Podcast #216 from

http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2012/11/episode-216-6-hidden-ways-that-

you-may-be-lowering-your-metabolism-gaining-fat

[0:00:00.0]

Introduction: In today’s podcast, 6 hidden ways that you may be lowering your

metabolism and gaining fat. Also: do body wraps work for weight

loss, getting rid of diastasis recti, ways to increase your VO2max,

how to work your upper body without using your arms, and will

hyperbaric therapy work for recovery?

Brock: Hey Ben! What’s happening?

Ben: I’m sitting here in my office with my guitar in my lap. Can you

hear me? Can you hear my guitar?

Brock: I can. It sounds glorious.

Ben: Glorious! I finally get launched back into guitar lessons this week.

I’ve got this guy who’s like a MMA fighter and a heavy metal

guitar guy and he also does a lot of acoustic rock. Anyways, he’s

teaching teenagers guitar lessons at our YMCA so I approached

him about maybe letting me take guitar lessons and he said yes.

As a matter of fact, we’re gonna cancel the podcast and we’re

going to just start a band, Brock and I.

News Flashes:

Brock: All right. To get these and other interesting news flashes every

week, make sure you follow Ben on Twitter and at Google + and

you can find the links to Twitter and Google+ if you go to

bengreenfieldfitness.com and scroll along the right hand side.

Ben, what are you gonna highlight for us today?

Ben: Well, there were a couple of studies that are going to basically give

you a heart attack if you run next to busy roads just because you’d

be worrying so much about your health. I twitted why you

shouldn’t run next to busy roads and it’s not because you’ll get hit

by a car. And I also had another follow up twit after that that

talked about how we’re toxifying ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I

do not believe that people should live inside a bubble but the

inspiration for this started with the study in the Medicine Science

Sports and Exercise Journal. With the study they have in there

entitled The Sub-Clinical Effects of Aerobic Training in an Urban

Environment and they looked at inflammation, neural

inflammation and cognitive performance.

Brock: Wait…neural inflammation? Is that the inflammation in the brain

itself?

Ben: Yeah. Exactly. You can look at your brain derive the neuropathic

factor – that’s the factor that increases from aerobic exercise and

helps out with your IQ. You can also look at how much nitric

oxide you’re exhaling. There’s a bunch of different psychomotor

and memory tests that you can do for cognitive performance. And

then of course, for inflammation, you can look at leukocyte counts

in the blood stream and other inflammatory markers as well.

Brock: So, does that require them actually like peeking at your brain, you

can look for markers in the blood and other places?

Ben: No hacks are required to lift the lid of your head or something like

that. What they found was that aerobic training in an urban

environment with high traffic-related air pollution increased

inflammatory biomarkers and also didn’t increase cognitive

performance the same way that you would normally experience an

increase in cognitive performance from aerobic training. The

take-away message here is if you are in a busy high trafficked area,

you’d actually be better off exercising indoors with the filtered

room or else literally get in your car and drive somewhere where

you could exercise without being exposed to that high traffic. And

of course, whenever you have the option, stay away from the

highway trafficked roads.

Brock: So, how far away would you need to be from the highway

trafficked roads like if you’re in a city like Toronto – it’s a city of 5

million people, so I can go to a park but that park is also

surrounded by some pretty high traffic streets.

Ben: Yeah. You’re obviously gonna get some bio remediation of

pollutants just from the trees and the plants and things like that in

the park but I will just say the farther the better but I don’t have a

specific rule. I’ll just tell you just for your peace of mind, let’s just

say 50 paces, Brock – 50 paces away from the road.

[0:05:19.2]

There is a related study that says adult human exposure in an

urban center (in this case, they did the study in France in Paris)

and they were looking at exposure to what are called phthalates,

which are kinda nasty chemicals that you can literally get exposed

to through your digestive tract, your respiratory tract and they

looked at how much of this stuff people are getting from drinking

water, from food, and from ambient air. And it was found that

you could actually get quite a bit of exposure just through ambient

air from this stuff. Again, it’s another good reason to really really

be careful if you’re exercising in urban environments to try and

stay away from the streets as much as you possibly can because I

know we got a lot of runners and cyclists and folks like that who

listen in. Just a warning folks: be careful.

Brock: The air will kill you. Don’t breathe this.

Ben: Living will kill you. Got a bunch of people turning blue in the

face. Actually, you know what? It’s kinda funny. I don’t even

know for elps but I do this sometimes if I am running next to busy

road like a big semi or a truck or something goes by or a bus, I’ll

hold my breath as long as I can until the thing is off in the

distance.

Brock: I do the same thing when I pass a smoker.

Ben: Yeah. You mean a cigarette smoker?

Brock: Yeah. I do it very pointedly too like take this huge inhale and look

at them.

Ben: That’s funny! And then the other thing is that there was a cool

study that looked into the effect that putting a ton of cinnamon in

cereal has on your blood sugar levels and (this was in the Journal

of Nutrition and Diet) found the effect of ground cinnamon on

what’s called post prandial or after a meal. Your blood glucose

concentration found a significant enhancement in insulin

sensitivity, a significant reduction in blood glucose concentration.

The injection of cinnamon was about 6 grams and that was done

along with 50 grams of cereal – just plain cereal. I’m a huge fan of

whenever I have a meal with which cinnamon would actually taste

good. I’m not putting on a pad thai or anything like that but any

meal that’s got carbohydrate in it, on which cinnamon would taste

good which is typically gonna be like if you gotta have some

breakfast cereal or you an oatmeal or something like that or

morning kinwa or something of that nature, cinnamon is really

gonna mitigate the effects of blood sugar. This was a cool study

that reinforced that concept.

Brock: Very cool. So you said, how many grams or 5 grams?

Ben: 6 grams.

Brock: 6 grams. That’s a lot!

Ben: I think that comes about a couple of teaspoons.

Brock: Oh really? Okay.

Ben: Yeah. It’s not a ton. Now, you don’t have to put a cinnamon

shaker in your mouth or anything like that.

Brock: Oh…don’t even try that. That’s the worst.

Ben: Yeah. I think that’s a party game, isn’t it?

Brock: Yeah. The cinnamon challenge.

Ben: See how much cinnamon you can ingest.

Special Announcements:

Brock: All right. I guess let’s start off with talking about The Become

Superhuman Live event that you’re hosting in Spokane in March.

Ben: Coming together fantastically. By the way, if I get excited and spit,

you’re not even gonna be able to hear it because I’ve got one of

these spit filters on my microphone.

Brock: That’s so good ‘cause I spend most of the time just editing out

your spitting.

