Episode #255 – Full Transcript

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Podcast #255 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/09/255-how-to-get-strong-as-a-bull-and-then-get-ripped-cold-thermogenesis-quick-tips-how-often-should-you-poop/

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Introduction:    In today’s episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast: How to get strong as a bull and then get ripped, how to get better results from cold thermogenesis, what to do about excessive sweating, how often should you poop, the best natural skin care strategies, and how to get rid of a bone spur without surgery.

Welcome to the bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast.  We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation.  So whether you’re an ironman triathlete, or you’re just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-off-the-mill, cutting edge content from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Ben:   I’m gonna interrupt Brock before he even has a chance to say anything at all because he usually is the first person to talk in these episodes.

Brock:  I do, I usually blurt something out.

Ben:  But I gotta tell you, just to give you a little insider sneak peek of what goes on before we record. I so far have been filled in that Brock took a giant dump this morning as he has almond skin in his teeth and he’s drinking decaf coffee right now.

Brock:  Yeah.

Ben:  So, just to paint a picture for you guys.

Brock:  That was nice of you, aired my shame for me.

Ben:  Yes, no problem. Anytime my friend, anytime. Hmm, awkward silence in the podcast.

Brock:  Is that the ….

Ben:  I guess that was our awkward silence moment. Speaking of awkward silence, I’m about …..

Brock:  There’s gonna be a serious awkward silence when Ben goes up into the wilderness to practice his zombie apocalypse skills.

Ben:  That’s right.

Brock:  You’ll leave tomorrow, right?

Ben:   I’m going total AWOL, so for all of you podcast listeners and folks who ask me questions online and stuff, you may notice some amount of absence on my part especially from responding to personal emails because I’m going to a 5 day wilderness survival camp in the back woods of Colorado somewhere with no phone and no internet and I’ll come back out with squirrels growing out of my beard. I guess squirrels would be more appropriately living in my beard not growing out of my beard.

Brock:  I’d like the image of them growing out of your beard. It just seems more like just sort of …. I can see their little arms pushing their faces out of your beard.

Ben:  Giving my face over just squirrels. So, there’s another intense visuals for our listeners and we have  a jampacked podcast this week because we’re gonna just be doing a special episode next week considering the fact that I can’t record too well and I’m living at bear cave or wherever I’ll be. So …..

Brock:  The squirrels will bat at your microphone too much.

Ben:  We’ll be sure to give you a special report though if I’d be sad I wanna return to post industrial America after I spend a few days in the trees.

Brock:  Yeah, what if you never come back?

Ben:  It could happen, it could happen.

Brock:  Yeah, it could, I guess I’ll take over.

Ben:  Yup, you can, you can …..

Brock:  Look out everybody. Bad if I scamming every out everywhere.

Ben:  You can have my kids, you can have my wife, you can have my dog and I will …. I’ll be out in the cabin in the woods somewhere so there you go.

News Flashes:

Brock:  Alright, go over to audiblepodcast.com/ben and you can sign up for your free audible membership and get yourself a free book and I know Ben, you talked about this book over at daily apple.

Ben:  Yeah, I did, I did. I recently wrote a blog post over at Mark’s dailyapple.com.

Brock:  dot com.

Ben:  Which is marksdailyapple.com. A really good website, Mark’s cool.

Brock:  Half and bending.

Ben:  It’s called Top Ten Rules For Becoming an Ancestral Athlete and in that article I talked about this book called Antifragile by Nassim Taleb who actually have the …..

Brock:  Antifragile, so that’s strong – not fragile. It’s an interesting way to phrase it.

Ben:  It’s the ….. subtitle is Things That Gain from Disorder and it’s pretty cool. It just teaches you about how things like air conditioning and heat and modern living and health and biology and medicine and all of these stuff is basically making us weak and how you make yourself strong. Audiblepodcast.com/ben describes it as erudite and witty and …. what is erudite mean again?

Brock:  I think that word basically sums up making us weak.

Ben:  Ah wait, erudite does that really?

Brock:  Well, not really. Erudite is somebody who’s well read, well learned, very clever and …..

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Ben:  Yes, well erudite and witty. I’m not going even to pretend that I came out with that phrase. Taleb’s message is revolutionary, that’s what audible says about it.

Brock:  Cool.

Ben:  So, either way good listen for you check it out it will be a good book that will just blow your mind and speaking of blowing your mind, an article came out, I think it was on the New York Times websites although I also saw it on a ……

Brock:  Hey, wait a second. Are we doing this on the wrong order, do I jump in to special announcements and then on to news flashes?

Ben:  You did but ….

Brock:  Oh man.

Ben:  You make mistakes, we all make mistakes.

Brock:  You know, I’m glad now that you told everybody that I was drinking decaf coffee ‘cause that explains what’s going on in my brain …. which is very ….

Ben:  and I love how to make …. on to this podcast. I love on today’s podcast we’re doing zero editing we’re just kinda like talking over all our mistakes so. We will just do that the whole time.

Brock:  Sometimes we realized we’re doing something wrong and we’ll actually go back but ah, yeah, I don’t think this week.

Ben:  Nah, not …

Brock:  This isn’t one of those weeks.

Ben:  Not gonna happen. I actually have to go to the doctor right after this podcast for a special heart scan to see …..

Brock:  Oh yeah, your stress test.

Ben:  Yeah, I’m gonna go see what 10 years of extreme endurance exercise has done to my heart. So, stay tuned for some feedback on that but anyways that means that we have to churn out this podcast in time for me to hop in my truck and drive to the doctor’s office.

Brock:  Okay, so let’s go back to news flashes and then continue on as if I didn’t put us on to special announcements.

Ben:  Meanwhile, chopping wood boosts your testosterone more than playing sports and this was pretty cool study. A guy named Dr. Ben Trumble studied a bunch of forgers/farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. I’m not really sure exactly what a forger/farmer is but I can only imagine and they tested….

Brock:  I’m sure he has squirrels growing out of his beard.

Ben:  He must. They tested these guys saliva after they played soccer and then after they had chopped down trees where clearing the jungle to grow crops and at that point I’ve kinda realized while reading why they chose this group because how many people on the face of the planet both know how to play soccer….

Brock:  Do both of those things….

Ben:  And chop down trees to clear jungle to grow crops. Hence, Bolivia. So, what they found was that there was a significant higher released of concentration of salivary testosterone after chopping the wood specifically doing something that would kinda be considered providing for the family or something engaged in food or economic productivity vs. simply playing sports. Both result in a spike in performance but the spike from chopping wood is higher. So ….

Brock:  What it didn’t mention was that they were playing soccer against ten year old girls.

Ben:  That’s right, that’s right. This actually inspired my workout last night though that’s why I’m sore right now. I have one of those battle mazes from Onnit which is designed to really give you a really good workout that’s similar to what you get from like a kettlebell workout but one of the exercises you can do with the giant battle maze is wood chopping against a giant rubber tire. And so, I swing the battle maze up over my head while my 5 year old boy stand there watching me and cheering me on and I hit the big rubber tires many times as I can and that is a really really good workout I gotta tell you. If you just gonna go and do one thing and ….. it’s a little bit cathargic too. So ….

Brock:  Uhm, I bet. Do you switch sides, like one side one chop on the left, one chop on the right? Just back and forth?

Ben:  I’d go 5 and 5 just to kinda spread the workout through my body evenly and this is also why, I’m actually in the process of building a home right now that’s kinda out in the middle of nowhere, on 10 acres in Washington. More hippie action from Ben and I’m putting a wood stove into that home and when I was at the Paleo FX Conference last year I listened into a really interesting discussion by a biohacker named Josh Whiton who actually lives as ancestrally as possible I think in the …. somewhere in like Brooklyn, somewhere in New York City -ish. He is a huge fan of these modern wood stoves where air enters the burning chamber from multiple conduits that are kinda build through and throughout the stove and they have these panels that reflect heat back at the wood and into the room. They’ve got this tight fitting doors that keep particulates out of the air and you can put this intake into them that uses air that’s piped in from the outdoors into a combustion chamber.

