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Transcript
- 02:01 About Ben Greenfield
- 06:25 Exercises for Adrenal Fatigue
- 15:40 How Genes Affect Physicality
- 19:07 Wiped Out
- 22:51 Over-Exercise and Adrenal Fatigue
- 28:14 Tuning into the Body for Exercise Programs
- 31:32 Adrenal Budget
- 33:56 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 36:55 Equipment and Tools Against to Get Away from Excessive Sitting
- 39:12 Beyond Training
- 40:30 Hair Mineral Analysis
- 41:54 More About Ben Greenfield
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live To 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me on myersdetox.com. Just go there if you want to have a long healthy disease-free life. There are all kinds of info for you on diet, lifestyle, detoxification and surviving to 110.
Today we have Ben Greenfield on the podcast. He is a fitness expert, a fitness god in my opinion. And he’s going to be talking about what kind of exercise you should be doing if you have adrenal fatigue. I get asked this question all the time, so I thought this would be a great podcast and who better than a fitness expert like Ben Greenfield.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for a professional medical advice. The Live To 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature for entertainment purposes only. So please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in anything that we suggest today on the show.
I’m so thrilled. I’ve finally have launched my Body Bio Rehab Online Health Program. You can learn more at BodyBioRehab.com.
I wanted to create a very affordable accessible online health program where you can learn on all the things that I think are very important to live a long healthy life and help to reverse disease, improve your health, your energy, libido bag or mojo bag. So I created five modules, diet, exercise, stress, sleep and detoxification.
So go sign up at BodyBioRehab.com and learn more.
Our guest today is Ben Greenfield. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Beyond Training. He has a very balanced approach to fitness nutrition and health, which comes from his extensive experience in fitness and wellness industry as one of the country’s leading personal trainers and wellness consultants.
In 2008, Ben was nominated by the NSCA as America’s top personal trainer. And in 2013 and 2014, Ben was voted as one of the top 100 most influential individuals in health and fitness.
As a public speaker on fitness nutrition and training, Ben has hosted several top rate fitness and health podcasts on iTunes including Get Fit Guy, the Ben Greenfield Show and Obstacle Dominator. Ben speaks around the world and in addition to, presenting at multi-day conferences in global hot spots like Dubai, London and Thailand. He’s also a regular speaker at Paleo FX actually happening in April and the Ancestral Health Symposium.
Ben resides in Spokane, Washington with his wife, Jessa and twin boys, River and Terran. Hi Ben. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Ben Greenfield: Hey. Thanks for having me on.
Wendy Myers: I think that’s hilarious that you’re working out while we’re going to podcast.
Ben Greenfield: This isn’t really working out. I don’t consider a walking treadmill work station to be a workout. You’d probably croak if you saw my actual workouts. No, this is being active. This is simulating the hunter gatherer lifestyle in a post industrial era.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I need to get one of those.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: It’s on the list.
Ben Greenfield: That and the pull-up bar and the door and pretty much everything you need to fool your body into thinking that you’re hunting and gathering and gardening and anything else all day long when all you’re really doing is working on a laptop.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I need to move my body more often.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and pretty much your role as a fitness god?
Ben Greenfield: Fitness god? I’ve been pretty much in fitness since I was 15 years old and teaching private tennis lessons. I’ve studied Exercise Science, Nutrition and Biomechanics in college while I was playing collegiate tennis.
I also played water polo and volleyball in college and I eventually got into body bloom. And then I ran in triathlon for that. I opened up a bunch of personal training studios and gyms in Idaho and Washington. In 2008, I was voted as America’s top personal trainer.
And about six years ago, I started doing a lot more online consulting and doing a lot more Skype work with folks, a lot more freelance writing in terms of my blog at BenGreenfieldFitness.com. I got training articles there. I got a couple of podcasts I do on the side. I’m still racing. I’m doing camps and clinics and working out myself.
Yeah, pretty much all I’ve ever done is help people get fit, help people heal injuries. It seems like these days, I’m doing a lot more anti-aging, bio-hacking sectors too. Maybe that’s just because I’m getting old.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I started to hear a lot more word about these things, bio-hack, everything.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah, exactly. It’s weird that you start thinking more about everything from skin and connective tissue and joints and living longer. The older you get – my writings and my podcasts and my topics of choice are going more towards that.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, what’s I’m like 60 years old. Maybe I’ll start writing about whatever.