Ben: I know. Sometimes I get excited and I spit. Anyways, The Become

Superhuman Live Conference in Spokane, Washington, this thing

is gonna be epic. The speakers that I’ve got on board so far, I’m

super excited about, I’ll be revealing all them here in the next

month. But in the meantime, this is not just for the people who

live in Spokane Coeur D’Alene area. There are people coming in

from all over the globe for this thing. It’s filling up fast and it

literally is a 2-day conference that really geeks out on health,

fitness, nutrition, we’re doing private parties for podcast listeners,

bunch of stuff and I think we even played commercial during the

podcast so I’m going for too long. But one quick thing: if you

register by December 1, there’s a couple of things that you get

thrown in to the half for. One is a private one on one hour-long

consult with me here during the conference when you show up.

And then, the other thing that we are gonna entry into the prize

for is a free ticket to either refund your ticket or you can use that

free ticket to bring somebody else along with you. But you gotta

register by December 1st, 2012, if you wanna get entered into the

prize drawn for either of those. We’ll be sure to put a link in the

show notes.

[0:10:16.3]

Brock: Yeah. You’ve got 3 weeks people.

Ben: There we go.

Brock: All right and I guess we should also mention that if you love

podcast, you’ll probably love audio books and the best way to get

an audio book and especially for free, is to go to

audiblepodcast.com/ben and when you sign up, you’ll get one free

audio book if you’re a new member. It’s pretty good deal.

Ben: I love audio books. I’ve been listening to something called The

Philosopher’s Note. I’m not sure if you can get that on Audible

but it’s a synopsis of a bunch of different philosophy books. It’s

fantastic. I think I don’t even know the aural philosophy notes or

something like that. Brock, any books of

audiblepodcast.com/ben that you’d recommend?

Brock: Absolutely! One book that is on there by a guy named Michael

Pollan. He’s written a bunch of books…

Ben: And we say Pollan here in the United States of America.

Brock: Okay. I will try to adopt your crazy accent. The book is called In

Defense of Food (or Fod for you Americans). It’s an awesome

book. It actually has the 7 words that you need to remember

when choosing your food which is “eat food not too much mostly

plants”. If you follow those 7 words, apparently, you will eat

correctly ‘cause as Michael Pollan says in the book that we’ve

completely forgotten how to eat over the last well, close to

century, I guess. It’s really an interesting book so I suggest getting

that one.

Ben: I love it! Except that I would actually modify that. I would say

“eat food not too much, mostly animals that have eaten plants.” I

guess that’s more like 12 words. That’s more my style. Anyways,

though, check it out at audiblepodcast.com/ben and then also,

finally, getmaccax12.com. If you listened to last week’s podcast at

Ben Greenfield Fitness, I interviewed Chris McCormack. He has

some awesome workouts. I’ve got them all downloaded. It’s PDFs

to my computer. I’ve been doing one a week. They’re funky

workouts like the accordion and the lung buster…

Brock: I like the rolly polly.

Ben: The rolly polly workout…ton of sweet workouts that are pretty

easily implemented into a pretty existing training program, so if

you’re triathlete, endurance athlete or you just want some new

workouts that are gonna burn a lot of fat, a lot of calories, boost

your metabolism, give you a good injection of fitness, check out

getmaccax12.com and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Brock: Absolutely mate!

Wanna get personal access to all of Ben Greenfield’s secrets life?

This March in Spokane, Washington. Ben is bringing the world’s

best speakers straight to you. You’re gonna get step by step

blueprints for performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain,

sleep, and hormone optimization and get inside or access to

private parties special sessions for podcast listeners only. And of

course, delicious locally grown organic meals. The conference is

called Become Super Human and it’s already filling up fast. But

you can get in now at bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman.

You’ll come away from this live 2 day event completely set for life

to achieve everything you want for your body, mind and

performance. Whether you want to maximize fat loss, achieve an

ironman triathlon, or push your body and mind to the absolutely

limits of human performance. So visit

bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman and we’ll see live you live

and in person March 8th and 9th, 2013.

Listener Q & A:

Fred: Hey Ben! This is Fred. I have a question for you guys. They’ve

said a lot about wraps, so probably people selling these things are

promoting them in regards to helping you lose weight. Just wanna

know what your take is on this. I’m not a believer in it. I think

hard work and exercise is the way and the key is in that it’s too

good to be true than it usually is. Just wanna know what your

thoughts are on it. Thanks Ben.

Ben: Well, Fred (for those of you who may not have understood what

Fred said, he said “wrap”) yes, indeed body wraps are something

that are promoted as a way to help you detox and slim down or

even get rid of cellulites.

[0:15:18.7]

Brock: Wait. You’re not talking about burrito wraps.

Ben: I’m not talking about eating burritos or stopping by your local taco

truck, unfortunately. You’re using cayenne and pepper though, you

might lose little weight with those two. I’ve done body wrap. I did

a fall on like couple’s body wrap with my wife over in Jamaica one

time.

Brock: Did they wrap you to each other?

Ben: No. It wasn’t kinky like that. We just happened to be in the same

room getting wrapped. Your skin really feels super smooth and

they’ll use all sorts of different herbal treatments and mud and

stuff like that when they do these wraps. But another thing that

these wraps actually promise is that they are going to (in addition

to give you smooth skin) detox you by using seaweed or mud that

pulls toxins from your skin and also somehow slim you because

you’re getting a lot of these strips of material wraps tightly around

you and finally, reduce cellulites by using herbal remedies on your

skin. What’s probably going to happen or really what will happen

for a few days after you get one of these wraps is your skin is going

to appear more firm, it’s gonna be more toned, it’s gonna be more

hydrated. There are certainly a wide range of vitamins and herbs

that can help to improve the quality of your skin and even a little

bit of the elasticity and the collagen-like structure of your skin

because your skin is a connective tissue. However, as far as direct

removal of adipose tissue or direct removal of, for example,

cellulite, body wraps are not necessarily going to cause significant

weight loss. The best way to use these would be for example, if

you’ve got like lose skin that you wanna get rid of after a lot of

weight that you’ve gained or you’ve got some cellulite issues, you

are exercising, you’re perhaps even doing some of the things that I

recommended over on the 2-part cellulite series I wrote at

quickanddirtytips.com such as lifting weights and avoiding

wearing super super tight garments like tight panty hose and stuff

like that during the day. These may help a little bit with removal of

some of the appearance of the cellulite as well but this isn’t a quick

fix for fat loss. It’s just one of those things where you improve the

tone of your skin, yeah, you may affect the way that you look a little

bit.

Brock: So Fred’s right when he says hard work exercise and good diet are

the way to go.

Ben: That’s right but throwing in body wrap if you also wanna smell like

eucalyptus and chocolate or seaweed or whatever else.

Brock: Yum.

Jolene: Hi Ben! I have a question about abdominus rectus muscles. I have

a torn one from two pregnancies and I have quite a large diastasis

still – it’s about four fingers wide and I’m just wondering whether

something like that can be healed on ______[0:18:25.4] whether

you can train it back into the position so that gap, heals up or

whether it has to be treated surgically. My main concern is that I’m

having trouble training my core properly and as a result I’m having

occurrences of back problems and hip and knee and on and on.

Issues with it, so I’m just wondering if there are some exercises

that might help to heal that problem. Thank you.