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So, I at first didn’t want to put a wood stove in my home ‘cause their really inefficient and then once I listen to him talk and started to research this a little bit more, and I’m going to put a link in the show notes for anybody listening in who’s interested in this stuff. It turns out that wood burning stove like modern wood burning stove can actually be really green and really efficient plus you’ll get higher testosterone. So, what’s not to love.

Brock:  Yeah, my guess if they can keep the soot out of the room that’s awesome ‘cause like my biggest problem with burning stuff was the smell and the dirt.

Ben:  I actually want, I want soot and dirt all over my living room so that after I’ve chopped wood I can go in with my jack-upped testosterone levels and just like roll around on the bare skins in my living room making love to my wife with my huge testosterone levels and then stroking my beard and sitting in front of the fire as it crackles away.

Brock:  You’re totally not coming back in this building to search your heat. I ‘m just ….. I’m gonna be stuck with everything. Ah, jeez.

Ben:  Let’s move along.

Brock:  Alright.

Ben:  So, let’s move on and talk about high heels. I’ll put a link to this in the show notes. What is this? Episode 255?

Brock:  255.

Ben:  So, in the show notes, the episode number 255. I’m gonna put a link to this really disturbing 3D scan of a female foot in high heels and they have this new way to use a $340,000 scanner at an orthopedic hospital to do a 360 degrees scan of somebody’s foot in about 60 seconds. And so they’re studying high heels now and when you do the full scan with the high heels, it’s really nasty what goes on with the foot so that the toes get squashed inside the shoe and the more stiletto shapes that the high heel is the worst that is. The toes gets squashed and then they become clawed and the base of the big toe kinda becomes deviated outwards with forms this bunion and then the bones actually become rotated and dropped out of position and so you’re not only looking at creating some serious foot problems when you wear high heels especially if you wear them you know, for like 8 hours a day but it’s also, it creates a lot of upstream issues in your low back that kinda turns off your ability to use your glutes just, it’s bad news all around and for any of you women who need more convincing that you should save high heels for situations in which you preferably not putting much weight on your feet at all and you’re only get a half month for a short period of time. Go check out the scan, It’s pretty not so. So, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes and I’m sure Brock at this point has taken off his high heels.

Brock:  I did. I threw them out the window when we first start talking about this.

Ben:  Moved on to skates or something?

Brock:  Yeah, but I’m always in hockey skates really. It was just my high heel skates I was just wearing before.

Ben:  Gotcha! Well, one more, one more article. I’ll link to that, I’ll put out on Twitter that I wanted to explain a little bit more and this was a study that they did in mice. Well, they have this mice exercise for 90 minutes in a fasted state and I’ve written articles before about how cellular death can be initiated when you exercise in a fasted state. I think a lot of people get a sharpen and take their breath and take that as a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing, it’s called a autophagy or cellular turnover or …..

Brock:  Autophagy.

Ben:  Autophagy as they say in Canada or as they say anywhere other than Ben Greenfield’s head.

Brock:  I believed you pronounced it autophagey once. That was uncomfortable.

Ben:  Slightly, In PC or cellular apoptosis. Anyways, we’re talking about cell death and when you actually allow your cells to turnover a little bit more quickly, you clean up the trash in your body so to speak, you remove a lot of cellular garbage and so that’s one of the benefits, it’s why exercise in a fasted state can be potentially longevity enhancing or increases longevity and also improves the actual muscular response to the workout. You also get what’s called increased mitochondrial fission which means that you can improve your mitochondrial density or your ability to potentially use things like fatty acids to make ATP base energy more quickly when you are actually exercising in that fasted state. A lot of people hear about this though and then they go out and they’re idiots and I’m sorry but when you look at the study, the mice were doing the equivalent of what basically comes out to a brisk walk in humans for 90 minutes….

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and people see this research and then they go out and they head out to their cross-fit box or they grab their hardcore master swim workout for that morning or whatever and …..

Brock:  They just go to this stuff.

Ben:  Yeah, and then you do that day after day and it sends a message to your body that you’re asking it to dig deep into it’s energy stores and basically a catabolic state and you get muscle wasting and you get huge amount of cortisol formed and you get a drop in your testosterone, you get a lot of nasty downstream metabolic issues so when we’re talking about exercising in a fasted state like when I’m sitting down or writing down a fat loss workout for somebody for example, I actually do in both males and females, kinda use that fasted workout approach but it’s always easy stuff like it’s 20-30 minutes of easy aerobics, and I don’t even flirt with that with that 90 minute range more often than about once a week as far as like a long fasted workout and it’s always aerobic and  always easy so that there’s not too much muscle that deconstruction that’s going on.

Brock:  And we’re talking about a real fasted state too not just like not just havin’ eaten for a couple of hours but actually eat dinner rather early didn’t eat anything again until well after the workout the next morning kinda thing, right?

Ben:  In my case, it’s 8 hours so, yeah ….

Brock:  But I guess, mice has a tiny stomachs …..

Ben:  That’s why I was thinking, perhaps that’s the equivalent of 16 hours in humans who knows but either ways some cool stuff about fasted workouts, about chopping wood to boost your testosterone levels and

Brock:  Mice on treadmills?

Ben:  And high heels. So there you go. Go chop wood and don’t do it in high heels and be careful doing it fasted and you will have benefits from every news flash in today’s episode.

Special Announcements:

Brock:  I’m not gonna say anything about audible because I already did. So I’ll remind you to do is go to audiblepodcast.com/ben and that is all I’m going to say about it.

Ben:  Yeah, the freakin’ time to shine. So, I’m headed to London after the wilderness trip. I’ll turn around and fly to London to speak at The Global Triathlon Conference and …..

Brock:  That’s jolly old! Isn’t it jolly old. Not London, Ontario.

Ben:  Jolly or Arkansas as we mentioned earlier. There’s a facebook page though because I’m gonna do a meet up in London while I’m in there for all the Ben Greenfield fitness listeners and we’ll put a link in the show notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/255. We’re gonna do a day of playing in the park followed by nice healthy primal paleo whatever you wanna call it style dinner that is put on by a guy named Darryl Edwards who runs this fantastic primal workshops around the world and he is the guy who also creates workouts at thefitnessexplorer.com which is a fantastic website. It’s a ton of fun. He’s offering this special early bird discount, the time of this podcast recording that early bird discount is good for another about 48 hrs or so for you to squeeze into that primal workshop where basically it’s fun, we climb trees, we crawl around like animals, we do it like some park or move nuts style, you know, play basically.

Brock:  And you bathe bunch of bobbies that are chasing you through high park.

Ben:  Invade those bobbies, that’s right, so if you want …..

Brock:  Actually they only have like night sticks so you don’t worry about a new shot.

Ben:  Yeah, so no permanent risk of death or anything like that. Not if there’s any temporary form of death. Anyways, bobbie evading, so if you want to enhance your bobbie evading skills, check out the link in the show notes and come out to that and then just a couple other things. Everybody’s asking about Ironman Canada and what went on with ketosis and my race report and everything. Published that on Monday, a couple of days ago. Anyone who is part of our 10 dollar a year premium podcast at bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium can grab that and run away with all the blood lab results, the nitty gritty’s of what happened with the nutrition and everything that shook up as far as whether or not ketosis actually worked, whether I plan  on continuing that scenario for Ironman Hawaii, pretty much everything you’d ever wanna know I geeked out for about an hour and before Ironman Hawaii, for any of you who are part of the premium podcast, I’ll be doing it again essentially kinda feeling in on all the little things that are getting added into the protocol and just some of the big take-aways for you whether you’re an ironman triathlete or you’re wanting to experiment with, you know, ketogenesis or blood work or biohacking or minimalist training protocols or any of that jazz.

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All of that is worth the premium.

Brock:  And head over to Youtube and do a search for Ben Greenfield fitness and you’ll see there’s a couple of videos that make great compendiums to that podcast episode that Ben did to.

Ben:  That’s right. Brock and I went nuts with the video camera because he was up there as well and …..

Brock:  And I have nothing else to do but chase him around at the video camera which is actually really fun.