Wendy Myers: What to do when you’re falling apart.
Ben Greenfield: Golf maybe, I don’t know.
Wendy Myers: Or what to do when you’re falling apart.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah, exactly. Hopefully that doesn’t happen. That’s why I’m doing everything I do now so I don’t fall apart when I’m 60.
Wendy Myers: Me too. I’m trying to do everything I can.
Ben Greenfield: Or 110.
Wendy Myers: Exactly. Exactly. You have to detoxify if you want to live that long.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about the topic of our podcast. I get asked this all the time. What kind of exercise should people do when they have adrenal fatigue?
Ben Greenfield: That’s a good question. It depends on the stage of adrenal fatigue because if you’re still on a stage where you’re producing adequate amounts of cortisol and your sympathetic nervous system is still pretty robust.
A lot of times, all you need to do is simply program in more rest days and recovery days. That’s what you see a lot of times with the crossfitters or the triathletes or marathoners. They’re really not in stage three or four. They’re still motivated to work out. They’re still producing a lot of cortisols. They have a lot of sympathetic drive and they simply need those days.
Like for me, today is a recovery day for me. I’ll be walking on my treadmill while I’m working. I’ll visit the sauna for about 30 or 40 minutes and sweat things out this afternoon while I’m reading some magazines. I did this morning my “workout.” It was a cold water soak for about 10 or 15 minutes and then some foam rolling.
It’s like I’m still making my body better on the recovery day. But a lot of times, that’s all it takes if you’ve got early stage adrenal fatigue and you just need to program a little bit of resting and realize that rest doesn’t mean you go stir crazy sitting around the house, but you’re actually able to do things that make your body better, sauna, cold soaking, hot soaking or cold-hot contracts so that you get blood flow moving around. Trampolining and vibration platforms, those would be also examples of things that really get lymph flow and blood fluid circulating without actually being stressful to your body from an impact standpoint.
Foam rolling or massage therapy is fine as well. Anything else as far as deep tissue work using massage sticks, cross balls or yoga tuna balls to work a lot of the fascial adhesions and the cross linking that are building up on other days in a week. Infrared sauna or dry sauna, either of those would be fine as well. But a lot of the times, that’s all it takes.
Now once you’re getting into something a little bit more like a stage three adrenal fatigue. Usually stage four typically folks are bedridden and they’re not exercising at all because they can’t.
But when you get to the point where you’re really not producing much cortisol at all, there are a few other things that you got to do. Typically, I get a lot of people who are Iron Man triathletes, bodybuilders, folks like that who come to me and they really are – if you look in adrenal stress index for example, really rock bottom cortisol levels throughout the day, difficulty really getting much adrenals stimulus at all and a lot of cravings for glucose and caffeine and other ways to get energy levels up simply because cortisol is not mobilizing liver glycogen the way that it should and the energy levels are simply not there.
In a case like that, a lot of times, it takes a good four to eight weeks to push the reboot button on the body. In a situation like that, the type of workouts that will start folks off with are first of all some of the things that I just talked about when it comes to the type of things that an athlete can normally – he needs just one or two recovery days. He’d be doing them in those recovery days. So cold-hot contrast, sauna, things that go along those lines, foam roller, massage.
But typically what we also do is yoga, tai chi. I’m a huge fan of it as well for that just because of its ability to decrease cortisol. We do a lot of nature walks, a lot of sauna exposure. So a typical week or a four-week reboot or recovery protocol would look like something if we would look at seven days a week. Every other day, you’d be doing a nice, easy 20 to 30 minute morning walk in the sunshine to start to jumpstart the cortisol levels in the morning and get the Circadian Rhythm going. And on the other days of the week, it would be 20 or 30 minutes of tai chi or yoga or something like that in the morning.
