive sports.  And it’s actually something that’s very difficult to manage and to get rid of.  And the reason that it’s so much more difficult that even like a lateral epicondylitis where like a tennis elbow to get rid of, is because it’s an area where there’s a little less blood flow.  And it’s also an area that tends to be aggravated quite a bit by activities that we commonly do in our day to day lives these days specifically texting and typing causes these little tendons that run over that medial epicondyle to stay inflamed.  And it can be really, really tough you know, normally you’ll see all of the recommendations that you tend to see for injuries out there recommended to manage this like you know, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or even natural anti-inflammatories like you know: curcumin or fish oil, you’ll see heat recommended, you’ll see ice recommended, you’ll see like this elbow’s straps or counter-force braces that actually work really, really well for tennis elbow – these little braces that you wear above the elbow.  They don’t work that well for like a golfer’s elbow even like a full on sleeve over the elbow or like this… you know like the kinesio tape that folks would tape themselves up with?

Brock:  Oh yeah.

Ben:  A lot of times, none of this stuff works for like a golfer’s elbow or climber’s elbow and it can be very, very frustrating and painful ‘cause every time you pull or you grip it, it just hurts.  So I’ve had this injury before.  I’ve gotten rid of it and I’ve walked a few people through it and what I recommend is the following:

[0:25:03.3]

First of all, you gotta do some really intensive like forearm and deep tissue work and it can be hard.  If you’ve ever tried to like foam roll your arm, it’s pretty hard to do.

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  It’s also pretty hard to use like a lacrosse ball on your arm you know, like the ‘Becoming a Supple Leopard’ book would go into like there’s not a lot for like the elbow and the forearm there.  But what you can do is you can pin your arm between two surfaces that allow you to almost like roll it as it’s pinned and there’s a device out there that is specifically designed for climbers, for golfer’s, for grippers, for typists, for people who do things that aggravate that middle epicondyle – it’s called the arm aid, the ArmAid and it’s like…

Brock:  You’ve had a video about that, don’t you?

Ben:  This giant claw.  Yeah, ‘cause I owned one and I’ve used it just because I’ve been doing so much more climbing for like Spartan racing and stuff like that.  And also, I do a lot of gripping now with the bows, shooting the bows.

Brock:  Oh yeah, I bet.

Ben:  And then of course, I’m also typing a lot and so it’s weird, it’s ugly ahead on me a few times and I use this ArmAid and just use it the same way as I would with foam rollers, there’s deep tissue work and if you have this as a chronic condition – this medial epicondylitis or this inflammation in your elbow, you would wanna do this every day the same way as you’d foam roll say like, you’re IT band if you had IT band Friction Syndrome you’d wanna work that deep tissue every single day.  So it’s called the ArmAid, so that’s number one.  Number two is I went through a bunch of the different books and e-books and online manuals and Youtube videos that are out there for golfer’s elbow and for climber’s elbow.  And there was one that I found that’s like this systematic thing that you do every day.  It involves like holding on to a wooden dowel or you can even use like a hammer just ‘cause it has a little weight on the end of it and a handle that you hold on to.  You can use nothing and just go through the rotation but it involves a series of rotations that you do with both your elbow bent and your elbows straight.  Along with the series of resisted hand opening exercises where you like use a rubber band that’s wrapped around your hand, and you’ll open your hand and extend and then close it and open it and close it almost like grip training.  And this thing when I went through that program combined with daily deep tissue work using the ArmAid, I got rid of this elbow pain almost right away after doing everything from like prolotherapy and platelet-rich plasma injections and you know…

Brock:  Wow.

Ben:  …the anti-inflammatories, and topical anti-inflammatories, and the ice and the heat and the electro stem and the vibration and the cold laser and nothing held the candle to just using the ArmAid and then going through this program it’s called golfer’s elbow cure.  Super cheesy program, it’s like this little e-book with crappy greeny photos and like, it’s you know it’s one of those like online books that’s all like hyped up with the sales page and everything, but it actually works.  So that is – is the next thing that I’d recommend, that’s number two.

Brock:  Alright.

Ben:  And then number three, if you don’t want this problem to come back and you like climb a lot, or you golf a lot and you get pain on the inside of your elbow, you have to make sure that you’re typing, if you use a computer that most of your typing is done now with the elbows bent but with the elbows more extended than bent.  Which means if your desk or your work station sets you up in a position where your elbows are bent as you’re typing, every time your little fingers move, what happens is all the tendons rub over that inner and outer elbow.  Whereas if your arm is extended, you get a lot less of that type of movement – that type of rubbing over the boney condyles in the elbow.  So essentially what you wanna do is get yourself in a position where your arms are kind of extended as you’re typing.  Now the catch-22 is that sometimes there can be like a vision or an eyesight issue like if you have poor vision or poor eyesight, by typing with your arms more extended, that by definition means your screen’s gonna be farther away from you so that can throw some people for a loop and I don’t know, get by focals or something like that or…

Brock:  Or big telescopes.