Ben:  We did shoot, the next time that you listen to the podcast stay tuned for a special url that we’re gonna give you because we did actually shoot a cool little 5 minute video for you where Brock and I are messing around so stay tuned for that and last thing I want to throw into the special announcements here just real quick was that, we did have a one slot open up for Thailand for the Thailand Triathlon Adventure that I’m taking everybody on from November 15th to December 4th or November 21st through December 4th depending on when you decide to jump in to the adventure. But we’ll put a link in the show notes to that, it’s gonna be a ton of fun and if you wanna escape to Asia this winter and go and race and train and do some clinics and stuff like that, definitely get in on that we have one slot open up so there you go.

Listener Q & A:

555:  Hi Ben, I was wondering if you are familiar with the strong lift 555 program. I know the 555 has been around for a long time, but just for somebody who’s wanting to strengthen up the workout a little bit, is it a good program and is it effective? I appreciate the work you do and look forward to hear from you. Thank you.

Brock:  Now I’ve never heard of strong lift 555 I’m hoping that you have Ben.

Ben:  555 is actually something that’s been around since the 70’s to tell you the truth.

Brock:  Uhm, maybe that’s why I don’t know about it.

Ben:  So, quick overview here for people who are wondering about 5 by 5. So, if you wanna get strong and you wanna get mass and you just want to make yourself strong like bull, 5 by 5 is a good way to go.

Brock:  Or was it 5 by 5 not 555?

Ben:  Well, this 555 workout is based on the original 5 by 5 training system and that was designed by football strength coach back in the 70’s, this guy name’s Bill Starr and 5 by 5 is just 5 sets of 5 repetitions of specific exercises. So the original 5 by 5 program was published in this book called The Strongest Shall Survive and it was designed simply to bulk up football players to add mass and some amount of strength to football players. So the way to the 5 X 5 workout goes and this something that men or women can do who wanna get strong fast and I’ll explain in a minute how this is actually very similar to something I am personally gonna be doing in the off season for my training this year. But each workout in the original 5 X 5 workout has 3 primary exercises that you do and the 3 primary exercises are squats: so a basic barbell squat with a bar in your back, power clings which is kinda more of an Olympic weight exercise and then the bench press which is actually an exercise that I hate and I think it’s a silly exercise. Anyways though, unless you wanna add a bunch of mass, mass to your chest and it’s not that bad silly bench press. So, these 3 exercises basically work every major muscle in your body once you actually put all three together. So when you do the 5 X 5 workout the original 5 X 5 workout, what you do is each exercises rotated so that 1 of the 3 exercises is performed with a maximum load each week or the other exercises are performed with a sub-maximum load.

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So let’s say you’re gonna do your 5 X 5 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and that’s pretty typical you’re usually doing something like this 3 days a week and following it for around 6 weeks or so. So, Monday you’ll be doing really heavy squats, 5 sets of 5 squats and then medium intensity power clings and bench presses but you’d also been doing 5 sets of 5 reps of those. And then like Wednesday, squats you’d use a medium weight power clings would be as heavy as you could go 5 by 5 and then bench press you do 5 by 5 but it would be a little less intensity. And then on the last day like a Friday, the bench press would be the heavy exercise that you do. Now, it works really well for mass there, a bunch of really cool variations of the 5 by 5 workout too and one of the best books that I would point you towards if you wanna see some really cool variations of the 5X5 workout including a variation of the 5X5 workout called simple strength which is a variation that I’m actually gonna be doing in the triathlon off season this year to make myself strong and build mass and kinda get my body to the point where it’s ready to start getting my goals to put on a lot of muscle and I need to get strong first. So I’m gonna use this book ….

Brock:  I believe the number 30 lbs. has been thrown around.

Ben:  My plan is to put on 30 lbs. of muscle during the first few months of 2014. Yeah, anyways though, the book “Interventions” by Dan John there are some really good variations of the 5 by 5 protocol in that book and another very very good book if you’re not accustomed to throwing around a barbell or you don’t really know how to move a barbell right, and you don’t necessary have access to like a weight lifting coach to work with is the book “Starting Strength” by Mark Rippetoe. If you were to read Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe and the book Interventions by Dan John, you would have access to all the information up inside your head that you need to get mass and get really strong, really fast, I still think that a lot of folks need to get in touch with a personal trainer or certified weight lifting coach and actually learn how to do specific moves properly if they’re really gonna seriously make some inroads in the strength like the power cling for example in the original 5X5 workout, if you don’t know how to do a power cling and you’re trying to do 5 max weighted reps of power cling, you’re gonna screw yourself up fast. So, that’s why you need to be careful with this stuff. Now …..

Brock:  Books aren’t very good at correcting your form.

Ben:  Yeah, I mean I kinda got my chops doing this 12 month internship with the University of Idaho football team where we have 2 certified weight lifting coaches and I was in the weight room 3-4 hours a day watching them teach and then assisting with the actual instruction for the football team. And then also doing all of that myself, so, I spent a year in the trenches learning the stuff and that helps a lot to hook up with an expert who knows how to move and to not just have your head in a book but as far as some of the variations, some of the workouts, some of the programming, these books are really good Intervention by Dan John and Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe. So this 555 program that ….555 ask about, they’ve left themselves anonymous didn’t they?

Brock:  Yes, yeah, I don’t think it was on purpose it was just so excited to ask a quick question and he forgot to say his name.

Ben:  555 is a variation of 5 by 5 program. It uses the lift squats, bench press and barbell rose on one day of the week and then it uses the exercises squat over head press and deadlift on the other day of the week. So it does eliminate the power cling which can be one of the more kinda injury creating exercise in a traditional 5X5 protocol but it’s pretty much 5X5 just a variation of it. So, my issue with this 555 program and they’ve got a website for a kinda typical internet sales website is it promises to get you ripped and burn up body fat and that’s bull. 5X5 programs don’t do that. All they do is give you mass and make you strong and if you’ve ever seen a football line back there with their shirt off most of them aren’t ripped, they are just kinda fat with a lot of more muscle and they’re kinda puffy.

[0:30:00.7]

So this would be something that you would be prior to launching into like a more traditional body building style program or launching into a more kinda met con style program like a beach body insanity or crossfit or P90X or something along those lines or you know, another really good one would be like an MMA style training routine like Martin Rooney has a good book called The Warrior Workouts something like that, you know, Cardio for Warriors I think but anyways, you have to follow up a mass program like this, let’s say you’re gonna do a 5X5 for six weeks or eight weeks, perhaps 12 weeks would be about as long as you go through something like this. You’d want to follow it up with another 6 months or 9 months or even a year of just a specific met con or body building style workouts to get you ripped after you put on the mass so I’ll put a link to the book Interventions by Dan John, the book Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe. I’ll link to the Strong lift 5X5 program in the show notes but then I’m also gonna put a link to a 9 Month Men’s Muscle Building Program. It’s one that women could use too. I designed it, I named it Men’s Muscle Building Program just because I wanted to appeal to the dudes out there but if you’re a lady and you wanted to kinda get toned or ripped or whatever, you could use a program like this. It would be something that you follow up, the starting strength or the any 5X5 variation with and if you we’re to follow that program, it’s all programed into training peaks which is the online software that I use to deliver workouts to the phone to the email whatever, it’s all really specific. I spell out the exact exercises, workouts to do, so really cool scenario would be, you pick your 5X5 variation, what you’d gonna do the stronger 555 or simple strength or one of the variations in the book Interventions by Dan John and then you’ll followed up with something like this 9 month men’s muscle building program and that would be like if you’re gonna target 2014 to just turn yourself into a freak of nature during that year, that would be how to do it, that would be what I would do.

Jenna:  Hello Ben and Brock, I have a question regarding cold thermogenesis. I was hoping you could discuss or contrast the effects and benefits of pure cold exposure, all cold water for example vs. a hot and cold alternate contrast. I’m inquiring specifically as it pretends to a shower protocol. Is one better off to use only cold water or to cycle between hot and cold water or is this dependent on one’s goals for example for a recovery type goal is it advisable to use the cycling up hot and cold water as opposed to a metabolic goal in which you would be advisable to use a purely cold shower? Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate you answer my question. Bye.