And then in the afternoons, Sundays, you do something like a sauna for detox type of protocol or cold-hot contrast where you’re going back and forth from sauna to cold shower or sauna to not anything too cold. You wouldn’t necessarily want to do an ice bath for example if you have adrenal fatigue, but you can do a colder pool to a sauna or a lukewarm or a slightly cold shower back and forth to a sauna to get the blood flowing and the detox effects of that. Foam rolling, massage, really light body weight type of movements if you’re going to do any type of resistance training like just some easy pushups or squats or something like that.
Those are some of the main things. And then once somebody has gone through a few weeks of that, what I’ll typically introduce first is some way to increase blood pressure and increase heart rate as well as build strength without actually stressing up the body. And I’m a big fan of super slow training for that.
Once you’ve gone through the four weeks of just doing the yoga and the sauna and the easy walking, that’s not necessarily sitting around your butt. But it’s also not stressful, especially from a sympathetic nervous system standpoint. There are no long aerobics sessions or anything like that during this time, running, cycling, swimming, anything like that.
Basically the next phase that you get into is you keep doing all that same stuff. Then I’ll introduce just two or three times a week about 12 to 15 minutes of super slow training.
There’s a good program. There’s a book called Body By Science by Doug McGuff. It just plays out a very basic routine where for example, it is four to five different exercises.
Let’s say you’re going to do at the gym a chest press, a pull down, a shoulder press, a leg press and a seated row. What you do is 10 seconds down, 10 seconds up for each of those exercises, really, really slow and just one set for each exercise. That’s it.
It’s actually a little bit more difficult than it sounds, but it’s not like power-lifting, not like crossfit, not like doing high intensity interval training on a treadmill or anything like that. It’s just slow, restorative, nonimpact based strength.
Next thing that I’ll introduce are very short spurts of high intensity interval training. It’s nothing that gets really glycolytic, but we’re talking about very short 10 to 30 second sprints of workouts.
Somebody might do 10 by 100 meters or something like that out in a baseball field or soccer field, in the grass in bare feet, something like that. Again, it’s nothing too long, nothing too voluminous, nothing that exhausts your glycogen source or has you going for very, very long period of time. It’s just short spurts of exercise.
Now at that point, once someone is doing the easy light restorative aerobics, they’re doing a couple of those super slow strength training routines and they’re sprinting a couple of times a week, they’re basically back to a program that’s really more of like a longevity anti-aging program. That’s really all you need to be doing for your exercise program, unless you want to do competitive sports, unless you want to do triathlon or an obstacle race or a marathon.
If that is what someone wants to do, then we introduce, once they’re fully recovered, more of the longer stuff. So then we’ve got two or three days of the week where you’re actually doing the long swim, the long bike, the long run, more stamina based 16 minutes to two hours type of session where you actually are pushing the body a little bit more.
For the weight training, we gradually progress out of something like this super slow training and start doing more traditional strength training, power-lifting, crossfitting, that type of thing. That step into the more athletic realm is something that a lot of people think they have to look good or to be fit. That’s not really the case. I mean you can get away with doing the super slow training, occasional high intensity interval sprints like the 100 meter type of stuff. And then the yoga, the swimming, the easy stuff really compresses the majority of the program.
If you came up to me and said, “Ben, rather than racing all these triathlons, doing the Spartan races, stuff like that, if you want to live as long as possible, what would you do?” And I would switch into a program like that where I’m not beating up my body necessarily and draining it each week.
I personally have this deep-rooted desire to put a notch in the belt and go out and do these crazy feats of physical performance. That’s also part of my living as I coach people and I have to spend some time in the trenches doing that stuff. But ultimately, if it was just about living long, I wouldn’t necessarily be in those things.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean you’re the type of person I think that you probably have the genetic propensity, the genetic components to be able to do this type of physical exercise and perhaps not fall into adrenal fatigue.
Can you talk a little bit about the differences that people have? Some people just don’t have the genetic countenance and they just fall apart if they do too much long stay cardio and too much high intensity exercise and they can easily fall into adrenal fatigue. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. There are certainly genetic markers that are associated with, for example, ability to produce certain indigenous antioxidants that help with recovery. If you go to a company like DNAFit or I believe it’s called Athletigen or something like that (that’s another new company), that will allow you to export your 23andMe data and see whether you’re a fast recoverer or a slow recoverer.