Ben: So, diastasis recti – that’s basically this condition where your

abdominal walls start to separate and when they do that,

everybody’s got this little ridge that runs along the length of the

abdomen from the top to the bottom along that muscle in the

middle of the abs called your rectus abdominus.

Brock: So when you rub your fingers down the middle of your like from

your sternum down to your belly button, you can sort of feel it in

there. Is that what we’re talking about?

Ben: Yup! Everybody grab your 6 pack or your 8 pack, feel that…

Anyways, everybody’s got that – that ridge but what happens is it

can get stretched quite a bit during the prolonged period of

pregnancy and also during birth, depending on the degree of the

stretching and also the relative trained state of the abdominal

muscles during pregnancy, you can get to the point where that

stretching of that connective tissue gets the point where really

creates an actual structural abnormality and you can risk, for

example, like an abdominal wall herniation if it gets stretched too

far.

[0:20:02.3}

Now, whether or not you actually need surgery for something like

that is something that you would need to talk to your physician

about because it really really depends. There are certainly

therapies that you can do. Probably the most popular is one called

the Tupler Technique that you can do to attempt to try and

strengthen the abdominal muscles to where the separation is

eliminated a little bit by strengthening of the connective tissue.

But there is no hard and fast recommendation for example, for the

amount of centimeters or the number of fingers that you can put in

between the ridge to measure its length that would indicate

whether or not surgery was required. In most cases, however,

surgery is not necessary for diastasis recti and it’s very very

common in women who have gone through childbirth. Now, there

are things that you can do after pregnancy and also while you’re

pregnant leading up to birth to eliminate the chances of diastasis

recti being pretty significant or at least to help, again, with that

strengthening of connective tissue to help it to give a closure

together after you’ve given birth. One really important thing to

remember is that a lot of times, diastasis recti is blamed on a low

tone of abdominal musculature. And while that’s true, there are

two other components that you really need to focus on if you want

to really take care of this issue. One is the strength of your

diaphragm and one is the strength of your muscles on your pelvic

floor. In many many women, they’ll do things like work their core

and do abdominal exercises but not train the lower pelvic floor and

not train the diaphragm properly. The idea behind straining those

lateral two type of muscles is deep breathing exercises and also a

lot of the Kegel type of exercises, sitting on the floor, pressing your

low back into the ground, squeezing the muscles – the same

muscles you’d squeeze if you wanna stop urine flow, that type of

thing.

Brock: Somewhere like a contracting hold sort of thing rather than lifting

weights or doing crunches or something?

Ben: Yeah. And that’s why I mentioned this Tupler Technique because

what it does is it kinda trains you how to use the muscles around

your midsection like a corsette. It focuses on abdominal exercises

that train the entire corsette and it’s designed for moms who’ve

just had a child and they wanna tighten that say in the stomach

area or women who are just preparing for childbirth and want to

make sure that their abdominals are strong. For example, one

exercise would be kind a like a planking type of exercise where you

put your forearms on the floor with your elbows underneath your

shoulders. You interlock your fingers together, you put your toes

on the floor with your feet about shoulder-width apart and then

you just straighten your back and you pull your stomach inward

the same as you would do during like a front plank exercise and it

would just be like a hold for 30-60 seconds while also training your

diaphragm and doing deep breathing from the stomach while

you’re in a front plank position. And then right after you do that,

you can turn over, you can lie flat on your back with your knees

bent at about a 45-degree angle, same as that’d be if you’re gonna

do a crunch, you can lay your hands on top of each other over your

lower stomach so that you’re basically kinda like holding on to

your navel. And then you flex your ab muscles to try and get your

hands to move towards the floor so you’re pressing you low back

down into the ground and then you’re holding that for as long as

possible – for 30 seconds to 1 minute. And then you can literally

get back over going to the plank position and do that again. That

method, going back and forth from the front plank to the low back

pushing down into the ground can actually help with strengthening

the connective tissue and in pulling the stomach muscles a little bit

closer together. That’s another one you can do as well. There is an

article that I wrote at bengreenfieldfitness.com that has…I think

it’s like 15 different exercises that you can do. We’ll put it in the

show notes to this episode. What episode number is this, Brock?

Brock: 216.

Ben: Yeah. So Episode 216. I’ll put a link to this article but it’s basically

ab exercises that you can do while you’re pregnant that don’t put

you into like a recumbent position that would clot blood flow to the

baby and also would be considered exercises that actually do really

strength from the abs compared to crunches or sit-ups. I’ll put a

link to that in the show notes.

[0:25:08.4]

I also had a really good interview with Cassandra Forsythe and we

talked a lot about strength training during pregnancy. We’ll put a

link to that in the show notes as well. But those would be two

other good resources for you in addition to these two exercises you

can do for diastasis recti.

Brock: Is there anything that she should be avoiding in the meantime

while she has this separation? Would running be contra-indicated

or swimming or lifting weights or anything like that?

Ben: Any impact-based exercise that basically has you breathing hard

and doing impact at the same time, I would be really careful with

so yeah, that will include running and then the other thing I’ll be

careful with would be weight lifting that causes you to do what’s

called this valsalva maneuver or holding your breath as you’re

pushing against the force like a squat or a dead lift or something of

that nature. The same type of exercises you’d wanna be really

careful with if you, for example, had a hernia. So I would really

focus on, for example, that Tupler Technique that I mentioned

prior to starting into some of those other type of movements.

Brock: Also get that taken care of first and then move to the traditional

stuff. Cool!

Ben: Get your tummy strong like bull.

Rick: Hello Ben! This is Rick from Ohio. I enjoyed your podcast. You

and Brock do a great job. My question today is from my girlfriend.

She likes to drop about 15 lbs but she has hypothyroidism and

takes synthroid about 88 mg per dose. She’s in her early 50’s and a

Crossfit girl. She’s at the box at least 3x a week. She really

struggles to drop the weight. So my question is this: Besides

managing her caloric intake, is there anything else she could be

doing to increase her metabolism? Do you think she has a larger

challenge because of her thyroid problem? Looking forward to

your thoughts. Thanks a lot.

Ben: Well, this is an interesting issue because hypothyroidism, it can be

so complicated and of course we should put in our traditional

disclaimer. We may wanna just play that in fast motion right here,

Brock.

Brock: Got it.

Ben: All right. Cool. Brock’s on it.

Brock: Ben is not a doctor and the content provided on this podcast is for

informational purpose only and should not be construed as

medical or health care advice.

Ben: We’ve interviewed Dr. Fit - Dr. Roby Mitchell on this podcast

before about how to manage a low thyroid and that would be a

good episode for you to listen to. There’s also a really really good

book out there called Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms

When My Lab Tests are Normal? That book was out of print for a

while but it’s back in print now and I’ll be sure and put a link to it

in the show notes. But the thing to understand about thyroid is

that there are many environmental triggers that can act on your

thyroid gland and affect your thyroid activity that your girlfriend

should know about because all of these, by affecting thyroid

activity can of course, affect metabolism because your thyroid is

one of the master regulators of your metabolic rate or your calorie

burn.