Brock:  There are a lot of different reasons to use cold therapy for very different things and especially the difference between a contrast therapy than not necessarily not just a shower and just straight up chilling the bones, so yeah, what’s for what?

Ben:  Or if you just want to make some good jokes on a Seinfeld episode cold thermogenesis comes in handy for that too.

Brock:  I guess so.

Ben:  I forget what the exact line is. Something like I was cold, I don’t remember. You know the episode I’m talking about though.

Brock:  No. You know, I never watched Seinfeld. I’m one of those people but I don’t know what you’re referring to like with some sort of shrinkage ….

Ben:  Yes, one of those called shrinkage jokes so this is something that at the Become Superhuman Live Event, the world’s expert on using cold thermogenesis to lose fat as quickly as possible talked about and that guy’s name is Ray Cronise. I have interviewed him and also that entire talk that he gave at Become Superhuman is available inside the Ben Greenfield fitness phone app. So if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/app you can actually watch the whole thing and grab the, actually I think the way that we have it set up is the, you can listen to the whole thing. If you wanna watch the video and grab the pdf and the slides, you would need to be on the premium version of the app but either way like you can get access like this first hour of his talk just blew my mind because he’s talking about rates of weight loss in terms of like 15-25 lbs in a month using contrast methods of cold thermogenesis. So, specifically what Ray Cronise uses to get the body to burn fat as fast as possible is he drinks about a gallon of cold water in the morning, sleeps without covers, does hot/cold contrast showers that are not done with super duper cold water but fairly cold water and then he takes mile long walks in the cold (in a cold enough environment where he’s shivering).

[0:35:14.3]

So I believe that he has a kind of a biohack lab or he’s doing those on a treadmill on a cold room but you could also do them outdoors on a cold if that were something you had access to. Now, the hot cold contrast showers are 5 minute long showers that are 20 seconds of cold water followed by 10 seconds of hot water or warm water basically ten times through. Okay, so you go cold water to warm water ten times through 20 seconds of cold to 10 seconds of warm. That is the actual protocol that is most effective for metabolic goals when you looking at fat lose. There’s some amount of blood circulation right like vasodilation followed by vasoconstriction in your blood vessels when you’re doing a hot cold contrast shower like that which is why you could also use it for recovery. So it’s the reason that they’re have like hot tubs and cold tubs in athletic training rooms of professional training facilities and athletes who go from the hot to the cold to the hot to the cold. You get better recovery, you actually can really help with like hangovers and detox and stuff like that to you can actually feel like a million bucks after you do hot cold contrast. I remember my wife and I did it for about 45 minutes when we were at this special sauna in Jamaica and this was after a night where we’ve been out on the town kinda doing the margarita ville thing and you know, we did a hot cold contrast like 45 minutes and walked out of the sauna just feeling like a million bucks like we had touched a drop of alcohol so there are benefits that go above and beyond simply fat loss and muscle recovery. Anyways though, there are also other things that you can do. I’ll put a link to a big article that I wrote about cold thermogenesis, it’s called The Cold Thermogenesis How-To and it talks about how you can do something like when you’re sitting at your desk, use one of this vests that you can get from coolfatburner.com and this vest from coolfatburner.com wrap around your collar bone and your back and the areas where you tend to have a lot of brown adipose tissue and they cause that brown adipose tissue to burn calories, to create heat to keep your body warm. You can also get compression tights like the 110% compression tights and put ice sleeves into those if you wanna do a similar thing for your lower body with the added advantage that when you combine compression with ice, you actually enhance recovery and you stop a lot of potential what’s called a back flow of some of your lymph fluid when you’re icing and you’re not compressing at the same time. So a lot of kinda ways that you can use cool temperature but to answer Jenna’s question about like which one is better for recovery and which one is better for fat loss, the contrast showers are better for fat loss and they’re more comfortable and they’re more doable too like one in the morning and one in the evening. The cold water immersion, I’ve personally found to work better for recovery in terms of lowering inflammation and lowering post workouts soreness and also something that I’ll use a lot of times during or before workout to pre-cool the body especially before a hot workout. So the issue is that, that is a total and equals one statement because the evidence goes back and forth about whether or not cold water immersion really truly does work to reduce soreness or enhance recovery or if’s kinda all up in your head. So, you kinda have to go out and try it and I know it’s kind of a cup out answer but I’ve personally found that cold thermogenesis in terms of cold water immersion for me, when you compare to a hot cold contrast showers or like putting ice on area or even using compression tights with ice in them nothing for me beats going out and going out shoulder deep down into the cold Spokane river behind my house and just like standing there for 15 or 20 minutes or treading some water, nothing I have found beats that when it comes to my muscles feeling or recovered so, there’s that.

Mike:    Hi Ben, a big fan of your shows, 44 years old worked out my whole life, the last ten years seems like I react differently to humidity when it’s really hot and humid I sweat, I sweat a lot whether I’m working out or not it’s obviously just very embarrassing in social situations, I just feel like it looks like I’ve come out of the pool and wonder if you can kinda help me out give me ideas on other way to tolerate the heat better other than shutting down the air conditioner off when I’m inside it’s just embarrassing, it’s inconvenient and you know, I’ll have tell my people I just finished the workout like 15, 20 minutes before so if they’ll ask or I’ll go out and say it’s really hot out, you know, so anyway I can do about better let me know, there you take out sweat glands, help.

[0:40:37.5]

Brock:  This is again every time somebody brings out the excessive sweating, I’m always all ears because I’m a very heavy sweater and I like the way Mike is thinking here someway to shut it down by always being hot which is completely against what Jenna has to it and Mike said that he, should he shut off his air conditioning, so I’m thinking yeah, maybe just get being more conditioned to the heat.

Ben:  Heat acclamation actually causes you to sweat more. It makes you more efficient at sweating unfortunately.

Brock:  That’s right, it increases the blood volume and stuff doesn’t it so you can sweat more efficiently.

Ben:  It’s actually a biohack that I used before like the, for example for the next month before Ironman Hawaii I’ll be using this product called Sweet Sweat that I can put on my skin and it increases the temperature of your skin. It’s got cayenne pepper and a bunch of essential oils in it and then you go sit in a sauna after you put this …..

Brock:  So it’s a marinade.

Ben:  It’s a marinade, a juicy juicy marinade. You put it on your skin you go sit in a sauna and it jacks up your body temperature or your skin temperature specifically even higher than you get if you weren’t wearing it and so you just, you pour buckets of sweat and it really amps up your body temp but what you find is that you start to pit out and sweat more ‘cause your body just gets so efficient at cooling itself that the sweat flows even more so in Mike’s case, if he’s a heavy sweater already, heat acclamation protocols would probably not be such a hot idea or intended for him. Hyperhidrosis is something we’ve talked about on the podcast before though and hyperhidrosis is a condition characterized by abnormally increased sweating or perspiration if you’re a lady since ladies don’t sweat as we all know, they simply perspire, they glow.

Brock:  Of course, they glow.

Ben:  So, hyperhidrosis – it could be something that’s caused by genetics so it could be congenital, it could be acquired and I’ll explain in a second what I mean by acquired but either way you sweat more and there is, part of it is increased nervous system activity like sympathetic fight or flight nervous system activity, part of it is greater density of sweat glands some of it can be exacerbated by nervousness or excitement and I really try not butcher saying the word exacerbate right there because I almost turned it into a different word. And foods and drinks and caffeine and smoking and even different kinds of smells can trigger this hyperhidrotic response of excessive sweating. In many many many people what I have found to be the issue when it something that kinda pop up at some point in your life and you really weren’t a heavy sweater before typically it’s because you have gone through a period of stress in your life that has created a little bit of an autoimmune situation meaning that for example, someone who I know very closely went through a personal relationship issue, kind of a divorce type of scenario and within several weeks they were allergic or intolerant to a variety of foods that they would normally have been able to consumed just fine in the past and for this person it manifested in hives, rashes, sweating, some gut issues – bloating, constipation things of that nature. But this is a situation that can be brought about by stress increased sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight activity from that stress and then increase gut permeability and kind of an imbalance in the neurotransmitters produced by the gut and some of the issues we’ve talked all about an episode 154 when we talked about just like how gut issues can be the precursor to a lot of other issues. So, autoimmune protocol and I’ll put a link to the autoimmune protocol, the autoimmune ebook that I’m a fan of, it’s a 4-8 week autoimmune protocol that you could use to see if your high amount of sweating is indeed due to an autoimmune reaction and it just cuts out common autoimmune triggers like soy and wheat and dairy but actually provides you with some meals that allow you to do something other than just like, I don’t know, sip, yeah, chew on cardboard or just eat icy’s from 711 or whatever.