A lot of times, someone with fast recovery does very good with consistent exercise every day. A lot of times, it can dip into the well a little bit deeper each day of the week where someone with slow recovery or someone who doesn’t naturally produce many of these antioxidants simply can’t take as much.
They might be able to go out and do a really hard session a couple of times a week. But as far as consistently digging deep, they just couldn’t probably do it. But they need some extra help via supplementation, even IV therapy, Myer’s cocktail, stuff like that to actually help them along a little bit.
The other thing is the warrior versus the worrier gene. Someone who has two of the warrior genes, they tend to be easily the professional athletes, the 6 ft 8 inch, 5% body fats, 300 lbs football players who are obviously – they would have been the warrior king thousands of years ago.
And then some people have a copy of the warrior gene and then also the worrier gene, which is your average person who’s able to go out and exercise.
That’s what I have. I have one copy of the warrior and one copy of the worrier. I’ve got enough of that warrior gene to be able to really throw some hard stuff on my body, but I’m not a complete physical specimen. So I’ m 6 ft 2 inch. I’m 180 lbs. That’s not really going to necessarily put me into the elite athlete category. That genetic combination is pretty common.
Then a lot of people have two copies of the worrier gene and they’re not all that great. They’re just not naturally gifted and they have an uphill battle. That’s not to say that they can’t be healthy and do a lot of these things like the yoga, the walking, the tai chi, the dancing and all the things that help to keep you happy and fit for life. But maybe they’re not ever going to really win the day’s crossfit or whatever.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, we’re not doing Iron Man.
Ben Greenfield: They’re doing an Iron Man, but they’re not doing it in nine hours. They’re more 14 or 15 hours. But they’re probably good at other stuff.
A lot of those things that we tend to see in society or in school or whatever, the people aren’t actually getting to the sports or athletics. Part of that can be traced right back to genetics. So that’s really interesting.
Wendy Myers: Can you talk a little bit about when someone exercises, they do some intense cardio at night and they’re just completely wiped out? Can you talk about how that might be a sign of adrenal fatigue because I think that there are a lot of people out there that have adrenal fatigue and they don’t realize it?
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. So if you’re completely wiped out after workout, sometimes – I see this more and more these days – it can simply means your glycogen depleted.
You see that a lot of times, the low carb people who are following a low carbohydrate diet protocol that was designed for a relatively sedentary person, like 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrates a day. A lot of times, I get someone that comes to me with the whole ketosis thing, but they don’t understand that you can be in ketosis and you could still get all the benefits of a low carb high fat diet. But if you’re exercising a lot, low carb for you is 100 to 200 grams a day, not 30 to 40 grams a day.
That was certainly the case for me when I first started to experiment ketosis. The first recommendations I read were from guys like Dr. Jeff Volek. He does a lot of the research on ketosis, but he doesn’t really exercise. He occasionally lose weight and that’s it.
I was following his recommendations and it was nowhere near carbohydrate intake necessary for me to be able to get through a workout without feeling exhausted. I was testing breath key tones and blood key tones and all that jazz. I figured out that I could get my key tones just as high as Dr. Volek was talking about in his book Low Carbohydrate Diet for a Performance. I forgot the actual name of his book.
But anyways, really high key tone values are like three to four times the level of carbs that a relatively sedentary person would recommend. That’s one thing. It is possible if you’re in a consistent state of glycogen depletion for you to get it, a lot of the symptoms of adrenal fatigue or sluggish metabolism because you need enough glucose to for example convert inactive to active thyroid hormone.
So that’s one thing you realize. A big part of it can be glycogen-related as far as feeling really rundown after workout. I mean if you’ve got a large amount of – say like a pregnant woman – still happening where a lot of your hormonal precursors like vitamin D for example are getting shuttled toward cortisol formation from constantly being stressed and over-trained rather that producing more anabolic hormones like testosterone or DHEA. You’re going to take a lot longer to recover and you’re also going to feel more beat up after work out because your testosterone and cortisol ratios are going to be really low just because of high cortisol and low levels of anabolic hormones.
The other thing is similar to once you get yourself to a state where you’re producing a really, really low amounts of cortisol, if you look at things like noradrenaline and epinephrine and a lot of the things that get turned out when you’re frequently exercising in the same way that you eventually can become desensitized to caffeine. You need more and more caffeine to get the same effect.