Ben:  Or bigger monitor.  Yeah, but basically you want to avoid typing with the elbows really bent or hunched over so you would want to – have you ever typed like on an airplane with your computer on a tray in front of you?

Brock:  Yeah, that’s basically at your belly button?

Ben:  That is the exact opposite of the position you’d wanna be in when typing.  So you wanna tweak your work station or tweak your typing set-up so your arms are extended as you type.  So those are the three things I would do: the ArmAid, I would use this little e-book and I’ll link to it in the show notes called the ‘Golfer’s Elbow Cure’ and then I would make sure that I adjust any type of typing biomechanics.  And you can definitely get rid of the soreness but it’s a tough one, it’s one of the tougher injuries kinda like IT band syndrome – it’s one of the tougher injuries to get rid of.

[0:30:06.4]

Brock:  Do you think Eric might be doing something wrong or some weird techniques with this kettlebell cleans that might be causing the problem?

Ben:  It’s possible but honestly a lot of times what happens is you get this inflammation, right? And the inflammation could be from typing, it could be from gripping, it could be from over-training, it could be from lack of deep tissue work or fascial adhesions which I know we’re gonna talk about a little bit later on the podcast, this whole concept of fascia.  And then what happens is no matter how good your form is, it just continues to aggravate the area, it’s you know, just working out with an injury, and of course you definitely you do wanna make sure that you’re using good form on the cleans but assuming that the clean form is proper, it’s one of those deals where you have to do some of these other things that I mentioned that actually heal it up before returning back to the cleans.

Brandon:   Hey guys, I’ve been using Creatine Monohydrate for mental performance since you guys have been talking about that, and over the past couple of weeks I seem to gain some water weight.  So I was wondering, if you have any thoughts on how to prevent that or minimize that when supplementing with the Creatine.  Love to hear what you have to say.  Thanks.

Brock:  Sounds like Brandon’s getting fat.

Ben:  Getting fat from Creatine.  So yeah, the water retention can be an issue with Creatine.  I actually did a podcast with Onnit about this, we had like a brief little fifteen-minute podcast on Creatine, and the fact that most of the water retention issues with Creatine arise from following the old school recommendations of loading with Creatine.  And by loading with Creatine you’re typically taking anywhere from 15 to 20 grams…

Brock:  Woah!

Ben:  …of Creatine.  And you’re using that amount daily during a loading protocol that last anywhere from one to two weeks.  It’s pretty rare that I’ve seen anybody being able to handle that amount of Creatine without getting water retention and some of the cramping that’s associated with Creatine.  And what you can do – what I do with Creatine when I start using it or you know, when I stopped using it then I start back into it – is I just take 5 grams daily.  So 5 grams of Creatine is the amount of Creatine you’d want to use to actually get all of the strength and the power and I’ll talk about some of the cognitive benefits of Creatine here in the second.  But that’s the amount that you’d use, and by skipping the loading period, it does take a little bit longer for the benefits of Creatine to set in.  It takes about two to three weeks to really start to feel the effects of Creatine if you started to 5 grams of Creatine versus doing a loading protocol of like 20 grams.  But you avoid the water retention issue with Creatine, when you do that.  And I use to do a lot of this like Creatine loading and de-loading and I’d have – I get those cramping issues all the time.  And now, now that I just take a small amount each day, it is not an issue.  So, in terms of the cognitive effect, it actually really is very interesting.  So first of all, they found that in vegans and vegetarians who are typically in the state of chronic Creatine deficiency, that Creatine specifically using this 5 grams per day dose has been shown to increase memory, increase learning and increase cognitive performance, and that’s specifically in vegetarians and vegans.  And this is also been shown to work in other populations who tend to have low Creatine levels, and that’s specifically people who are sleep-deprived and elderly people.  So the cognitive benefits seem to set in most in people who are prone to Creatine deficiency.  They’ve found that in omnivores or in people who tend to eat meats on a regular basis, that the cognitive benefits of Creatine are not as pronounced and that you don’t notice quite as much in terms of Creatine if you are getting enough meat in your diet, if you’re not sleep deprived, if you’re not elderly.  So ultimately, you know, I know that I’ve talked about Creatine and cognitive performance before, but it appears to have most of its cognitive benefit if you are someone who is Creatine deficient, not eating much meat, sleep deprived or elderly.  And in other cases you probably getting enough Creatine just from meat intake to be able to avoid any of the type of cognitive deficits that arise from Creatine deficiencies.  However…

Brock:  So…

Ben:  ..if you’re listening in and you’re like vegan or vegetarian, I’d definitely recommend Creatine supplementation and also – and this is a very recent study in terms of elderly people and spatial recall and long-term memory.  It appears to significantly enhance what’s called the executive working memory in the elderly, and so you know, as I age and I look at the things that I might use as like an anti-aging or longevity supplement, Creatine would definitely be something that I’d use.