Brock: Actually Ben, it’s been a good time to clarify or I wanna ask so she’s

got hypothyroid? Now that’s not having enough thyroid or your

thyroid’s not producing enough of the…

Ben: Your thyroid isn’t either producing enough of the T3 or the T3

isn’t getting converted into T4 properly in the liver or in the gut or

perhaps the thyroid stimulating hormone is not being produced in

adequate quantities or you may have thyroid antibodies circulating

in your blood stream. There are variety of reasons that

hypothyroidism may occur and that’s something I’ll get into here

because I would say that there are basically 6 main things that you

should be aware of that are gonna affect your thyroid, that I think

everybody should be aware of. The first would be the

hypothyroidism in most cases is what would be called an auto

immune disease. What that means is that there are certain

components in your diet, in your blood stream, etc. that can cause

your body to mount an inflammatory attack against your thyroid

tissue. And one of the main components that can cause this auto

immune attack is gliadin. Gliadin is the protein portion of gluten

which you find in wheat and gliadin really closely resembles

thyroid gland tissue so if you are eating a lot of wheat and this

gliadin breeches the protective barrier of your gut and enters your

blood stream which is very easy for that to happen, your immune

system will tag gliadin for destruction and it will create this

antibodies that bind to gliadin but these same antibodies can also

cause your body to attack thyroid tissue.

[0:30:25.3]

That means that if you have any type of propensity for this type of

auto immune reaction, a lot of people do, and you eat foods that

contain gluten, your immune system can attack your thyroid and

this is not one of those cases where you’re just like “oh I try to

avoid bread, never once in a while I have it.” The immune

response to gluten in this case in this attacking your own thyroid

tissue case can last up to 6 months each time that you eat gluten.

That’s why for anybody who has hypothyroidism or anybody who

even has done lots of tests that suggest that that may be the case,

you gotta be 100% gluten-free. You need to eliminate it completely

from your diet. Probably really the best test I would say to find out

whether or not you’re gluten-intolerant or whether or not you tend

to produce this type of auto immune antibodies would be a test

from Cyrex Laboratories. They do a really good one and so I would

speak with your physician about using that method to test for

gluten intolerance. That would be one thing is get gluten out of the

diet because that can have an effect on your metabolism by

attacking thyroid tissue basically. That would be the first thing to

take care of.

I would also consider vitamin D because vitamin D is specifically

associated with the same type of auto immunity and

hypothyroidism and intake of vitamin D or higher levels of vitamin

D has been shown to benefit the same kind of thyroid dysfunction.

Vitamin D does a lot of cool stuff – it can regulate your insulin

secretion, it can balance your blood sugar, but it can also help out

in people who have low thyroid function. The problem is that in

many cases, people who have low thyroid function also have a

leaky and inflamed gastrointestinal tract. So, a lot of times,

absorption of vitamin D can be reduced because of that. The other

issue is a lot of times, people who have hypothyroidism also have

issue with the levels of vitamin A and the levels of vitamin K2 in

their bodies and both of those need to be present in adequate

quantities in order for you to properly use vitamin D. So, a vitamin

D deficiency is another thing that can really precipitate or worsen

the hypothyroidism. And getting just vitamin D from a supplement

source like going out and getting vitamin D capsules, isn’t enough.

You need to make sure that you get vitamin A and vitamin K2 as

well. And that’s why I’m a big fan of something like cod liver oil in

this case because that’s gonna give you a really really good source

of vitamin A. And then also working something like grass-fed

butter, for example, that’s a good source of vitamin K2 like a good

organic grass-fed butter. Nato which is the Japanese fermented

food – that’s a really good source as well but it’s harder to get.

Brock: It’s kinda hard to eat too.

Ben: Yeah. I actually really like it. I had a ton of it when I was off in

Japan. Lot of people think it’s like tastes like beans covered in

snot.

Brock: I was gonna say slime but snot works.

Ben: I like beans and I like snots so there you go. Kiefer is also a pretty

decent source of vitamin K2 if you can get your hands on some

kiefer. And even egg yolks (whole egg yolks) are pretty good

source as well. So, get cod liver oil, egg yolks, grass-fed butter,

nato (if you can get your hands on it) and then try and include for

that vitamin A, some cod liver oil in your diet in addition to

supplementing with vitamin D. That would be another thing to

really focus on in this case.

The third thing that I would take into consideration, I mentioned

your gut and how there’s a real real link between your gut and your

thyroid and one of the issues here is that in many cases when

you’ve got increased inflammation in your gut, issues with

infection in your gut, a lot of times, that’s precipitated by low

stomach acid and many many people do have low stomach acid

and that’s something also that you can look into if you’re dealing

with hypothyroid or you wanna make sure that you’re healing this

gut thyroid access is to look into utilizing some type of like an axia

with pepsin type of supplement or at least if you’re getting heart

burn, consider doing that. So, if you have a lot of gut issues, a lot

of digestive issues and you also have hypothyroidism, I’ll really

take care of the gut.

[0:35:24.3]

Hypochloridia or low stomach acid is not the only thing that you

can do. We’ve really geeked out on the show before about ways

that you can heal your gut. I’ve got an entire recommendations

page over at bengreenfieldfitness.com that goes into a bunch of

other supplements that I recommend for healing your gut. But

understand that a lot of T3 to T4 conversion takes place in the

liver. You get a ton of thyroid activity that occurs in your gut and

so you really wanna take care of your intestinal bacteria, you

wanna take care of your intestinal lining. And inflammation in

your gut can really reduce specifically T3 levels by raising cortisol

and about 20% of T4 is converted to T3 in the gastrointestinal tract

so that’s another area or another thing that can be decreased when

you’ve got inflammation in your gut so taking care of your gut,

making sure that you have adequate stomach acid and also looking

into some of the other gut healing protocols that we’ll make sure to

link to in the show notes would also be something you can do.

Another thing to think about is your blood sugar and there’s a real

real link between thyroid and blood sugar because if your blood

sugar is constantly high, what happens is your pancreas is always

secreting all these insulin to move the excess glucose from your

blood into your cells where the glucose can be used to produce

energy. But studies have shown that when you get repeated insulin

surges, that increases the destruction of the thyroid gland

especially in people who have auto immune thyroid disease. So

you gotta be careful with high blood sugar levels and higher

amounts of carbohydrates not physical activity (that type of thing)

but on the same type of level, you also have to be careful with

chronically low blood sugar levels. And this is especially the case

for people who are going on low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.