You could eventually get desensitized to all this epinephrine and adrenaline that you’re consistently surging out as you might need greater and greater amounts to get that same high. You might get to the point where you’re simply not able to feel that exercise high and you also just are not as sensitive to those neurotransmitters and hormones that are related to feeling driven and motivated. That’s another part of it too.
That’s why rest and recovery days, it allows you to reset your sensitivity to those that are important in a good smart structured exercise program.
Wendy Myers: I feel that over utilization of energy for exercise even if it’s good for circulation of other health benefits can trigger adrenal crashes. Are you in danger of developing adrenaline fatigue or crashes if you over-exercise?
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. I mean that’s one of those reasons that you would get adrenal fatigue. Obviously it’s stress. And you could get into a state of adrenal fatigue from constant exposure to pollution, mold, environmental toxins, WiFi, EMS, poor relationships and a busy lifestyle. That’s our new one way that you could get adrenally fatigued. Lack of sleep is probably up there too, as well as too many e-mails.
But then you can also do it from over-exercising, which is a lot more common. And that’s the reason that you see people getting adrenal fatigue much more often. It’s simply too much activation of both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, especially on the same day.
So you see a lot of people doing what’s called concurrent training where they’re doing both strength and endurance training multiple times per week, sometimes everyday of the week. And this is pretty common among crossfitter, triathletes or marathoners or endurance athletes who are also implementing weight lifting or strength training or people who work with their hands, people working in constructions, stuff like that who are also at the end of the day going on doing bike rides or runs or swims or things of that nature.
That’s a really good way to deplete yourself very quickly because you’re beating up both branches of your nervous system almost every day of the week.
That’s where something like heart rate variability monitoring can come in handy because a lot of times, you’re waking up in the morning and you’re doing a quick five-minute reading on the strength and robustness and resilience of your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. You can see which is more beat up and which might need recovery.
Yesterday, I did Murph, which is a mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats and then a mile run. And you’re doing all that as fast as you can.
When I did my heart rate variability measurement this morning, my parasympathetic, like my rest-and-digest branch of my nervous system, it was just fine. It was a nice robust numbers, a very high, what’s called a high frequency score on my heart rate variability.
But my sympathetic nervous system was depressed. It was under a thousand, which is a low score for me. So it’s obvious that that branch of my nervous system was really beat up. And whereas a lot of times, you’ll see a crossfitter like, “Go back to the box to do another hard workout the next day.”
It’s good that today is a recovery day for me or a day where I’m only doing something like parasympathetic nervous system based walking during a podcast just because my sympathetic nervous system is beat up, not ready to take it.
So that’s really the fastest way to adrenal fatigue. It’s to not pay attention to what energy system that you’re working and not giving that energy system enough recovery.
If you take a hard weightlifting session, technically you could be recovered from the muscular skeletal standpoint within 24 hours as far as your inflammatory cytokines, your HSCRP, metabolic byproducts, localized muscle tissue. All of that can be removed within a day.
But as far as neuromuscular fatigue, nervous system fatigue and adrenal fatigue, it can take 48 to 72 hours to recover from a tough workout. We’re talking about whatever, say an Iron Man triathlon. It can take two to three weeks.
If you’re not taking into account those recovery times and not just paying attention to whether or not you’re sore, which is typically muscular skeletal fatigue, but also you got to pay attention to heart rate and heart rate variability. You’re playing with fire when it comes to making sure that you’re adequately recovered and not constantly digging yourself into a hole.
The other important thing to realize is that in many cases, it’s a constant known as periodization in sports. But you should, at certain times if you’re trying to get very, very fit, purposefully dig yourself into a hole.
For example, the Iron Man triathletes who I work. We’ll get to the point where in those final eight weeks leading up to the race, we’re playing with fire or we’re getting very, very close to adrenal fatigue, very, very close to digging ourselves into a deeper hole.
But then once you program in what’s called a taper, which is a period of time full of rest and recovery and a period of time very much like an athlete often goes nuts because they’re just not doing as much as they’re used to. You can get what’s called super compensation where you get into a very low, low without getting in a full-on adrenal fatigue, but you’re beat up. You have days where you just don’t feel like working out. You got to go out and do it anyways.