[0:45:13.7]

So you’ve got that, the autoimmune protocol something that you can definitely try but there are some other natural kinda home remedies for excessive sweating that you can also try. So, some of the things that are effective natural remedies for hyperhidrosis include number 1- using apple cider vinegar and actually consuming it about 3 times a day on an empty stomach, you can also soak some cotton balls in apple cider vinegar and you can rub it into your underarms to get rid of some of the odor that’s produced from excessive sweat, coconut oil instantly also works very well for that but as far as actually …..

Brock:  That doesn’t sound that it would smell better though putting apple cider vinegar in your armpits like that, that’s not gonna smell good.

Ben:  Well, it has an anti-bacterial action remember that sweat doesn’t stink it’s the bacteria that are in your armpits metabolizing sweat.

Brock:  Yeah, I’m just saying that the vinegar itself smells and even when you’re in your kitchen with vinegar, it’s smells like vinegar for a few hours so you wiped it on your armpits and sure you’re not getting b.o. but you’ve got v. o.

Ben:  Similar to cleaning a house though, you could wipe it on your armpits and then you just do like a soap and water cleanse afterwards if you wanted to get rid of the vinegar smell. So, you could do that.

Brock:  Uhm, good point. Next.

Ben:  Coconut oil would also work. Another thing that may help in a similar manner and this would just be basically away to kinda shutdown a little bit of sympathetic nervous system activity in a similar way that eating vinegar on an empty stomach would be to have a glass of tomato juice and you can do just a fresh glass of tomato juice preferably not the v8 stuff but just like regular old tomato juice several times a day and that’s another thing that has traditionally been used as home remedy for excessive sweating. So, that’s another thing. There are a couple of herbs, one is witch hazel, the other is sage and both witch hazel and sage tea can help to get rid of excessive sweating. They help to reduce the sweat gland activity though activate the para sympathetic nervous system a little bit to reduce underarm sweating so that’s something else that you could try. It’s an herbal tea made out of like sage or witch hazel those are two of kinda traditional herbs. As far as some other things that you could try, that go above and beyond just like an autoimmune protocol, sometimes iodine-rich foods can aggravate sweating and that would be specifically some of your cruciferous kinda stingy foods like broccoli or asparagus or onions those would be some things that you could be careful with and some of those can kinda cause sweating and also cause sweat to stink a little bit more. The other things that can cause that would be foods that are rich in nitrate or foods that are also rich in purine based proteins. So having a lot of like beef and liver and dark poultry meat and stuff like that can also aggravate the issue and I know that these stuff is just kind of like you know, it might be tricky for some people to eliminate but if you’re trying to get rid of sweating and you just wanted to try out a few things, these are the things that are traditionally used as like natural remedies if you didn’t wanna go  in for surgery to have your sweat glands cut out. So, last thing is wheatgrass and wheatgrass juice can actually be an effective home remedy for excessive sweating. We actually grow wheatgrass on our counter and …..

Brock:  I thought that was something new and fancy I haven’t heard it before.

Ben:  Wheat jazz. Wheat jazz juice. Anyways, wheatgrass juice, we grow wheatgrass and just drop it into smoothies you can just cut it with scissors after it grown in your counter and toss it into a smoothie or just you know, I guess you could eat it if you wanted to you can blend it to make wheatgrass but having a glass of wheatgrass a day similar to like having a glass of tomato juice a day or drinking some of these herbal tea or using the apple cider vinegar, all of those are things that you can definitely try for excessive sweating if you don’t just wanna go and get the sweat glands snipped so to speak.

Brock:  Is that really a thing?

Ben:  That really is a thing sweat gland removal or destruction is a surgical option or …..

Brock:  I’ve heard of giving the botox injection….

Ben:  Botox is another one but it’s very similar to like a liposuction with lasers, it’s called lasers sweat ablation and you can also use a similar technique that you’d use for liposuction or sucking fat out and it’s called sweat glands suction. So, ….

Brock:  I just worry that keeping all that sweat inside you just explode at some point.

Ben:  At some point your head is just gonna like swell up and you’ll explode in one nasty stinky pile of sweat.

[0:50:06.9]

Brock:  Exactly.

Ben:  I’m sure that they have looked into that and …. they did a little bit of research before the surgical procedure which approved by the FDA or not, so there you go.

Brock:  I’d be the first.

JustWondering:   How many times do you poop in a day?

Ben:  Well, that was short and to the point.

Brock:  It’s right to the point and I like it.

Ben:  Speaking of stuff building up inside of you and exploding. So, how many times do you poop in a day? Well, I can go right out there and tell you how many times I poop in a day and it’s once. So, I have one big bowel movement in the morning where I’m typically, I’ll sit on my squatty potty and I sip my cup of coffee and usually I read my kindle for a few minutes and do my big bowel movement for the day and that’s it and I really don’t go back to the toilet other than to pee after that so I’m a one a day-er and I used to be more of like a 2 or 3 day-er until I decided that I wanted to be 1 a day-er and so I just kinda stay in there in the bathroom until I kinda eliminate everything in the morning and then I just don’t go back in the rest of the day, I’ve kinda trained my body to just go once in the morning and that works out pretty well for me. How about you Brock?

Brock:  I’m extremely similar, I did the same thing a few years ago. Actually when I started racing it’s when I started start doing marathons that I just decided, okay well this is, I’ve got my protocol down, I have my big glass of water, I get my cup of coffee (have a couple sips of that) and badabing badabang, it’s all done!

Ben:  Your para-sympathetic nervous system is pretty active in the morning and it’s really conducive time to just get everything out if you’re able to, if you have the luxury of not waking up and being in a stress hectic rush to get to work and you know, skip a morning trip to the bathroom and that kinda thing. If you can make some time in the morning, you can actually train your body to get in to this kinda one a day scenario and if you need some help getting that along, you should listen to my podcast episode I did with the guy named Troy Casey.

Brock:  With the poop expert.

Ben:  The poop expert, who’s also a male model. He’s a male model and a poop expert. So, there are 2 unique populations that we’ve discussed, the soccer playing wood choppers and the male model poop experts in today’s episode. I will link to that one in the show notes but he’s got a, Troy has a what’s called his better pooping regimen which is a combination of something called Dr. Schultz’s Intestinal Formula, clay literally the edible earth clay and then a high fiber herbal colon cleanse and I think Troy and I talked about this in the episode but I talked to Troy a little bit about how I feel like the high fiber cleanses cause more potential damage to the small intestine and long term build up in the gut rather than really helping you to poop long term and actually there was an article that came up today Brock and I were talking about it before the show about how  too much fiber may also be bad for your sexual performance. So, I’m not a huge fan of high fiber supplements, I personally recommend if you want to kind of get your body into a state where it initiates that bowel movement a little bit easily in the morning. Two things that I like: one is called mag07 and that is like an oxygenated magnesium and compared to all of the other forms of magnesium out there this is the stuff that I think has the most potent stool softening effect. So, that would be one and then the other one is called the Colorectal Recovery Program and if you have a lot of issues with your colon and your pooping mechanics and all that jazz it maybe due to some kind of a bacterial imbalance in your large intestine or something that needs to be addressed from like a fatty acid or a mineral standpoint in your colon and the colorectal recovery program is something that I successfully used when I got pretty severely constipated after a bout of antibiotics and this kinda rescued me. So I talked about all of those and linked to all of those both choice better pooping regimen and also Ben’s better pooping regimen in the How to Poop Episode so I will link to the How to Poop episode in my response to her, but yeah, I’m a one day-er and it’s just a combination of the Squatty Potty and just kinda wakin’ up in the morning and I don’t even use anymore, I don’t use a stool as often or anything like that in the evening, I just kinda get up and go but initially when I was poop training myself, so to speak, I started off by using some of those evening stool softeners and occasionally if I’ve had something that I know constipates me such as too much alcohol, I’ll still do that.