[0:35:05.4]

Creatine is also something to stack with say like a smart drug or a neurotrophic if you ever operating on a day in which you’re sleep deprived.

Brock:  So I was gonna say, is Creatine’s sort of along the lines of like B-vitamins then when it’s not necessarily giving you like an advantage or like a superhuman boost.  It’s just bringing you back-up the baseline.

Ben:  Exactly, exactly.  Now the only… the only caveat or the only exception as – there was one study that they did on people who were eating on omnivorous diet and in this case it was adolescence, and they did find a slight increase in reaction speed when supplementing with Creatine, and you could certainly argue that reaction speed is a cognitive performance gain.  And the other thing that I should mention is that regardless of the cognitive benefits, Creatine has been demonstrably proven whether or not you’re Creatine deficient to improve strength, power, speed, explosiveness, etc.  So you know, in that case, you don’t have to be a vegan or a vegetarian or elderly or sleep deprived to benefit from Creatine you know, if you’re strength athlete or you’re a power athlete or someone who wants to crank out a few more reps in the weight room, Creatine is one of the most researched and the safest supplements to use.  In most cases, just a basic Creatine Monohydrate works just fine.  Now I do use something that’s slightly fancier than that.  I use something called CRE02 that’s made by this company called Millennium Sports and one of the main reasons that I use that is because it’s what’s called enteric coded which means that its stomach stable.  It bypasses any type of destruction in the acidic environment of the stomach and because I take so little Creatine, I wanna make sure that I absorb as much of it as possible and I found zero cramping or water retention effects with that.  I like it, it’s convenient for me – it’s more convenient that like a Creatine monohydrate powder.  It is more expensive, right?  So I take three to four tablets of that in the morning and I take that almost year-round now.  So it’s a little bit more expensive but at the same time you can take less of it because there’s no destruction during the digestion in the simulation process because it’s very, very stomach stable.  It’s just basically like a time release tablet, but you’re gonna pay more than you’d pay for just like a basic Creatine Monohydrate powder.  And that stuff has some other things just got like rhodiola and cordyceps and some of these other things in it and you know, frankly I don’t take it for those reasons, I just take it for the Creatine and the stomach stable Creatine.  But that one’s called the CRE02 and I have a 50% discount on that stuff.  I’ll throw in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/319 if you wanna use that stuff.

Brock:  Hey, a couple of times you mentioned cramping.  What do you mean by cramping?  Like stomach cramps or muscles cramps?  Or…

Ben:  With Creatine?

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  Muscle cramps.  Although, if you take a lot, if you take 20 plus grams, it can result in a little bit of a dumb and dumber toilet moment type of effect that some people actually do have issues with, but that’s typically either a.) because you just started taking Creatine, you took way too much and you use like this 20 plus gram loading protocol or b.) because you didn’t take it with sufficient water.  You typically have to take Creatine with 12 plus ounces of water if you’re using like that higher dosage.  So yeah, usually it’s a muscle cramping but if you take a really, really high dose it can also be a… go way beyond muscle.

Brock:  It’s interesting.  I have been experiencing some weird muscle cramps over the last few weeks like just while I’m doing yoga or I was taking my wetsuit off the other day and I got wicked cramps in my abs and I’m now thinking maybe it’s ‘cause I’ve been taking Creatine really consistently for about two months now.

Ben:  How much have you been using?

Brock:  Just 5 grams.

Ben:  Hmmm, interesting.  Well you wanna make sure that you’re taking it with enough water.  And that would be the biggie because what’s gonna happen is because Creatine is going to enhance both your glycogen storage as well as your Creatine storage on the muscular level, you simply need more water period because you’ve got more stuff in your muscle that needs to be saturated with water.  So, if you’re not stepping up your water intake at the same time that you started do Creatine protocol, you need to be or else you’re gonna have those little twitches and cramps when you’re taking off your wetsuit as we’ll hate to experience while we’re taking off a wetsuits.

Brock:  Awesome.  Well Brandon and I both learned something today.