Once you rest and recover from that, you get super compensation, a big boost in fitness that you would not normally have experienced. It can be a delicate process and that’s where measuring – most of my athletes do quarterly blood and bio marker testing daily, heart rate variability testing so that we know if they’re getting to the point where they’re very, very close to adrenal fatigue or overtraining.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I think an exercise program should be designed specifically for the level of adrenal function. You need to keep a pulse on your energy levels and how you feel so you don’t overdo it. Can you talk a little bit about really listening to your body and tuning into your body?
Ben Greenfield: Yeah, exactly. I mean you cannot certainly follow what’s in men’s health or women’s health magazine and expect it to work for you. And that relates to what I mentioned.
It can be tough to do an adrenal stress index everyday and expensive. They look at salivary cortisol and DHEA four times a day every day. But you can look at corollaries. You can look at heart rate variability. That’s a perfect example.
Heart rate is another good example meaning that a lot of times people will think that the lower your resting heart rate gets, the better and the fitter you are because your stroke volume is increasing. You’re pumping on more blood with every beat of your heart. Therefore, if you’re having to pump less times per minute, you must be getting greater blood volume and better heart efficiency and better cardiovascular efficiency. But people who are already fit, a sudden drop in heart rate can be indicative of a risk for adrenal fatigue or overtraining syndrome.
And then heart rate variability, I already explained. But that’s another thing where if there’s a certain drop in heart rate variability or a consistent daily low heart rate variability and someone who normally has a high heart rate variability. That’s another thing that you need to pay attention to.
That’s going to change from person to person and a lot of times interestingly it can change not just based on exercise but also on travel, Circadian rhythms, work stress, relationship, stress, whether or not the wi-fi router is off at night or on at night. Little things like that add up pretty quickly when it comes to something like heart rate variability.
There are other things that you can look at. I mean fluctuations and weight. A sudden drop in the weight can be a warning sign. Standing up and sitting down and feeling dizzy when you go from a seated to a standing position. That can be another warning sign. Feeling like the legs are really loaded with lactic acid every time you go up a flight of stairs. A lot of times that can either be warning sign that you’re getting close to adrenal fatigue or that you’re very low on glycogen, sometimes both.
There’s a really cool tool. It’s called RestWise. I don’t remember what the website is. It might be RestWise.com. They allow you to, when you wake up in the morning, track nine different variables from your mood to your heart rate, to your color, to your weight, to your heart rate variability to give you a running metric that you can look at.
I mean if you wanted to pull in as many variables as possible, that’s a little bit more of a laborious process in my opinion, more of a very serious athlete or someone who’s really putting a lot of their life into getting ready for an Iron Man or something like that might do – it’s a useful tool.
I find that most folks, even people who aren’t very serious about sports just want to be in this game for anti-aging and longevity. I like the concept of just doing heart rate and heart variability, simple five-minute morning measurement everyday. It gives you a lot of data. That’s what I personally do, just that measurement.
Wendy Myers: I think it’s really important also for people to keep in mind an adrenal budget where you can’t do everything. You cannot sleep and work out five days a week and eat too many carbs and drink alcohol with your friends on the weekends. There has to be a budget. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. That’s the perfect way to express it, to budget. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do some of those things. But what you need to understand is you have to plan.
If you know that you’re going to be out drinking with your friends on Saturday night and there’s a big party, you either are going to need to program a recovery day on Saturday or a recovery day on Sunday to account for that. You can’t just throw that out to your body much I guess like a 19 year old college student.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Ben Greenfield: I know I was more robust when I was in college and expected to bounce back.
The same could be said for example for relationship stress. If you’re going through difficult time with the spouse or a loved one or a pet or a child or something like that, you’re going to find that there can’t be a disconnect between that and your exercise routine. And you may have to program in a week.
I had a client who recently finished up about two weeks of international travel. He was just all over the place. He was speaking. He was a high level CEO and it was just a lot of stress. And he was working out during that time. I know that’s what he needs to stay sane.
So I was programming in workouts for him. Most of those two weeks, he was working out. By the time he got home, I know his budget was pretty close to empty. And his entire week for that week when he got home was basically yoga, easy walks, couple of easy swims, a lot of time spent in the sauna in just seven days.