[0:55:12.7]

Brock:  I remember the guys who invented the specific carbohydrate diet, the SCD when they were on the show they were talking about how especially the one fellow, I can’t remember his name, he was having like what basically what we were refer to as poo emergencies quite often during the day and he cured basically while he was inventing this specific carbohydrate diet so isn’t it often like people who do have to go more than once a day, it’s likely because there’s something going on that isn’t quite right that they need to sort to figure that out a little bit.

Ben:  Yeah, it can be infections, irritable bowel syndrome, it can be like an allergic reaction, like an autoimmune issue. Anytime you’re going more than 3 times a day, that would be a case where you should be definitely look into using something like the specific carbohydrate diet, eliminating what are called fodmaps which you could go do a search for at bengreenfieldfitness.com ‘cause I’ve talked about them before there just fermentable foods that can cause issues with going to the bathroom too much or becoming constipated. And yes, going less than once a day or going like 3 plus times a day are both issues that you may need to address some kind of a bacterial imbalance or kinda dig a little deeper when it comes to figuring out what’s going on, Interestingly the other thing that you need to pay attention to is color and there’s something called the Bristol Stool Scale which shows you the proper texture that poop is supposed to be but there are also charts out there that show you different colors of what an ideal stool should be and you’ll notice a lot of times in athletes that the color of poo is more brown sometimes a little bit even borderline black and that’s because of bilirubin which is this pigment that’s generated when you breakdown red blood cells. A lot of times once you start exercising or during a period of time when you’re exercising heavily, your poop gets darker and that’s something I’ve noticed because my kids forget to flush a lot, it’s that their poop is like really light colored compared to mine which is very dark and it’s because of my levels of exercise and that bilirubin formed by the breakdown of red blood cells. So, all sorts of interesting things that you can delve into and we could probably talk about poop for really a long time but ultimately one a day is in my opinion a really convenient way to train your body to go and then if you’re not even going once a day, or you’re going more than 3 times a day, something is probably up and I’d get that checked out.

Brock:  And as Dr. Kellogg used to say “Never resist the urge to defecate”.

Ben:  Never resist the urge ….. that’s actually really good advice, you should, if you need to poo, go poo because when you resist the urge it actually can damage the nerves that are up inside of you and it can also cause an impact and some issues with restraining hemorrhoids stuff like that so when the urge to poo happens, go poo. So, that’s being said, I’ll be right back. No I’m just kidding.

Kelcey:   Hi Ben, hi Brock. This is Kelcey calling. Since I have been listening to your podcast and reading some of the great articles that you’ve written and doing the superhuman coaching thing and I’ve gotten kind of into checking the ingredients on everything especially like cosmetics and skin care products. So anyways, there’s a company that I’ve been buying skin care products from for years it’s called Hydron and so I was reading the ingredients list and they were using BHA as a preservative in one of their products that I really like. So, I sent them an email, you know, with my concerns, they sent me an email back saying well you know, we really need our products to be shelf stable and vit E and rosemary oil would probably cut down the ton that these products would stay fresh. So, I sent her another email with a link to a couple of articles. One was about a new preservative called Rosamox made from rosemary that is good for skin care products and…. anyways, to make the long story short, she sent me an email back and she said, “thank you for the great articles, I’m forwarding these articles to our chemist and she said because of your email we are going to start testing this Rosamox in our products, you know, maybe we’ll see if we can switch over and get rid of the BHA in our products”. So that was just really cool to get that email to actually make a difference to a company and that company would actually listen to me, that’s pretty cool, anyways, thanks for everything you do.

[1:00:05.8]

Brock:  So that was a really great story and you know, there isn’t really a question in what Kelcey said but I decided that we should put it in the show anyway because I sort of have the question now after hearing her story of successfully getting this company that actually looking to switching to something else. Is that actually better, as Rosamox going to be better than the BHA?

Ben:  Sure. They’re just both anti-oxidants. So BHA is something that gets added to a lot of foods and supplements and skin care products because it’s a fat preservative. So we all know that like fish oil if we get fish oil and it’s not packaged with an antioxidant and it’s not cold processed and it’s not in its triglyceride base form it’s doing more harm to your body than good to consume that fish oil but if the antioxidant that they add to that fish oil is say a BHA derivative antioxidant then that also turns that fish oil into something that is potentially carcinogenic and something that has more oxidative stress producing properties potentially because that is a synthetic chemical that BHA so what you’re seeing the better companies doing now are choosing natural antioxidants that preserve fats in both supplements and nutraceuticals and skin products using natural antioxidants that are extracted using a different form of chemistry specifically in the case of this Rosamox stuff it’s extracted using super critical carbon dioxide and that’s totally solvent free, it’s green, it’s sustainable and it results in an end product and an antioxidant that actually doesn’t have those same type of carcinogenic properties and chemical properties as traditional BHA. So, that’s fantastic that a company which used to use something like Rosemox instead of BHA and this is something that I’ve kinda have my head into recently anyways because as I think as I’ve mentioned on the show before, I am in the process of developing a supplement line that specifically designed for kinda like hard charging people who wanna get the most out of their bodies and out of their minds and I’ve had to look at ton into the actual ingredients that are used and you know, how we can generate a formulation that allows you to have just 1 pill bottle in your fridge and kinda get everything done in 1 fell swoop and yes I’m subscribing right now to all these natural supplement insider magazines and it’s mind blowing and mind boggling how many different labs and ingredients source materials are out there that you could use and I’m sure that there are many many companies out there making these decisions based solely on price and not on long term effects so you certainly got to be careful. My wife actually has done some webinars inside the Ben Greenfield fitness Inner Circle where she not only talks about how to make your own sunscreen and your own natural skin protectants but she talks about how to protect your skin by avoiding chemicals, how to choose the right products, she’s got a bunch of videos in there like the lotions that she uses and everything. I talked to her last night though and I actually asked her, you know, if I wanted to tell the listeners to the podcast tomorrow some of the little things that you do, can you tell me and so some of the things that she does is she dry brushes her whole body everyday. And we don’t have lot of time today to get into what dry brushing is but essentially it’s kind of a removal of a lot of dead skin cells and you could go google dry brushing and you’d find a lot about it.

Brock:  I found it’s exactly what it sounds like.

Ben:  Yeah, it is.

Brock:  So it’s kinda a lot of mystery there.

Ben:  Yeah, so she dry brushes everyday, she uses a mineral based make up made by a company called Ferro that’s F-E-R-R-O. She washes her face with a very hypo-allergenic soap and it’s a goat milk soap and I believe she gets that goat milk soap from the local health food store and then she also uses coconut oil a coconut oil rinse as an oil cleansing method to cleanse like bacteria and stuff off of her skin. Once a week she scrubs her skin with baking soda for about 5-10 minutes and she doesn’t do that anymore often than once a week because it can really be very drying to the skin to use baking soda too often and she used to really have to deal quite significantly with acne and actually that’s one of the things that initially kinda tuned us into some of this.

 [1:05:05.0]

you know, kinda westerner price ancestral paleo primal eating was kind figure out how to get rid of some of her acne about 6 or 7 years ago or so and we bought one of Loren Cordain’s books called something like The Dietary Cure for Acne and she picked up a lot of kinda natural dietary tips from that but she has great skin now, if she does get a breakout, she does a honey mask, she makes a honey mask that’s another thing that you could look into using against ….we won’t get into on the show, she does talk about her recipes though inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle and when she gets kinda like a freak pimple, she dubs just like a baking soda based toothpaste on it overnight to draw the infection and then she makes most of her own stuff aside from the mineral based make up and puts all those recipes into the inner circle. So we’ve got a lot of listeners I know, I think we have about 800 listeners who were inner circle members so for those of you who are inner circle members, I’ll just kinda put the link to the 2 webinars if you don’t wanna go search for them in the Inner Circle, I’ll link to them straight from the show notes for this episode, episode number 255. And if you’re not an Inner Circle member it’s 10 bucks a month so it’s pretty cool. We actually just did a webinar 2 nights ago called Dieting Sucks where we talk about why dieting sucks, why we don’t diet and how you too can not diet. So, there’s that shameless commercial for the Inner Circle and yeah, that’s what I’ve got for you.