You need to be careful because when your blood sugar levels are

constantly dropping below normal, your adrenal glands will

respond to that by secreting cortisol and as I mentioned earlier,

high high amounts of cortisol can affect the proper activity of

thyroid hormones. The reason I’ve to get back it’s produced when

you have blood sugars, it tells your liver to produce more glucose

that causes what’s called glycogenolysis in your liver to bring your

blood sugar levels back to normal. But too much cortisol gives

your body that fights or flight response, it causes a lot of stress and

that can suppress pituitary function so your thyroid can’t function

properly and it can also affect inflammation in your gut. So, that’s

another thing to take care of – making sure that you’re regulating

your blood sugar levels properly.

And very very similarly or down the same line is that the fifth thing

to bear in mind is your stress and your sleep levels because not

only can a lot of stress and really stress at your adrenal glands

causing them to produce a lot of, for example, cortisol, that can

cause depression of your pituitary function as I just mentioned

which directly affects your thyroid hormone production. The other

thing that can happen though is that can reduce conversion of T4

to its active form of T3, it can promote auto immunity by

weakening your immune barriers, meaning that you’re gonna be

more likely to produce a lot of this auto immune destruction of

thyroid tissue, it can cause resistance to thyroid hormone because

when you’re stressed out, your body produces a lot of

inflammation and these inflammatory called cytokins have been

shown in studies to suppress the actual receptor site on your cells

to thyroid hormone. So, that’s another issue. The last issue with

adrenal stress or being constantly stressed out or not getting

enough sleep or having these high levels of inflammatory cytokins

from being stressed out or not getting enough sleep is that that can

cause hormonal imbalances. And specifically, when you have a lot

of cortisol circulating in your blood stream, that decreases your

liver’s ability to properly clear estrogens from your blood and when

you have a lot of estrogen rolling around, that increases levels of

something called thyroid binding globulin and those are the

proteins that attach to thyroid and cause it to be in its inactive

form in the blood stream. So, if you’re constantly stressed out, if

you’re not getting enough sleep, that’s another issue that can really

really aggravate the low metabolism that can be caused by low

thyroid activity or aggravate auto immune attack of thyroid tissue.

[0:40:15.1]

And I know I’m going on and on here on this question but there’s

one other thing I wanted to mention and that would be

inflammation. Excess exercise, not recovering properly like I

mentioned earlier - stress and lack of sleep – all of that can

increase inflammation. And there are a few different things that

inflammation can do. There’s one study that showed that one

injection of inflammatory molecules, basically inflammatory

cytokins, was able to reduce your blood levels of thyroid

stimulating hormone, your T3 your free T4, your free T3 for five

days and inflammation completely disrupted the production and

regulatory mechanism of thyroid hormone. The other thing is that

inflammation, as I just mentioned, can decrease the number and

the sensitivity of your thyroid hormone receptors and then the last

thing that it can do is it can decrease the conversion of T4 to T3. In

most synthetic hormone medications are T4 like synthroid that she

is on. If you give synthroid to somebody who’s got a bunch of

inflammation, it’s not gonna work because the body just can’t even

convert T4 to T3 when it’s in an inflamed state and the patients

who don’t really do a good job converting T4 to T3 actually do a lot

better on bio identical thyroid hormone anyways like armor

thyroid, for example. I’m not a huge fan of synthroid anyways just

because it’s got cornstarch in it, it’s got lactose as a filler. Cytomel

which is another kind of popular synthetic T3 hormone has

modified food starch in it which has gluten, ironically as a filler.

I’m a bigger fan of bio identical hormone replacements using a

compounding pharmacist or else using something similar to like

an armor thyroid. A lot of stuff to bear in mind but the main

things to wrap this up would be get gluten out of the diet, get on

vitamin D and make sure you get vitamin A and vitamin K2 along

with it, take care of your gut, look into stomach acid and also look

into some of the other recommendations that we’ll put on the link

in the show notes to healing your gut. Monitor your blood sugar,

make sure it’s not too high or too low, eliminate stress and get

adequate sleep and then just make sure you’re not overworking

your body, creating too much inflammation, not recovering

properly.

Brock: And I guess she should be able to…Rick doesn’t say how long she’s

been on the synthroid but if she hasn’t noticed any improvement

since she started taking it, then maybe that would be a good

indication whether to continue to take it or maybe switch to one of

the different sources like you were saying.

Ben: Yeah. That’s something she’d wanna talk to her doctor about but

there are definitely some cases where synthroid really isn’t gonna

work. Again, if you’re not properly converting the T4 to T3 since

synthroid is just synthetic T4, it’s not gonna do anything for you.

There are other things that can interfere with the actions of T3 too,

for example, if you’ve got estrogen dominance which is really

common when you’re hypothyroid, high levels of estrogen like I

mentioned those increase the levels of thyroid-binding globulin

and that would make it so that synthroid doesn’t really work. And

then of course, you could be sensitive to the fillers in synthroid so

you’d be aggravating an auto immune condition in that case.

We’re getting into stuff that you’d really have to talk to your doctor

about. I’d recommend you look into armor thyroid. Dr. Roby

Mitchell and I geeked out on this a little bit in my discussion with

him so I’ll link to that in the show notes. I’m definitely not

convinced that synthroid is the best solution for people with

hypothyroid.

Bill: Hi Ben! This is Bill from Nevada. I need some help on getting my

endurance back. Last spring, I was in my best Ironman shape

when I had a bike crash and did some serious damage to my

shoulder. After surgery, I spent 4 months on the sofa watching TV.

Then, it hurts so much I could not even lean on a standby or

tolerate a jog. Now, I’ve been back to training for a month and half

but my endurance is gone. After 45 minutes to an hour on my 6-

mile bread-and-butter run, I am gassed, completely out of breath,

and about 5 minutes slower than before. Interestingly, my heart

rate is staying down between LT and AT for the entire run. Before

the crash, I had a respirator treadmill test I was told I was in the 99

percentile of VO2 max for my age group. I’ve finished 6 long

course tries with the help of your excellent Dominator Program,

each one a little faster than the last. Sleep, temperature and

nutrition are all the same. And as you remember from the 2

Phuket races we’ve done together, I’m not lacking in heart and

desire. Any suggestions on how I can get my mojo back? Also,

what body fat percentage do you like to have during taper week

before an Ironman or half Ironman? Thanks for the help and the

podcast.

[0:45:39.3]

Brock: So, I guess if anybody has any questions about any TV shows over

the last 4 months, I guess Bill is the one to talk to if that’s what he’s

been doing.