It’s like repaying that budget and rebuilding the bank account stress again so that he would be able to start delving back into some of his other goals once he’d come out of that de-stress period. And he could start to focus on things like building muscle, burning fat, boosting VO2 max and some of his other goals. Yeah, you always have to take into account that budget and you can’t just throw stuff willy-nilly at your body.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think that’s an important point. You can’t do everything. You have to make choices in life about what your priorities are and follow those goals absolutely.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah, exactly.
Wendy Myers: I have a question I like to ask to all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Ben Greenfield: Gosh! It depends. For example, I’m a big fan of World Vision, the charity that helps to get water to people in developing countries who have no access to clean water and to clothe children who cannot be clothed and to provide food for folks and obviously, basic. You look at Maslow’s needs, right? These people, it’s just like basic food, water, shelter.
When I’m talking with people who I’m trying to get them off their butts to do something like a standing workstation or reducing sedentary activity that they have during the day, certainly that’s a pressing need in America, just getting people out of the mode of sitting all day long and then fighting that with an exercise session at the end of the day.
I would say that in modern developed first world countries or whatever, that’s the biggest. It’s just that getting off your butt and moving and hacking your environment so that you’re not sedentary all day long.
But then in a developing country, all of a sudden, that doesn’t seem to be very important at all. All of a sudden, it’s clean water and it’s food and it’s shelter and it’s HIV and all these other issues that are way more serious than all of us fat Westerners are trying to get off our butts.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Ben Greenfield: So it depends. But ultimately where we’re living and probably the majority of our audience, it’s basically figuring out ways that you can be more active during the day and figuring out ways especially so that you’re not sitting with your glute muscles turned off, your hip flexors are shortened, your low back basically compressed, your neck thrust forward. And then you get up, you try to exercise and you get injured because everything is just biomechanically off. If you look at our ancestors, they did not spend as much time each day sitting as we do.
I’ll be going over to my kids’ school after we talk. They have a talent show over there and one of the things I’m doing is getting standing desks for each classroom so that kids were not only able to stand but also aware of the fact that you don’t have to sit to get stuff done. Sitting does not have to be the go-to posture during the day.
In our house, we follow that rule of You sit to eat. That’s the time when you want a lot of parasympathetic nervous system activation and you want to be relaxed in that posture. And the rest of the time, we’re standing, lying, kneeling, lunging, you name it, doing anything except this modern chair form of sitting.
Wendy Myers: Damn it, I’m getting a standing desk.
Ben Greenfield: You got to do it.
Wendy Myers: Where do you get one? Where do you get a treadmill desk? What brand do you use?
Ben Greenfield: Until this year, I just had a cabinet in my house that I have a little shoebox on top of. That was it. That was what I did for actually four or five years.
Now I have one of those little crank desks. It’s called theRebel Desk. I wrote a big article on my site about all different standup desks and treadmill desks and stuff that are out there. But my set up is I have a standing desk called the Rebel Desk, which can crank up and down with hand cranks. So there’s no EMF. A lot of them have motors. This one doesn’t.
My treadmill is a manual treadmill. It’s called True Form. I got a True Form because I can run or walk. I can also do workout on it if I wanted to, but I can also walk very slowly. And again, there’s no motor, no EMF.
And then I also have basically a very dense foam mat called the Kybounder that’s next to my desk, so that if I am not on my chair and I’m standing, I’m not on my hard carpet all day long. I can shift my body weight to different muscles. So there are no overuse injuries that are occurring while I’m standing.
And then I also have this little stool that I can lean against if I need to lean. That one is made by a company called Focal Upright. It’s called a Mogo.
And I’ve got little foam rollers and stuff on my office. It’s like a little playground. I’m there all day long. I can be in different positions. There’s a pull up bar outside. You can hang form like a monkey. I just try and subject my body to all sorts of different positions all day long.
Wendy Myers: So it’s a gym/office.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love it. I need to get one really badly. I do way too much sitting and computer work, et cetera.
Ben Greenfield: And the window that I’m looking out as you’re talking, it’s a green forest. There’s a green grass and rocks outside. But then I’m just looking out at these big bunch of tamarack trees. I get a little nature therapy.