Mark:   Most therapists I talk to believe that toxins are often trapped in myofascial adhesions.  This comes up in post-treatment discussions for example they say, “drink a lot of water today” after they give you some kind of myofascial treatment.  But I never hear it discussed as a preventive measure.

[0:40:03.3]    

So does detoxification and in avoidance of toxic substances help prevent the build-up of adhesions?   Is it an effective adjunct to the various myofascial release therapies?  I would love to hear Ben’s opinion on this.  Thanks. 

Brock:  I’ve had this, too you know, when you leave the yoga studio or you’re leaving like you’re leaving the massage and they’re like “oh, make sure you drink a lot of water, hon.”

Ben:  Aha.  Yeah.

Brock:  “Make sure you stay hydrated.”

Ben:  Yep, exactly and I actually used to do a hip and knee surgical sales back in the day when I was first out of college and a lot of times when…

Brock:  You were selling body parts?

Ben:  I was selling body parts.

Brock:  Cool.

Ben:  Specifically, implants.  But when an orthopedic surgeon during surgery cut through – cuts through some of the areas of thicken fascia like a special like around the hips a really, really thick fascia there in the knees – it actually spurts like nasty stuff literally like puss-like deposits of white blood cells and a lot of times you’ll see like thickened, hardened-like, calcification-like deposits within this fascia.  And a lot of people who I mean, just imagine if someone lifts weights a lot or runs a lot and you know, beats up their fascia you know this sheaths that surrounds your connective tissue and your muscles and they never message that, they never focus on releasing some of the tension or working out some of the cross fibers in that tissue.  Just imagine the areas of like calcification and puss and white blood cell accumulation.

Brock:  No, I don’t want to.

Ben:  Yeah.  It’s…

Brock:  It’s awful.

Ben:  It’s pretty crazy.  I mean you talk to a lot of people who are like constantly tired or constantly get injured and a big, big part of that could just be due to like the stickiness in these adhesions.  So what an adhesion is, is it’s just a type of scarring or scar tissue that can accumulates specifically in the fascia that surrounds your muscles and you know, what’s happening there is you get like this stickiness or this glue-like consistency in a sheath that supposed to slide a little bit over the muscles as it moves.  And once that sliding doesn’t occur, you get tissues and even organs that can become a little bit glued together because they’re not moving freely.  Now there – it doesn’t just have to be exercised-based trauma that can cause these type of adhesions.  So for example, mineral imbalances can predispose you to soft tissue adhesions.  One of those would be something that we talked about on the podcast with Dr. Wendy Myers, and that is specifically copper toxicity which is a pretty serious issue these days.  It’s one of the heavy metals that tends to be one of the more notorious ones in our industrial era for accumulating in the body.  Imbalances in other heavy metals or presence of other heavy metals and specifically things like iron, manganese, aluminum, nickel, boron – things like that, that can also cause soft tissue adhesion.  And so basically if you play with a lot of Chinese toys, you might be in trouble when it comes to adhesions.

Brock:  Or if you have a lot of tattoos.

Ben:  Exactly, or if you’re like a car mechanic.  So inflammation is of course something that can cause its adhesions and this one I think that’s where I’m more aware of, and typically it’s inflammation from exercise from over-training or from over-using specific muscle groups especially allowing metabolic waste to accumulate that you don’t work out with like a foam roller, with cold, with heat, with inversion, with a lot of the recovery modalities that are smart to include in your training.  Now infections from bacteria, viruses, parasites, even fungi and mold that can actually affect the tissues as well, and there is such a thing as an infection caused adhesion which is likely what you see when you see like puss and tissue drainage occur when someone cuts into an area of fascia.  So what happens though once you get this fascia is a.) like I mentioned, you get a restriction of physical movement, so that can be everything from like structural imbalances in the spine like scoliosis or kyphosis, it can lead to like bone deformities, it can lead to you know, sacroiliac joint syndrome where a lot of the fascia around the hips you know, it causes like stickiness and glue-like adhesions and there are so – you know, when people say they have bad back or bad knees a lot of times it’s not joints, it’s not collagen, it’s not the tissue within the joint, it’s more of the fascia that surrounds the joint in the muscles that are around that joint.  When you look at like Chinese medicine in the flow of meridian energy and like these acupuncture meridians that you put needles into, a lot of times what you look at when you have areas of fascial adhesions is the restriction of actual energy flow which I know and for many people that’s more of a woo-woo concept, but it is true that we actually have a flow of key, of flow of energy throughout the meridians in our body and soft tissue adhesions can interfere with that as well.