Brock:  That’s interesting though that just I had skin problems before ‘cause having just spent 4 days straight with you guys, she has really great skin now. I saw her first thing in the morning and she looks great.

Ben:  Yeah, and let me say this too. I don’t want to take my own horn too much but I personally get a lot of complements about my skin, about the color of my skin, the texture of my skin, and when I don’t have my squirrel flowing beard essentially the youthfulness of my skin and what I use on a daily basis is I use olive oil as my moisturizer, just a regular extra virgin olive oil which is chockfull of healthful skin protectants and polyphenols. I take about 6 mgs of astaxanthin per day and that’s a natural skin protector. I don’t even use sunscreen, I didn’t put a single drop of sunscreen under like something Ironman Canada and I used to use super essential fish oil which has astaxanthin packaged along with it. Another really good source of astaxanthin is from the big island down in Kona, I forget the brand but it’s called like Kona or big island astaxanthin or Hawaii astaxanthin or something like that. And then the only other things I do is I use all natural personal care products. So I use hair pomade that’s made of coconut oil and hemp oil, I only use Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap which is again hemp oil and I think olive oil and a few other natural antibacterials, I used Br. Bronner’s shaving cream for my shaving cream and that’s again just made from natural oils you could literally eat the stuff and you’d be just fine, doesn’t hurt you and then I use a little bit of coconut oil occasionally in my armpits as a deodorant and that is about the extent of my own personal care product line and so essentially my rule for what I used on my face is if I could eat it without dying or if I could eat it without getting sick or getting a tummy ache then it’s probably okay to put on my face or on my skin so that’s the rule that I follow. Just recently we put out a video over at youtube.com/bengreenfieldfitness about that too. So that’s how Jessa and I go about our own care for our skin and hopefully that gives you listeners some ideas as well.

Brock:  Pretty much the first thing that people ask me when they found out that I work with you is, first they ask, how old is Ben? And then the second thing they ask is, how much money does he make? So of course, I answer, well he’s 67 years old and I think he makes about a 100 bucks.

Bob:  Hey guys, I’m Bob from Wildwood, New Jersey. I’m a long time listener and show supporter. My question today regards bone spurs. I have a serious bone spur near my big toe and it just keeps getting worst with every run, I’m hoping to learn of some magic pain treatment or recommendation to fix it. I wish I know surgery is inevitable but I had to reach. I’m curious at all what causes bone spurs and is there any non-surgical fixes that you can recommend. Alright thanks and keep up the great work, I look forward to hearing from you.

Brock:  You know, Bob needs to just go over to the website and do a search for bone healing or (what else could he look for) we’ve talked a lot about how to heal broken bones or fractures and stuff like that, I’m assuming it’s a similar type of answer here.

[1:10:16.8]

Ben:  Well, specifically with bone spurs though. The problem with bone spurs is you know, that’s an actual physical spur, I mean a lot of times you talked about stress fractures and how you can use like lactoferrin and electro magnetic stimulation and you know, glucosamine chondroitin from something like Capraflex and like ways you could heal stress fractures or even broken bones more quickly but a spur is actually a literal growth mean it’s an ______ [1:10:44.1] it’s a boney growth that typically forms on the back of your heel or on the front of your toes in response to stress in that area and it’s kind of a different situation right ‘cause it’s not something that needs to be melded or welded or fixed, it’s something that almost needs to be kind of like broken down or removed. So …..

Brock:  Ah interesting, I was thought that bone spur was actually part of the bone head sort of broken, not completely off but it’s just separated and was sort of sticking out like a spur but it’s actually growth eh.

Ben:  It’s an actual growth so if you look out like everybody’s got the little bump on the front of their knees and I thought this was really interesting in Anatomy back in the university when we look at the bones. In specific places where tendons that you use a lot attached to bones or where ligaments attached to bones and pull on those bones, you have bumps that’s why you have that bump on the front of your knee it’s because of the weda patella tendon attaches and in areas where bone is stressed its response by growing and in some places where there is repetitive injury or repetitive stress such as you know, in runners we’re putting repetitive stress on our heel or repetitive stress on their toes, you actually….. you can observed this osteophytes forming and pain develops eventually from this spur. So if you just wanted to control the pain, you just use a natural pain killing anti-inflammatory and a lot of people that’s enough. Like you can use something like a high dose curcumin extract like I use phenocane. So phenocane, it’s a turmeric, it’s nato kinase, it’s pheno alanine, it’s a bunch of stuff that works in my opinion just as well as ibuprofen or advil with zero side effects. Now phenocane is something I’ll use for hang-overs, it’s something I’ll use for muscle pain and I use about 8 a day for a week after Ironman to reduce my risk of blood clotting……

Brock:  I took a bunch of them before I went to the dentist once because I knew it was going to be a painful procedure.

Ben:  Yeah, so curcumin is a pretty potent brain anti-inflammatory as well so anytime who have brain fog interestingly can kinda help to clear that up too. But that’s what I would use for the pain killing part of this. If I personally ever gotta bone spur though I can tell you the very first thing that I would personally do before I even consider going in for surgery which is an option (survival option) you can have it removed and that’s not dangerous surgery. I would consider using pulse electromagnetic therapy. So, you’ve perhaps heard me talked about that earth pulse device that I placed underneath my mattress, it’s like grounding or like earthing on steroids meaning that it amplifies the natural frequency emitted by the planet earth while you’re sleeping and you basically soak up all those beneficial frequencies into your body. Very very low frequency is very different from like a cell phone or microwave or something like that as you’re sleeping.

Brock:  And you shrink your testicles down to the size of …..

Ben:  No, okay. And if it does you can just go and chop some wood. Anyways though, you can also take….it’s a magnetic, you can take the north end pole of a pulse electromagnetic frequency device like the earth pulse and you can place it against an injured area and it can enhance blood flow to that area. Now in the case of a bone spur there is actually….. there’s really interesting study online that shows some of the PDM after results on breaking down areas of excessive osteophyte formation but there’s a really interesting x-ray where within 6 months of this PEMF treatment there’s new elimination of a bone spur that’s almost penetrating the spinal cord in somebody’s back so it’s essentially a frequency that kinda breaks down a little bit of that bone. So what you do is you’d  hold it against the area where the spur is for about 15-20 minutes a day, north end pole would go up against the bone. Don’t worry it doesn’t like break down bone in that when you hold a hinge of bone you gonna like make a bunch of weak bones in your foot. It doesn’t work that way.

[1:15:07.8]

It’s just essentially working on that area, the excessive osteophyte formation it’s a frequency that’s emitted by the PEMF device fortunately also has a little bit of a pain killing effect. So that’s what I would use at least for a little while I would use it for a good couple of months and then if nothing’s happening, then go in and schedule your surgery, and get the bone spur removed and go do a search on bengreenfieldfitness.com for surgery so you know about all ways to bounce back faster like using proteolytic enzymes and all that jazz. That’s what I would do, I would use phenocane, I would use pulse electromagnetic field therapy and if you are a runner or a jumper or somebody who’s concerned about potential for a heal spur or a toast for reformation, the best recommendation I could give to you would be to a) strength train so that you are training your body to not have to put excessive stress on a joint but instead training your body how to weight bear a little bit more evenly and then be make sure that you are using footwear that’s really design very very properly for your specific foot and this is actually a blog post that I’m working on because I just personally had some customed fitted cycling shoes designed and they’re really cool and I’m working on a blog post about the kind of the closest thing that you can get to barefoot running for cyclist. They’re made by a company called Rocket 7 so I’m gonna be writing an article where …..

Brock:  It doesn’t sound like a good idea.

Ben:  What’s that?

Brock:  That they just seems kinda sort of counter intuitive to wanna be, why would you be wanna be barefoot on …..

