Listen

Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE

Transcript

  • 01:25 Detox Tip of the Day
  • 03:29 About Max Gotzler
  • 10:56 Testosterone
  • 15:52 Causes for Low Testosterone Production
  • 18:35 Maximizing Testosterone Production
  • 23:20 Working Out
  • 26:31 Morning Routines
  • 31:57 How to Increase Testosterone
  • 44:21 Where to Find Max Gotzler

Wendy Myers: Hello. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers, and you can find me at myersdetox.com.

Today, we are having Max Gotzler on the podcast. I met him at the Bulletproof Biohacking Conference. He spoke about testosterone production, how to improve testosterone production. So I thought I’d have him on the podcast to talk about that very thing.

A lot of people today are suffering from low hormone production, adrenal fatigue, and we’re going to talk about all of the inhibitors of testosterone production, and lots of tips about things that you can do today to begin improving your testosterone levels, feeling better, and enjoying a better, healthier libido.

But first, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition, and is not a substitute for professional, medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature, so please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in anything that we suggest today on the show.

01:25 Detox Tip of the Day

Wendy Myers: Now, it’s time for our Detox Tip of the Day. I want to talk a little bit about nickel toxicity. It’s one of the most common toxicities that I do find in my client population, and in speaking with other detox professionals that detox their clients.

Nickel is problematic because it doesn’t show very readily on a hair mineral analysis. That’s the first tool that I use when working with clients. Some clients, they’re very, very nickel-toxic, so it does show. But for many others, when I do a urine metals push test using certain chelators, then we find that they are, in fact, nickel-toxic.

It’s very, very common if you ever have braces, you have a lot of crowns and dental work, and certain exposures like mercury amalgam fillings. They also contain nickel as well as mercury. They’re amalgams, so there are a number of metals in mercury fillings. Nickel toxicity is a big problem.

And one of the main features of nickel toxicity is low-grade depression. Some people even have suicidal thoughts from it.

So, detoxing really helps to improve your emotional life and your mental functioning. I studied psychology for many years just as a personal interest of mine and always wondered why I had low-grade depression. And nickel toxicity, which I was toxic in at one time, definitely contributed to the problem.

Like I said, it just causes these low-grade malaise where maybe your life is going really well, and you have a good family and a good job, and you generally are taking care of yourself, but you just don’t feel that great, or you just don’t feel the joy that you should be feeling. It can be from nickel.

So, I can’t stress it enough. If you’re not feeling right emotionally, physically or mentally, you have low energy, brain fog, et cetera, you want to investigate your sources of toxicity.

03:29 About Max Gotzler

Wendy Myers: So, let’s get to our guest today. His name is Maximilian Gotzler. He is the founder and CEO of Biotrakr and Flowgrade. He is a former professional athlete. He’s a blogger, and organizer of the Quantified Self Group in Berlin.

And as one of the leading influences of the German Quantified Self and Biohacking scene, Max has received significant media coverage including Zeit Online, ARD Panorama, Bloomberg, Brand Eins, ARD Mittagsmagazin, RTL Extra, Welt Kompakt, Berliner Kurier, Deutsche Welle, NDR and several others. Hopefully, I said that with a really good German accent.

And as an NCAA basketball player at Boston University, Max discovered the usefulness of self-quantification to optimize physical and mental performance.

Inspired by biohacking pioneers like Dave Asprey and Tim Ferriss, Max started tracking different biomarkers and connecting them to his diet, fitness level, sleep and other parameters. Max has presented his findings on vitamin D and testosterone at the Quantified Self Conference in Europe in Amsterdam 2014.
With Biotrakr, Max is pursuing his vision to use the power of cutting-edge diagnostics to enhance human performance and to offer tools and actionable guidelines to everyone who wants to upgrade his or her physical and mental capacities.

Maximilian’s newest project is the Flowgrade Show, a promising biohacking podcast featuring guests such as Dave Asprey and many other experts in their respective fields. With the development of the brand, Flowgrade, Max and his team are working to offer high-quality nutritional products to complement the lab services offered through Biotrakr.

In addition, Max is a frequent speaker at health events and conferences on biohacking, self-optimization and self-quantification in Germany and Europe.