I hacked it. As I’m going through my day, I don’t finish the days exhausted and feeling unhealthy and sick and tired. I finish feeling energized.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I had honestly too many days where I feel like that. I’m just drained from working so much. I got to get that energy going.
Ben Greenfield: I told you. You got to hack the environment.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do. It’s on the list. So tell us about your bookBeyond Training.
Ben Greenfield: Beyond Training is, as the name implies, everything that goes beyond the workout because I’ve worked with so many athletes and weekend lawyers and recreational exercisers. They really did have the exercise thing down.
They’re working out but everything from digestion to sleep to recovery to hormonal balance to stress control to really good nutrient dense nutrition was not happening. So this book is basically a culmination of about 10 years of time spent in the trenches just helping people navigate everything that assist with longevity and anti-aging and performance and fat loss and recovery that goes beyond just the workout, all those things that you have to take into account.
It’s 500 pages worth of bio hacks and meals and recovery tools and everything else necessary to keep you in the game long term and ensure that you’re not just getting performance, but that you’re also getting health.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it. I’m glad we’re finally able to record it. I was on your podcast. Listeners can get that on HTMA…
Ben Greenfield: That’s right. I got to thank you for the hair mineral analysis. We identified manganese as a big culprit. Now I have amino because I was on well water. I assume that was pretty good to go on that.
It was already filtering out bacterial based iron, but now I’ve got a really good manganese filter added on that. So I’m filtering that out of the water and I want to test here pretty soon and see how that reflects my hair analysis.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, definitely do a retest for sure.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. So I’ve taken that into account for sure. Based on the copper issue, I’ve decided that probably one of the better things that I could be doing is more like a daily sauna treatment.
In the up stair’s closet, it was supposed to be my wife’s sewing equipment closet, I’m basically installing a walking infrared sauna up there. That would be right next to the bedroom. After I get out of bed, I go sit in there in the morning for my meditation and breathing and everything.
Wendy Myers: That’s terrific. That sounds perfect.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. A lot of people are surprised. They’re drinking well water. They’re thinking they’re doing so good with their water and they get the manganese iron toxicity surprise and even uranium as well.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah, exactly. Thanks for going through that with me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, for sure. Ben, tell the listeners where they can find you and about your other podcasts, et cetera.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. The best place to go is just BenGreenfieldFitness.com. You can use that as a portal to get to my podcasts, to my articles and things of that nature.
I’m always trying to put out good information for folks and see what they talk about this week. I believe this week was the effects of marijuana on physical and cognitive performance.
Then the podcast this week is on hydration and electrolytes and specifically how to find out your own unique sodium loss and your sweat, how to replenish that accordingly and how to make sure that you’re staying hydrated during activity and during a day to day routine. I’m always trying to put on something cutting-edge when it comes to especially performance, bio hacking nutrition, that type of thing. So BenGreenfieldFitness.com.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you have a lot of really unique podcasts that you’ve been doing a lot of times too. You have over 300 podcasts.
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. They’re probably unique just because I’ve gotten bored with all the same old, same old stuff. So now, I’m just delving in everything else.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’ll do one on Lyme disease. I’m not really going there with a very niche podcast.
Ben Greenfield: Nice.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Ben, thank you so much for being on the show.
Ben Greenfield: I live out in the forest where there are lots of ticks. So that’s what I want.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, for sure. It’s really a much more common than people think. I’m catching a few clients that…
Ben Greenfield: Yeah. I hunt deer a lot too. So when I’ve got my arms up to my elbows and the gut of a deer in my [inaudible 00:43:28]. Literally, I just see ticks floating off this thing. It always makes me nervous with the Lyme disease thing. Not to gross anyone out.
Wendy Myers: But you’ll probably get in the sauna. It will keep the viruses in check, et cetera.
Ben Greenfield: There we go. Sauna will cure everything.
Wendy Myers: Cure everything. It’s a cure for sure. Ben, thanks for coming on the show.
Listeners, you can learn more about me at myersdetox.com or all about natural healing, detoxification and my version of modern Paleo. Thank you so much for listening to the Live To 110 Podcast.