[0:45:11.5]

You can keep tissues from draining properly because when you look at adhesions you’re causing tissues to become more squeezed and more restricted and that can cause metabolic byproducts to accumulate in the tissue, it can cause toxins to build up.  You might have things like urine not flowing out of your kidneys adequately or your bladder not empting properly, or even your liver cells less able to eliminate a lot of the toxins that can accumulate in the liver; so you know, a lot of your normal detoxification is kind of impaired.  And then you also get a restriction of circulation of your blood vessels and your lymph vessels because it’s harder for those vessels to feed into areas where there’s cross linking and adhesions, and that of course can restrict hormones from reaching cells, that can interfere with everything from like insulin, to glucose, to fatty acid, the liver and just the basic movement of chemicals around your body.  So yeah, it certainly can be an issue and of course, me describing it pretty much tells you what to do about it.  One would be to – you know like I mentioned, look into the metal issue.  You know every year I do a 30-day metal detox where I just get rid of heavy metals in my body.  I use this spray called MetalFree it’s like an amino-acid based spray that chelates metals and helps the body to remove them.  You can look of course into deep tissue work for the more structural component and like this morning, I foam rolled for a half-hour…

Brock:  Nice.

Ben:  And I do that one to two times a week.  I feel like a million bucks afterwards and I look at that as an anti-aging protocol.  There’s this book called “Why Does Olga Run?”  It’s about this like 97 year-old track and field star and one of her protocols is and she does this actually when she wakes up at night, there’s a myth around that’s this idea that you’re supposed to sleep through the entire night and have an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep, when in fact it’s completely normal and our ancestors probably would’ve woken up for things like you know, sex and movement and dancing and you know, chatting around the fire and that type of thing.  And she would wake up every night like clockwork and she actually used a wine bottle and she would just knead her tissue and work out all these fascial adhesions with the wine bottle as she lay in bed.  And I look on this you know like my one to two times per week foam roller sessions as I look on it as not just a structural movement protocol to assist me with exercise and sports performance but also it’s like an anti-aging protocol to keep myself from building up a lot of these toxins and the build-up of metabolic waste that can occur when you’ve got fascia that’s just never get it in work, that’s never getting moved around or these adhesions, these cross linking that are never getting removed.  So that’s another thing to do is just the structure work and the book “Becoming a Supple Leopard’” and I’ll link to that in the show notes, is fantastic when it comes to that.  You can also make sure that you’re getting adequate substances necessary for assisting with the integrity of fascia into your diet: omega 3 fatty acids and fish oils are one.  A lot of these things that you tend to see is natural anti-inflammatories: tart cherry juice, glucosamine, chondroitin, turmeric, minerals that come from things like chicken cartilage or like the ground up bones and cartilage of animals – these can actually help out quite a bit.  You know for example, one of the things that’s in my fridge is NatureFlex and that is it’s a joint and cartilage support compound and you know, that’s – you know, one of the total – what do you call it?  Total transparency full disclosure like that is a Greenfield supplement right? Looks like a Greenfield Fitness System supplement but it’s one of like my flagship supplements because I put everything in there that the joint would ever need for repair and recovery whether it’s from an injury, whether it’s due to fascial adhesions, so that’s something else that I use quite a bit of this NatureFlex stuff.  And then of course like just structural work, if you really, really mess up you may actually need to work with an osteopath or chiropractic doc or a rolfer or a massage therapist to kinda like jumpstart you into maintaining what they’ve done by doing foam roller, and so for very long time I use to get massages a couple of times a week and I will just – you know for me I had the convenience that my personal training office I shared with a massage office and so I would just do like trade into the massage therapist and now I’m just kind of on cruise control with the foam roller but every once in a while you know, like when I visit Thailand, right?  I would have massage every day, twice a day for two weeks and kind of like reinitiate the intense soft tissue work where I’m getting extremely pliable. 

[0:50:06.7] 

And then the last thing as far as like detoxification and avoiding the build-up of minerals and a lot of these other things that – that can cause adhesions – infrared… infrared sauna therapy especially doing like an infrared sauna prior to a massage session, and then I know I said I was going to talk about this perhaps in the future but I’ll talk about it now.  Toys, you know, I mentioned that I just got a new toy and being that inclined treadmill but the other toy is something on building right now on my gym and writing an article on kinda like how to biohack and make hotter and reduce the electromagnetic radiation and it’s an infrared sauna that I’m building.  And once that’s done, I’ll get in that infrared sauna and I got a specific type that’s big enough for me to do foam rolling in and I’ll do my foam rolling while I’m getting exposed to this infrared so I get both the detoxification as well as the structural work all at the same time.

Brock:  Cool.