Maximilian holds a Masters in Economics from the Sorbonne University in Paris, and a BA in Psychology from Boston University. When he’s not trying a new Paleo dish, or recording a podcast, or writing for his blog, Max loves to play cheesy pop songs on the piano. And he currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

Max, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Max Gotzler: Thank you for inviting me, Wendy.

Wendy Myers: It was very nice to meet you at the Bulletproof Biohacking Conference. You were speaking, correct?

Max Gotzler: Likewise. Yes I was speaking. I actually gave a talk about a testosterone experiment that I’ve done and taught people how to raise their testosterone while in the room.

Wendy Myers: Nice. You’re going to teach us that today because I know a lot of men out there, especially coming to me, they’re looking to have more muscle mass and increase their libido, just overall to feel better by increasing their testosterone levels.

But let’s talk a little bit about you first. How did you venture into becoming a biohacker?

Max Gotzler: I actually come from professional sports. This is my story. I grew up being a basketball player in Southern Germany. I was tall enough. I’m about 6’7” and 220, 230, a big guy. I could handle the ball, could shoot it. And I got a scholarship in the United States.

So, I went over there. I spent my first two years at Oregon Tech, a small school in the West, and then transferred to Boston University (BU), the Terriers, and finished up my college career there. And while over there, I was really fascinated already by how – even in college, which is amateurish, pretty much, you’re not paid to play. But still, we had a huge [inaudible 00:07:36]. We were trained, we were using functional methods.

We were pretty much doing CrossFit before CrossFit even existed and tracking ourselves. And every month, we received this sheet with strength markers, or how fast we would sprint, some of our blot markers. And our physical trainers, they track us over the course of the pre-season at least and saw if we improved, and how the training worked out, and if we gained strength, if we became more fit, in a way.

I was really fascinated by this tracking aspect. And I noticed that just the fact that I tracked something already helped me improve because it made me aware, it motivated me to keep going, it showed me progress. And that’s how I got into the quantified self scene.

That was around the years when Kevin Kelly started the Quantified Self Movement in San Francisco with Gary Wolf. At one point then, I went to a Quantified Self conference just because I was interested.

So now, quantified self and biohacking are quite related. I would say quantified self focused more on the tracking aspect, and biohacking is then using technology and data in order to tweak and improve the screws of your body to upgrade body and mind.

And so this was the natural progression from sports to quantified self, the value of tracking to improving biohacking.

I started following the blogs, Dave Asprey quite early actually, Tim Ferriss, Ben Greenfield, these guys, and I started my own website in Germany.

At first, actually, I started a website that helped people get insights into their blood work, to track vitamin D levels. I’ve partnered up with a lab and sold a very easy dry spot blood test for vitamin D.
While I was doing this, I just started, I met Dave Asprey in person at a conference, and I proposed to him that I could offer to the same clientele, the same clients I assumed would also be interested in Bulletproof products to distribute Bulletproof products.

And so I started my shop which is called Flowgrade. I added the Bulletproof products. I started adding my own products, vitamin D products, and created content. People just became drawn to the content more and more. So we are very content-driven e-commerce now.

This is how that evolved over the last couple of years, how I became a professional biohacker in a sense.

Wendy Myers: I love biohacking too. I do it with hair mineral analysis and urine metals push testing, and other functional diagnostic tests that I do. It’s a lot of fun. It’s really interesting.

Max Gotzler: I’m really excited about this hair analysis.

Wendy Myers: Yes, I’m going to do one for you. It’s very, important to track that as well, and not just for hormone levels.

Max Gotzler: That’s right.

Wendy Myers: Yes, because a lot of metals do affect your ability to produce hormones, so it’s very, very important. They affect your adrenal function, especially mercury. And so it’s very important to detox those to enhance testosterone production.

10:56 Testosterone

Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about testosterone. Why are so many people having problems with low testosterone today?

Max Gotzler: I would say the elements that cause low testosterone are the same that I usually recommend for people to increase their testosterone, which is usually high amounts of stress, alcohol, bad diet, eating all the time, low amount of sleep, not really intense exercise, or just not intense enough.

But maybe even going a step back, how I got into testosterone. This is actually a related subject. It’s not my story to biohacking. But while I was playing in the NCAA Division I Basketball at Boston University, I was diagnosed by a doctor, all of a sudden, without really having any symptoms, with a deficiency of testosterone. For a male athlete on the highest level, this was a shock for me.