Ben: Hi Bill! By the way, if you’re listening in, Bill has gone to the

Thailand trip the past couple of years. I’m assuming he’s not going

this year ‘cause he hasn’t let me know if he is. But yeah, Bill and I

had fun going out on the beaches in Thailand quite a bit. Anyways

and by the way, big shout out to Bill because he actually…and I

don’t wanna scare you, Brock or anybody else who’s doing that

race in Thailand but Bill broke his neck when we were in Thailand

in the first race that we did and stuck around and did the second

race and didn’t even realize that he broke his neck until he got all

the way back to the states. But he’s one tough cookie and

apparently, accident prone. First of all, Bill used a couple of

phrases though that if you’re not familiar with them, he mentioned

his LT and his AT and how he’s going out on his runs and he’s at

his LT and his AT. Your LT is your lactate threshold and your AT

is your aerobic threshold. Lactate threshold is the point at which

you start to produce more lactic acid during exercise than your

body can actually get rid of. And your aerobic threshold is your

peak fat burning zone. It’s the point at which your body is using

maximum fat for energy. It’s a very very efficient intensity for

exercise at which you could go for a long long period of time. You

can measure LT and AT with a laboratory test or just like a self test

to way that you should go as you exercise your maximum

sustainable pace and that maximum sustainable pace, whatever

heart rate you’re at during that maximum sustainable pace that

your LT and then your AT is typically about 20 beats below that.

Now, when you’re de-trained or you have a loss in fitness, a lot of

times, you can still buffer lactic acid pretty well and a lot of times,

your lactic threshold may not change too much. They’d actually

done studies (there’s an interesting study where they looked at the

effects of de-training) on responses to sub-maximal exercise. Mr.

Zeus’ study that was actually done way back in the 80’s, what they

found was that your mitochondrial enzyme activity levels and also

what’s called your lactate dehydrogenase which are 2 of the ways

that your body buffers lactic acid, those can actually stay fairly high

for as long as 4 months after you stopped training. The thing that

does decrease though pretty significantly and fairly quickly after

even just 72 hours of de-training is your VO2 max. So, what Bill is

experiencing here is more than likely, a fairly significant drop in

his VO2 max and he mentioned that he began at the 99th

percentile VO2 max for his age group. One thing to remember is

that that percentile (if you’re to go get a VO2 max test and they tell

you, “hey, you’re doing great, you’re an 80th or 90th or whatever)

most fairly active individuals (the type of people who listen to this

show or triathletes or marathoners or whatever), they’re all in the

90 – 100 percentile. It’s just like we are so far and above the

average population. No offense to Bill. It doesn’t take a lot to be in

the 99th percentile but understand that if your doctor tells you that

or if you go and test that you’re in that percentile, that doesn’t

necessarily mean you’ve got what it takes to be a super athlete. It

just means that you’re kinda kicking the butt of the general

population. Anyways though, now that I’ve completely insulted

Bill, there are ways that you can increase your VO2 max. And

that’s what I would be focusing on hard core if I were Bill would be

increasing VO2 max. So, let’s talk about some of my favorite ways

to increase VO2 max, shall we?

Brock: Yes, please.

Ben: All right. Cool. First of all, studies have shown that aerobic high

intensity intervals improve your VO2 max more than moderate

training.

[0:50:02.2]

Studies state training going at long slow distance for 30 minutes or

60 minutes at 60% or 70% does not hold a candle to intervals. And

one study that they did compared long slow distance at 70% vs.

doing 15 seconds on 15 seconds off with the 15 seconds being really

really hard and the 15 seconds off being really easy and then also 4

minutes hard and 4 minutes easy found that the best type of effort

of all those different efforts I just mentioned for increasing VO2

max, number one was 4 minutes on, 4 minutes off, such 4 minutes

really really hard followed by 4 minutes of active rest like jogging

or whatever. Second best was a shorter effort like 15 seconds on 15

seconds off. And the least effective method (no surprise here) to

increase your VO2 max would be just like steady stay training.

So, use intervals and preferably use longer intervals. I’d like to see

the intervals be longer than 2 minutes to increase VO2 max.

Nothing is gonna hold the candle to training like that but there are

other things that you can do, for example, deep diaphragmatic

breathing - big big part of your VO2max is how much oxygen you

can actually get into your lungs. That’s a significant component of

your VO2 max. So, I would be doing some breathing technique

and some breathing exercises – I love yoga for that. That’s really,

in my opinion, one of the best ways to teach yourself to breathe

properly is to just do a weekly yoga class. You can also use (and

we’ve talked about these in the show before) those power lung

trainers like if you’re driving in your car and you tend to be in

traffic a lot, you just keep one of those in your car. And those

trainers that literally provide resistance when you breathe in and

out and strengthen your inspiratory and expiratory muscles. So,

focus on your breathing – deep diaphragmatic breathing and the

strength of your inspiratory and expiratory muscles. A few

supplements that you could look into – one would be Cordyceps.

There is one cool double blind placebo-controlled study where they

took a Cordyceps herbal extract and it significantly improved the

maximum amount of oxygen that folks were able to assimilate.

Now, the caveat to this is that this study was done in older

individuals (I believe they were 70+ year-old men) but other

studies have shown that Cordyceps also increases your cellular

oxygen absorption by up to 40% and can improve your heart

functioning. It’s something that’s been used in Chinese herbal

medicine for thousands of years. There’s a lot of endurance

supplements on the market right now that include Cordyceps in

their formula. A lot of them throw rhodiola in there as well

because it falls into that same family of herbs that are purported to

improve your VO2 max. One supplement that I personally really

like made by Millenium Sports (we’ll link to it in the show notes

and also in the MyList for this episode over at the facebook page) is

Cordygen VO2 by Millenium Sports. That’s a really good one. It’s

one that I’ve used in the past prior to sprint and Olympic distance

triathlons where you’re working really hard. A couple of other

supplements that can really help with stroke volume or cardiac

output which can also have a nice effect on VO2 max would be Fish

Oil. That’s another one that you’d wanna look into if you’re vegan,

a little bit of that with flax oil (not quite as good) but I would

definitely include fish oil in the diet. And then you also may wanna

look into a supplement for helping your red blood cells to carry

oxygen. You’d wanna be careful with just a straight up iron

supplement because toxicity with those can be kinda significant if

you’re not careful but ferritin which is a crucial iron-storing

protein – that tends to be deficient in a lot of folks and there’s a

good supplement called Floradix out there that I really like for

increasing levels of ferritin for getting your iron-storing protein. A

couple other things to think about that would be altitude training

or altitude tents. If you got access to those, those actually can

increase your number of red blood cells. It also makes the red

blood cells more efficient at unloading oxygen to your tissues so,

that would be another thing to look into would be, if you got access

to altitude tents or even just going every once in a while and

training in a high area, that can help out with your VO2 max. And

then, last thing would just be blood doping. You could call up your

friendly neighborhood illegal performance enhancing pharmacy

and get your hands on some erythropoietin or some epo to get

yourselves some new red blood cells growing or you could just like

donate your blood and freeze it and then concentrate the red blood

cells with the centrifuge and inject them back into your body.

Brock: That’s a great idea. Why don’t people do that? That’s fantastic!

Ben: I have no clue why people don’t do that more. Anyways, that

would be an idea as well though. Be careful there. Probably people

are gonna shout at us. I’m kidding.

[0:55:13.1]

Brock: Yeah. We’re joking.

Ben: Yeah. The only thing I’m joking about was that last thing. All the

other stuff actually works pretty good.

Brock: Well then, the last thing works pretty well too. Just google Lance

Armstrong and you’ll know why we’re joking.