Ben:  And so for me it’s not about you know like being a funny biohacker, right?  It’s about anti-aging and longevity and feeling really good from doing this stuff.  So ultimately, that’s the deal with fascia so you know, yes, it can cause toxin build-up and yes you know, drinking a lot of water and moving around a lot is good but a lot of times you gotta do a lot more than that when it comes to adhesions.  So I’ll put a link to some of this stuff that I recommended everything from like to ‘Becoming a Supple Leopard’ book to I’ll link to the metal spray that I use and the NatureFlex and the fish oils and all that jazz over in the show notes if you want to check them out, so.

Brock:  Actually it just so happens that I posted that chapter eighteen of Beyond Training audio book on the app today so that’s the chapter that actually covers all the detoxification and avoiding toxics substances and all that good stuff.

Ben:  Yeah, we’re releasing my book “Beyond Training” chapter by chapter right now inside of our premium podcast.  We have another podcast – we’ll talk about we release extra audios and stuff in there it’s over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium and yeah, you know each chapter takes me like an hour or an hour-a-half to record but this one was yeah, it was all about toxins, detoxing your home, detoxing your bathroom cabinet, detoxing your household cleaning chemicals and yeah that’d be certainly a good one to listen into if you really wanna geek out on this stuff.

Natalie:   Hi Ben and Brock.  I absolutely love your podcast.  First is about a test called DUTCH (Dry Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones).  It’s from what I understand the new sort of gold standard for cortisol testing, and I’m just wondering if you’ve heard of it?  It’s by Precision Analytical.  I have done a salivary and blood hormone testing before but I came across this test and I was wondering if you know anything about it and if you feel that it is indeed a worth-getting.  Thanks so much.

Ben:  To me, the word ‘dry urine’ is just… *chuckles*

Brock:  I know, I can’t help but imagine just somebody…

Ben:  Weird.  Yeah.

Brock:  ..peeing on something and leaving it in the sun?

Ben:  Right, right.

Brock:  Is that what you do?

Ben:  Yeah, urine is wet it’s not dry, so just the vernacular dry you’re seem a little bit strange.  So there are few different ways that you can test your hormones, and of course probably the most standard way in the way most people get it tested just because it typically comes along with other tests that you do is a blood test or serum test, and the problem with that as a hormonal panel is that it’s a snapshot, right?  So when I go in and I get a performance panel on a full test from a company like WellnessFX, it certainly includes hormones but the hormonal part of that is a snapshot of say like, my morning cortisol and it doesn’t tell me – what’s in my morning cortisol is low, right? Which is technically not bad for to be a little bit low even though you want morning cortisol to be a little bit higher than cortisol at some other points during the day ‘cause when sunlight hits your body and you wake up in the morning you want a little bit of a surge of cortisol to wake you up.  But let’s say that I were to repeat that blood test multiple times during the day, I would wanna see a fluctuation, right?  Like I would wanna see a drop between morning and noon, and then a slight rise from noon to the afternoon, and then another drop from the afternoon to the time that I go to bed and by using a blood color for hormones that’s pretty difficult to do unless you wanna be bleeding out a lot.

Brock:  Yeah, that’s a lot to getting stab in the day.

Ben:  Yeah.  And that’s where saliva comes in.  Saliva being probably the more popular way to test hormones for people who want running value; who wanna get like a twice a day or three times a day or even a four time a day cortisol or DHEA or testosterone measurement.

[0:55:00.9]

And probably the most popular measurement for this is the adrenal stress index or the ASI and it really is a very simple salivary hormone panel that you can order to your house that gives you a very, very good image of your running values of hormone and it’s something that you know, I’ve talked about before in previous podcasts, it’s a great way to check in and see if you’re over-trained or over-reached if you’re in like you know, stage two or stage three or stage four adrenal fatigue.  Each of those different stages of adrenal fatigue has a different adrenal stress index pattern associated with it specifically in terms of cortisol DHEA ratios.

Brock:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  So hormones via saliva are probably you know, at this point the most popular/best way to test for hormones in terms of what most people are talking about and most physicians are using. Now hair is the third way – hair is an interesting choice because it’s very stable, and a lot of times it is used in studies on stress…

Brock:  Your hair is stable.