Ben:  Oh no, they’ve got like a carbon foot plate and everything like the power transfer ______ [1:16:55.2] and they’re developed by professional cyclists but they’re literally molded to your foot. Like you do a casting of your foot, you send into this company, you put on the shoe and you can’t tell you’re wearing a shoe when you’re riding your bike but you still have the power transfer and everything. So it’s not like using those cheesy barefoot plates, I actually raise the Wildflower Triathlon in those once the….. I forget what they call but they’re not cycling pedals they’re actual platforms like I think they’re called pyro platforms and you…..

Brock:  Oh that’s snap into your where your clips would go?

Ben:  Not a good idea. They’re my transition during the triathlons like 5 minutes long and my feet were killing me for like weeks so yeah, true traditional barefoot cycling I don’t recommend but using customed fitted cycling shoes, holy cow, if you’re planning to be a cyclist long term, ah awesome, awesome stuff. Those are made by Rocket 7.

Brock:  Well, maybe you can get some branded with the BG Fitness logo.

Ben:  That’s right. I’ve got my name on mine. They’d say, “Be Green Field” ‘cause I don’t think Ben Greenfield would fit along the entire….. or just probably didn’t like Ben Green.

Brock:  so I was just actually joking about that ‘cause I wanted to find a way to segue to asking you if you have your Ben Greenfield fitness swag on all lined up to give away to our awesome ITunes reviews.

Ben:  Yes, you and your tricky segues. No, no, I don’t but I’m still sending out cool care packages for reviews. I should have that swag on by about mid-September so all of hats and I’ll have water bottles and I’ll have shirts like not croppy cotton shirts that look like tens but actually like nice fitting tech t-shirts for all of our muscly ripped listeners.

Brock:  All the people who do silly bench press.

Ben:  That’s right, all you silly silly bench pressers. So, if you want to leave your review on ITunes, what we do is if we read your review on the show then you can let us know that you heard your review being read and you give us your address and we send you a care package. So, it might be a canned of Campbell soup or maybe some crackers, some …..

Brock:  Some of those Oreo cookies with the double stuffing, everybody goes upset about it lately.

Ben:  That’s right, that’s right, that’s right or perhaps if you give me this week a survival kit maybe I’ll send you some beef jerky and some …..

Brock:  Oh, maybe one of your home grown girls.

Ben:  astronaut capsules that need to add water to get a turkey dinner. Anyways though, today’s review is left on ITunes by Try Buddha who only gave our podcast 4 stars not 5 stars. I have no clue why but anyways (I’m gonna read it anyways).

Brock:  Try Buddha, not cool Try Buddha not cool.

Ben:  But he says, “A great kick in the pants” so Try Buddha says…..

Brock:  I’ll give him a kick in the pants 4 stars worth.

Ben:  “Ben and Brock do a fantastic job each week bringing you everything you need to know about health, fitness, nutrition and holistic living. His tips and tricks on how to hack healthy living motivate and inform me on how to live a better life. It is one of the few podcast that actually bases all the recommendations on actual science and not tin hat conspiracy theories. Even the poop discussions have a (ready for this) nugget of truth in them”. Try Buddha you are such a kick in the pants and because you only left 4 stars, I think I may actually just send you a nugget if you catch my meaning. Anyways, a dark bilirubin colored nugget. So, there you have it.

Brock:  Nice.

Ben:  So anyways, yes, if you wanna leave your review go over to ITunes and of course if you want a special website that allows you to give the gift of Ben Greenfield fitness to your friends, your family, your loved ones or your extremely annoyed co-workers, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/love and at bengreenfieldfitness.com/love you can share the wealth and at bengreenfieldfitness.com/255 you can get the show notes for this episode and if you’re lucky, I might actually show up next week or a couple of weeks and a, if not, goodbye everyone it was nice knowing you.

 

 

Sep 4, 2013 Podcast: how to get strong as a bull and then get ripped, how to get better results from cold thermogenesis, what to do about excessive sweating, how often should you poop, the best natural skin care strategies, and how to get rid of a bone spur without surgery.

Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right, 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… but be prepared to wait – we prioritize audio questions over text questions.

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News Flashes:

You can get these News Flashes hot off the presses if you follow Ben on Twitter.com/BenGreenfieldFacebook.com/BGFitness and Google+.

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Special Announcements:

Ben’s official Ironman Canada/ketosis/minimalist training race report – came out on Sunday in a special Premium Podcast. Sign up and check it out!

ONE slot remaining – November 14 or 21 to December 4, 2013 Thailand Triathlon Adventure with Ben Greenfield – details at pacificfit.net/thailand. Now including the pre-camp: It’s a “high end” triathlon training resort. Brand new facilities – check ’em out! We’re going to do coached sessions every day. It won’t be hardcore training as much as a focus on learning about nutrition, training, fitness, and how to “get the edge” in endurance, life and health!

September 10 to 12, 2013: The Global Business Triathlon Conference is featuring Ben Greenfield as a speaker. Hilton London Metropole, London, UK – Join us for the premier global gathering of leaders of the triathlon business community. Enjoy three days of learning, networking and fun at the newly renovated Hilton London Metropole, conveniently located near the ITU World Championship activities in Hyde Park. Here is a link to the Facebook page for the London meetup with Ben Greenfield.

February 6 to March 6, 2014: Want to get into the Perfect Health Diet retreat in Austin, Texas? Click here for all details. Ben Greenfield will be presenting at the Feb 6-Mar 6 retreat.

If you’re looking for a topic we covered in the past – we have released the Ben Greenfield Fitness Top Hits, Vol. 1 on iTunes.

And of course, this week’s top iTunes review – gets some BG Fitness swag straight from Ben – leave your review for a chance to win some!

 

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Listener Q&A:

As compiled, edited and sometimes read by Brock, the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast “sidekick”.

How To Get Strong As A Bull, And Then Get Ripped

555 says @ 00:22:53
Do you think the Strong Lift 555 program is effective for someone trying to bulk up?

~ In my reply, I recommend “Starting Strength” by Mark Rippetoe, the book “Interventions” by Dan John, and my 9 Month Men’s Muscle Building Program on TrainingPeaks.

How To Get Better Results From Cold Thermogenesis

Jenna says @ 00:32:16
Is it better to use all cold water (like an ice bath) or cycle between cold and hot water (like a contrast shower) to maximize the effects of cold thermogenesis? Is there a clear winner or is one better for recovery goals and one better for metabolic goals?

~ In my response to Jenna, I recommend the Ray Cronise episode inside the BenGreenfieldFitness phone app. I also recommend my Cold Thermogenesis How-To article.

What To Do About Excessive Sweating

Mike says @ 00:39:43
He’s a 44-year-old who has worked out his whole life. In the last 10 years, he has started reacting differently to humidity – he sweats a lot. To the point of embarrassment. Should he shut off the air conditioning? Is there any way he can learn to deal with heat and humidity better?

~ In my reply, I mention an autoimmune protocol.

How Often Should You Poop?

JustWondering says @ 00:50:19
How many times should you poop in a day?

~ In my response, I mention the How To Poop The Right Way episode we did. I also recommend The Squatty Potty.

The best natural skin care strategies

Kelcey says @ 00:58:21
She buys skin care products from Hydron but they contain BHA. She emailed Hydron about it and there was some back and forth. In the end, because of her email, they are going to start some testing to see if they can get rid of the BHA in their products and use Rosamox instead. Is this better?

~ In my response, I mention the two BenGreenfieldFitness Inner Circle webinars: How To Make Your Own Sunscreen & Natural Skin Protection and How To Protect Your Skin By Avoiding Chemicals And Choosing The Right Products.

How To Get Rid of A Bone Spur Without Surgery

Bob says @ 01:09:23
He has a serious bone spur near his big toe. He knows surgery is inevitable but is hoping to learn why bone spurs happen and if there is a non-surgical treatment for them.

~ In my response, I recommend Phenocane and Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy with an Earthpulse device.

Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/09/255-how-to-get-strong-as-a-bull-and-then-get-ripped-cold-thermogenesis-quick-tips-how-often-should-you-poop/

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