Ben: Yeah. There was a cool study that showed use of an echinacea

supplement at about (if you get your hands on echinacea tincture

which is like the oil extract of echinacea) 1.5 ml of that per day can

actually boost your erythropoietin pretty significantly too.

Brock: You’re gonna try that out, weren’t you?

Ben: I did. I went through a whole bunch of it and I didn’t notice

anything at all but I wasn’t measuring my EPO levels. I wasn’t

actually going to the lab measuring them. I did notice though, I

really like the way it made me feel. It’s just kinda interesting. It

almost gave me a little bit of almost like a brain buzz after I’d used

the stuff. I ran out a couple of weeks ago but I haven’t noticed a

drop in my performance so, there you go. But the studies show

…maybe my EPO’s already tapped out, who knows-from all that

blood doping I do).

Brock: Now, Bill, did you have that final little sort of afterthought

question about the percentage of the body fat that you would look

for during taper week? Do you have any thoughts for that?

Ben: I’ve no clue. I’m so bad at measuring my body fat. I’ll tell you

what I do. I pinch a little bit of fat that’s right above your hipbone

kind of in between your belly button and your hipbone. If I pinch

that and I can only get a little bit, I know I’m doing a good job and

I’m ready to race. And if I can pinch and I get a whole bunch of fat,

then I know that I’m quite doing a good job. That sounds silly but

that’s literally all I do.

Brock: I’m pinching like crazy right now.

Ben: I can tell you when I was body building, I was at 2.5-3% body fat

and felt like crap for anything aerobic or anything high intensity

and from the few times that I’ve measured myself during the year,

I think I’m around 7-8% body fat now and I feel way way better so,

there you go. Less is not better.

Brock: There you go. Okay, let’s move on to a question from Kayla and I

actually have to do some reading. How exciting! Kayla says, “I am

5’3” and 116 lb female who has been going to the gym for the past 6

months attempting to gain muscle. I’ve made good progress so far.

However, I recently started experiencing pain in both of my

forearms. I saw my doctor who diagnosed me with forearm shin

splints (How does like that sink in – forearm shin splints?) and

have been taking …

Ben: When you say forearm, you mean f-o-r-e arm.

Brock: Yes. She has that forearms coming out of her shins so,

Ben: That’d be more of like a churn elbow radiation issue.

Brock: Yeah.

Ben: Okay. All right.

Brock: So, she says she’s been taking the naproxen and resting her arms.

“I’ve been instructed to not lift weights for a minimum of 2 weeks,

probably more, depending on how my arms heal.” She says, “I’m

worried about losing all the muscle I’ve worked so hard for.

Without the use of my forearms, I can’t seem to work my bi’s tri’s,

shoulders and back. Do you have any suggestions for keeping my

upper body in shape and of course, healing faster?”

Ben: Bomber. Yeah, forearm shin splints are actually...if you look at a

typical skeleton, you’ve got your shin splints that you can get down

in your tibia and fibula which is basically inflammation of that.

That’s syndesmosis – it’s called between your tibia and your fibula

but I mean you’ve got your own and your radius up in your upper

arm and those 2 bones similarly have some connective tissue in

between them that can get inflamed when you’re overusing your

forearm muscles. And it can feel like shin splints the same way as

you get shin splints in your legs. It’s pretty common if you’re using

your wrist a lot doing a lot of curls, a lot of extensions, a lot of

weight lifting. It’s just like micro trauma to the muscular

attachments that attach the connective tissue to the bone. You’ve

got what’s called this periosteum that covers the bone and that

stuff gets inflamed from micro trauma. First of all, make sure that

you’re doing the right stuff to get rid of this. Don’t just rest, also do

the same type of stuff you do the shin splints – free some dixie

cups in the freezer and roll some ice up and down the arms 5-10

minutes few times a day. You can use a compression bandage to

reduce the swelling or even use some of this kinesio tape. That

kind lifts some of the skin away from the surface of the body and

can assist with reducing swelling as well. Make sure you get some

good natural anti inflammatories like a high dose curcumin extract

or phenocane is another good one as my recommended alternative

to ibuprofen to help with pain, with inflammation.

[1:00:07.1]

Sports massage helps a ton with this stuff in terms of relaxing all of

those tight muscles and breaking down adhesions, breaking out

scar tissue. I’m a big big fan of that too for shin splints or for these

forearm splints. But as far as stuff you could do, like how you

could literally work your upper body without using your forearms,

first thing that you gotta realize is that in the same way that if you

work your right side of your body, you can strengthen your left side

or vice versa. It’s called the lateral training effect. So, if you broke

your right arm, you could still strengthen the right side of your

body by doing weights with your left arm. Same thing happens

between upper body and lower body so you can still do squats, you

can still do leg press, you can do leg extension, leg curl, you can do

lunges but instead of holding weights when you do the lunges, you

could have like a barbell on your back or dumbbells up on your

shoulders and you’re still gonna get a really really good core and

upper body training effect by working your legs. So, I would do

that. A lot of gyms, it’s mostly like Crossfit gyms or sports

performance studios that have sleds but sled pushing, actually you

don’t use your arms that much. You’re more using your shoulders,

your chest, your torso and your legs if you’re doing sled pushing so

that’s another option – to do sled pushes. As far as direct upper

body work, you could do things like any planking activity. It really

isn’t gonna put a ton of repetitive motion stress on your forearms

so you could do front planks, side planks, you could even do like

the yoga forearm stance. They’re called the forearm stance. It’s

sounds like you pull out the stress in your forearms but really most

of the stress is on your neck, your head, in your core. You could do

the machine at the gym where you’re doing lat extension with your

shoulders except you’re literally moving the weight with your

humerus – with your upper arm bone, not with your lower arms

that shoulder lat extension exercise at work, you could use ab curl

machines at the gym. Again, I’m not a huge fan of machines but

when you’re injured, sometimes, that can come in handy to isolate

the joint where you’re literally like sitting in a chair and

contracting your abs and like almost going through a bowing

motion or an abdominal flexion motion and never turning back to

the starting position. I’ve got this contraption at my house. It’s

called the FIT10. I think I’ve mentioned it before in the show. You

can attach that to a door and do really really kick butt standing ab

curls and that’s pretty cool for core work as well. So just use the

FIT10 for something like that. Any of that stuff – planking, ab curl

machine, shoulder lat extension machine, doing planks to forearm

stance, then working your legs, you could easily keep yourself in

kick butt shape for a couple of weeks doing that kind of stuff.

Granted your guns may decrease in size just slightly but just don’t

worry, you’re welcome to the gun show T-shirt. It should be okay

as far as that goes. As far as cardio, a lot of times, swimming, in

cases like this, zero stress in the forearms, you can still get yourself

looking like Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte or I guess since you’re

female, Kayla, maybe Amanda Byrd and just use swimming which

can actually be easy on the forearms. If your forearms and it really

hurt, you’re using them too much, close your hands into fists and

that tends to make use a little bit more of your upper arm and your

lats and your shoulders wherein you open your hands, a lot of

times, you can tend to use your forearms a little bit more when

you’re swimming. That’s a good swim drill actually, just swim with

fists. It’s also a good way to look like you’re drowning.