Ben:  ..and over-training.  And there’s some pretty good peer reviewed scientific literature on the use of hair as a measurement of hormones.  But the problem with hair is it takes a really, really long time and you gotta of course you know, cut your hair to get it measured and it’s just – it’s probably the least researched of the different hormonal measuring tools, but it certainly is something that you can get hormonal data from.  and then finally there is this dry urine test or a urine test, and I’ve recommended many times especially to women this concept of a 24-hour urine sex steroid test and I’ve done my own 24-hour urine sex steroid test when I did the Faster Study which is was the high fat low carb performance study over at University of Connecticut for job Velux Lab, and you literally do and collect all of your urine into this orange jug as you walk around during the day, and it’s done for a full 24hours.  So it’s definitely probably even less convenient than getting four different blood panels really when it comes to just like walking around with a giant orange canister full of your piss all day long, but it’s how this 24 hour urine test is done.  And this DUTCH test which stands for the dry urine test for comprehensive hormones is something that assesses everything from your first morning void of urine and then gives you over 24 hour collection period – your entire cycle of hormones for every time that you basically take a piss during that day and so it’s very, very good you know, you can measure estradiol and all your estrogrens, your progesterone, your testosterone, your cortisol, you can measure DHE, all your anabolic, all your catabolic hormones and you can get a ton of data from urinary panel.  And I know that you’re familiar with Chris Kresser, right?

Brock:  Oh yeah.  Yeah.  I met with him at PaleoFX last year.

Ben:  Yeah, he’s a pretty well-known on – he’s not a physician, he’s like a licensed acupuncturist but he’s well-known in like the alternative medical or the functional medical community and the 24-hour urine test is actually his test of choice because what he says is that it combines the advantages of saliva testing with the ability to measure what are called androgen and glucocorticoid metabolites in addition to just the hormones.  And all that means is you’re not just testing hormones, but you’re also testing a lot of the precursors used to make those hormones so it’s very, very thorough test in inconvenient but it does show you not just the hormones but a lot of what are called the sex hormone metabolites.  Now, I know that on other podcasts and in some of my writings, I’ve recommended the online lab testing service DirectLabs…

Brock:  Mmm-hmm.

Ben:  it’s like a wholesale way to order tests and I looked into it and they actually do not carry this DUTCH test, it’s made by company called Precision Analytical.  However, what I found out was that a company called Genova which you actually can order from DirectLabs, Genova has something called a complete hormone kit.  In this complete hormone kit is – it’s a urinary panel, very, very similar to this dry urine test for comprehensive hormones and I’ll link to that in the show notes.  But basically it’s the same as this Precision Analytical test for all intensive purposes.  Someone’s called the complete hormone kit by Genova.

Brock:  Now just ‘cause I know we’re gonna get a bunch of emails about that, do you know if that’s available outside of the USA?

Ben:  Ah, probably not.  Although what I typically do with my Canadian clients who I recommend lab test too and you know this Brock, is I’ll send you the test that I recommend and then have you go to a local functional medical doc or your local medical facility, show them the tests and see what similar tests that they have as a corollary because it is frankly in the US that you know, we live in one of the few spots where it’s very, very simple to order home tests for this stuff and I know in other countries, that’s not the case.  So in this case, you’d go to the DirectLabs website if you don’t live in the US, you’d print off that test, you bring it in to your doc or your medical facility and you tell them you’d like to get something as close as possible to that test.

[1:00:34.4]

And frankly I don’t have every country, you don’t memorize…

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  ..which country’s offer, which test and the names of the different tests in different countries because I’m not a rocket scientist.  I am actually I am based on the review that we’re about to read in idiot savant so, yes.

Brock:  *chuckles* Anyway.

Ben:  Yes.  And so that’s probably a great segway…

Brock:  Alright.

Ben:  ..to this week’s review.  So that does about wrap up the Q & A and of course we’ll link to everything that we talked about over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/319, but we always like to end the show by being a little Santa Claus and sending little gifts to the boys and girls across the world and in this case, if you left a review in the nice star rating on iTunes and you hear us read your review on the show all you gotta do is email [email protected].  And when you email [email protected] that’s not gear like Richard Gere but gear like g-e-a-r: [email protected] we’ll include your t-shirt size and we’ll send you a t-shirt, a BPA-free water bottle, and that’s not gonna disrupt your hormones or cause fascial adhesions or explosive diarrhea, and we’ll send you a cool tech t-shirt that makes you look fantastic whether you’re a guy or a girl.  If you’re a guy, it’ll give you a six pack and wide shoulders.  If you’re a girl, it’ll give you…

Brock:  It’ll give you a six pack and wide shoulders.

Ben:  That’s right, give you a boob job.  Uhm, so anyways we have a review – a five-star review from Tibike man and the title is “Ben is an Idiot”

Brock:  The picky man or Thai-bike man?

Ben:  Oh yeah, it’s probably Thai-bike man.

Brock:  It’s like those vanity licensed bike where you’re like “what?”

Ben:  Yeah.  So yeah, it says “Ben is an Idiot”.  So what do you think, Brock?  You wanna take this one?

Brock:  Alright.  “Ben is an idiot… and idiot savant that is.  Ho-ho.  Okay maybe not, but he does provide a ton of great info and isn’t afraid to challenge conventional wisdom.  I found myself on a similar path to Ben over the past several years moving away from the extreme endurance events fueled by processed carbs to a diet dominated by real food and striving for a balance between fitness and health.”

Ben:  Hmm.

Brock:  “I’ve enjoyed Ben insights along the way and…”

Ben:  That was quite of sense by the way.

Brock:  It was at – it was actually really fun to read because there was no place to stop and take a breath.

Ben:  That’s right.

Brock:  *inhaling* “I’ve enjoyed Ben insights along the way and I have implemented many of his suggestions.  During the podcast he provides answers to tough questions and overviews of recent research.  Ben and Brock keep things entertaining while they educate.  Highly recommended!”

Ben:  Hmm.  You know the idiot savant thing is interesting because my first exposure to that term was a documentary that I watched when I was a kid where there was like – it was for all intends and purposes just like a you know, a drooling mental retard – pardon the expression, but he was really, really good at playing the piano.  And he would like get up and play the piano like in the middle of the night and he had like this horrible singing voice he was like *sings a tune* but his piano playing was absolutely amazing.  And so when you call me an idiot savant, that’s just the image that’s coming to mind for me as the – a drooling idiot who’s good with the musical instrument.  So anyways, just thought to explain my feelings about that so how idiot savanting, but thank you, I think.  So that being said, let’s gonna wrap up the show and we do have a podcast coming out this weekend.

Brock:  Do we?

Ben:  We do have a podcast coming up this weekend as we do every weekend.  This weekend’s podcast is actually with this brilliant guy named James Heathers and we’re gonna be talking about heart rate variability.  I know in the past I’ve done some HRV episodes with the gals from SweetBeat, but James has an entirely different perspective and he’s this brilliant dude.  So if you’re into like self-quantification or you wanna learn even more about HRV than you currently know, so you can impress even more of your friends at cocktail parties, stay tuned for this weekend’s podcast with James Heathers.  So…

Brock:  That’s awesome.  I’m excited about that, I’ve heard so many podcast about HRV but it’s generally been round the collier from SweetBeats…

Ben:  Yeah.

Brock:  So this can be cool to hear something else.

Ben:  Yeah.  Now James is pretty badass.  This is a good one and so check that out.  Thanks for listening in, have a healthy week, check out the show notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/319 and I’m gonna go… I don’t know, run on treadmill or sit on a sauna or something.

Visit bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and performance advice.

[1:06:05.3]    END

 

 

June 10, 2015 Podcast: How To Fix Golfer’s Elbow / Climber’s Elbow, How To Keep From Retaining Water With Creatine, Can Fascia Store Toxins, and Urinary Testing For Hormones.

Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right (or go to SpeakPipe), use the Contact button on the app, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, Skype “pacificfit” or use the “Ask Ben” form at the bottom of this page.

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Listener Q&A:

As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Brock Skywalker Armstrong, the Podcast Sidekick and Audio Ninja.

How To Fix Golfer’s Elbow / Climber’s Elbow

Eric says: He has developed soreness inside his elbow – Golfer’s Elbow but more like Kettlebell Elbow. He thinks it if from doing the ketllebell clean. Any tips on how to get better? And also how to avoid this?

In my response, I recommend:
ArmAid
Tennis Elbow & Golfers Elbow Cure – Unique Elbow Pain Program

How To Keep From Retaining Water With Creatine

Brandon says: He has been supplementing with Creatine Monohydrate for the cognitive enhancements (like we have been talking about) but he has noticed that he has put on some water weight. Do you know how to avoid that happening when supplementing with Creatine?

In my response, I recommend:
CREO2 from Millennium Sports (use 50% discount code MSTBG09)

Can Fascia Store Toxins?

Mark asks: Most therapists I talk to believe that toxins are often trapped in myofascial adhesions. This comes up in post-treatment discussions (“drink a lot of water today”), but I never hear it discussed as a preventive measure. Does detoxification and avoidance of toxic substances help prevent the build up of adhesions? Is it an effective adjunct to the various myofascial release therapies?

In my response, I recommend:
Becoming A Supple Leopard
Omega 3 Fatty Acids
NatureFlex
MetalFree

Urinary Testing For Hormones

Natalie says: She is wondering about the DUTCH test (Dry Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones). She understands that it is the gold standard for cortisol testing. Have you heard of it? It’s by Precision Analytical. Do you feel that it is indeed worth getting?

In my response, I recommend:
Complete Hormone Kit by Genova from DirectLabs

Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2015/06/319-hypoxia-for-fat-loss-how-to-fix-golfers-elbow-or-climbers-elbow-creatine-water-retention/

 

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