Brock: Yeah. Good way to have your upper body sink.

Ben: And then, when you start back into things maybe use yourself anew.

Grab some of those weight lifting gloves that have the wrist wrap-

arounds that kinda do some of the grip work for you and that’ll help

you get back into things that help overworking your arms right

when you get back in. And those are just basically weight lifting

gloves with wrist wrap-arounds. Those work well also. Hopefully

that stuff helps you and best of luck getting your guns back.

Brock: Yeah. Definitely, it’ll steer you clear of the kettle bells.

Ben: Yeah. I wouldn’t be doing many kettle bells or dumbbell curls.

Brock: All right. Well, let’s move on to our final question that comes from

Richard and Richard says, “I have been looking into trying out a

hyperbaric treatment for no other reason than just my well-being

and recovery. I like the idea of getting higher oxygen levels to help

cell repair and general healing. I’m a 25-year-old male who’s been

known to over train just due to the fact that I feel like I can I keep

going. Can hyperbaric chamber sessions allow me to train harder

and more often?” Richard, are you looking for a reason to over

train?

[1:05:19.7]

Ben: I wanna buy one of these for my house. You can get them for 10-15

thousand dollars if you got a lot of good nice tax return but these

huge chambers and this is way different than the exercise with the

oxygen therapy we talked about a few weeks ago where you’ve got

this pretty little oxygen mask that you’re wearing with oxygen

container and you’re breathing in and out while you’re standing on

a vibration platform or running on a treadmill. The hyperbaric

oxygen therapy (this is the hardcore stuff) – these are like fall on

chambers that can put multiple pounds of pressure per square inch

of your skin of just saturated oxygen. And the idea…

Brock: Is this what Michael Jackson slept in?

Ben: I have no clue. Anyways, the idea is this is supposed to push

oxygen deep below your skin surface and super saturate your

muscles or whatever without you actually having to breathe hard

and exercise. You can find hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers in

different recovery units in hospitals and stuff like that and there is

some evidence that they may help people who are healing from

injuries, have a little bit more speedy resumption of activity. Try

one. I’ll put a link in the show notes. You can find the directory of

hyperbaric oxygen providers in the US and just go pay the lying

chamber for a little while. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes if you

wanna do that. But it is different than pressurized air. So, the idea

is that its pressurization inside this vessel and it can increase both

the content of the oxygen as well as, unfortunately, the content of

nitrogen that is around you as you’re lying in this chamber. So,

increasing the content of oxygen is the area that most people focus

on in terms of its potential effects for improving the respiration of

your mitochondria or the speed with which your muscles can heal.

The unfortunate part is that when you increase the partial pressure

of air inside the chamber, you’re increasing the partial pressure of

all gasses in that chamber and since none of them are really gonna

push out 100% oxygen, if you’re increasing the partial pressure of

nitrogen, that can actually aggravate inflammation especially in the

lungs and increased nitrogen can affect your brain tissue. It’s

something you wanna be careful with. I would make sure that

you’re being easy on the pressurized air if you’re using one of these

hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers and that’s something you’d

wanna be careful with just the effect of nitrogen balance on your

brain especially if you ever had a headache and you’re something

like that. So be careful with these things. They do have their risks

but there is a lot of primarily anecdotal evidence that they may

really really help with injury repair and they may help with muscle

repair. However, a lot of it is anecdotal or experimental and there

was a recent study in the Journal on Strength and Conditioning

Research. Literally, just this past month, they looked at the acute

and chronic effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy on blood

circulation of human muscle and tendon tissue and interestingly,

they found out that oxygen saturation of the muscle didn’t increase

at all during or after 6 weeks of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

However, there actually was an effect on the tendon and the oxygen

concentration at the tendon level did increase which suggests that

while this may not be all that hot for increasing your recovery after

you’ve done a hard weight lifting session or something like that, if

you strained or sprained the tendon or you’ve got a lot of connective

tissue issues with your tendons, it may actually help with that in

terms of increasing blood flow and increasing oxygen delivery to

actual tendons. But as far as actual experimental evidence that it

helps with muscle recovery or that even helps with sport

performance, all that is pretty anecdotal and you do wanna be

careful with the amount of pressure that you use on these things

just because of the nitrogen component.

Brock: I’ve never heard of using it for anything athletic before.

Ben: Yeah. And you could go to the PubMed website and look at some of

the studies. I’ll put a link to that recent study on the acute and

chronic effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It’s one of those

things wherein this is just fringe stuff. If I had the chance to use the

chamber, I’d probably try it out and see how I feel but I’d be really

really careful in terms of the amount of pressure that’s used. I

believe they measure pressure called ATA units and what I was

looking at online was once you exceed what’s called 1.5 ATA units,

that’s when the level of nitrogen comes fairly significant as far as

the partial pressure.

[1:10:40.2]

So, I would be careful with the amount of ATA units. Again, I’m not

an expert on hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Maybe a listener is and

they can leave a comment on the show notes but it’s one of those

things where you just wanna be careful on something like this and

understand that there may be risks as well.

Brock: Cool! Well, that does it for today’s list of questions and I just wanna

let everybody know if you do have a question for the podcast, you

can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and you just click on the little

tab on the right hand side of the page and you can record an audio

message right there. It’s really simple or you can call 1-877-

2099439 or you can skype to PacifiFfit or you can scroll down to the

bottom of the page again at bengreenfieldfitness.com and fill out

the Ask Ben form. Whew!

Ben: Yeah and we do get some weird questions that we don’t

_____[1:11:32.5] show. We get some people calling in who I think

don’t realize that speakers are on or something but yeah, there are

some funky stuff out there.

Brock: We’ve heard some weird conversations in what sounds like

somebody’s kitchen. So, yeah, be deliberate when you’re recording

your question.

Ben: Don’t take your laptop in the bathroom. You don’t wanna subject

Brock and I to that. We’ll put links to everything we talked about in

the show notes to Episode #216 at bengreenfieldfitness.com and

also we’ll put links to any of the resources that we mentioned during

this call from supplements for VO2 max enhancements to books

that I recommended about thyroid, etc. at the MyList for this

episode which you can access over at facebook.com/bgfitness and

those are pretty fun in terms of being able to check out some of the

stuff that we talked about as well. So, until next time and check out

audiblepodcast.com/ben for Brock’s Michael Paulin book.

Brock: In Defense of Food.

Ben: In Defense of Food and eating plants and animals that are real, not

fake. All right, what’s in this thing? Thanks for listening.

For personal nutrition, fitness or triathlon consulting, supplements, books or

DVD’s from Ben Greenfield, please visit Pacific Elite Fitness at

http://www.pacificfit.net