So, it changed everything. It changed how I behaved in the locker room, how confident I felt on the court, and I thought I have low testosterone.

And later on, I found out that this one test was really not significant. I’ve done an experiment where I tested myself every second day for a whole month in order to find out if there was really something wrong with me. I found out there was nothing wrong. But there were days where I had lower testosterone, and then there were days where I had higher testosterone.

And so then with tools of quantified self, sleep tracker and a mood tracker – I use this app called Mappiness that asks you twice a day how you feel. I track my sleep and my diet. And then I put it all over each other.

So I had my testosterone levels of one month, which were about 10 tests, I think. And then I had my sleep data, my mood data, and my nutrition data, my diet.

And it was really interesting. I could definitely see. This was a self-experiment. So it’s not really scientific. It’s M=1 quantified self study.

But still, it was quite clear to me that I had mornings where I had really high testosterone, and they were always after nights of really good sleep, where I didn’t drink alcohol before, where I had at least more than seven hours of sleep. And the highest level I actually had was nine hours of sleep. And the lowest levels I had when I went out partying, when I drank alcohol, when I slept only three to four hours.

This is almost common sense. It sounds like common sense. But seeing this in front of you, this really gives you clarity that this is actually working. Sleep is working. Diet is working.

This is how I then became more and more interested in testosterone and started reading up on it, and preparing presentations. I gave a talk at the Quantified Self Conference and the Biohacking Conference about testosterone. That’s how I found more and more about it.

You’re right. There are a lot of men, and also actually women, dealing with testosterone issues. So, it’s also present in women. It’s not produced in the testicles, but in the ovaries mostly, 90% of it. The rest is in the adrenal glands.

It’s just for men, this very important marker, I think it’s probably more hyped up than it probably should be because there are other hormones that are equally as important. But testosterone is just this one hormone that’s associated with masculinity and strength.

It’s a very good indicator also if something is going wrong in your lifestyle. I was quite surprised how many men there are dealing with testosterone issues. I think it’s really a combination of factors.

So going back to your question, it’s a combination of bad dieting, too much alcohol, too little sleep, too little exercise. This accumulates, and it becomes this vicious cycle, where you have lower testosterone, you feel less confident, you’re less disciplined, you eat worse, you feel worse. You have even lower testosterone the next day, and so on and so on. It’s a vicious cycle.

So, once you start improving your lifestyle or your diet, and including a couple of elements that actually benefit your well-being, your testosterone goes up, you feel better, you feel more confident, your testosterone even goes higher, and so on. So, this is why I think it’s such an interesting indicator.

15:52 Causes for Low Testosterone Production

Wendy Myers: I have a lot of clients that come to me that are suffering from adrenal fatigue. You need to have healthy adrenals to produce testosterone, and you need to have a healthy cholesterol intake to produce testosterone. You have to have a healthy zinc levels because testosterone is made from zinc. Are there any other issues that will prevent testosterone production?

Max Gotzler: There are. Once you understand the process – or at least that happened for me once I understood the process, then I could understand why some things work and why some things don’t work.

So when the body tells the brain that it needs testosterone, it starts from the hypothalamus. You know that better than me, but this is the simple version, I think, for someone like me, for an athlete to understand it. It’s a hormone called gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which is being released. It tells two other hormones to be released, which is follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone. The one is then causing sperm production, which is FSH. And luteinizing hormone, is actually telling the testicles to produce testosterone out of cholesterol.

Understanding this process will make you understand why diet works. I’ll actually give some advice a little later to what people can do immediately in order to increase their testosterone production. I’m quite confident in telling people that because I’ve tested it for one month, and I’ve seen it with me. So at least I can say this worked for me. It might work for you as well.

So, this process can be disturbed by a bunch of stuff. For example, cortisol is inhibiting testosterone production. When you feel really stressed, when you don’t get enough sleep, it causes your cortisol metabolism to not work adequately, and then your testosterone might be deficient.

The same with if you don’t get enough cholesterol. So, if you don’t eat a high fat diet, or a very low fat diet, that might cause a deficiency in testosterone. These are just a couple of examples. There are more.

Wendy Myers: And it’s important to eat meat. A lot of my vegetarian clients have low hormone levels and adrenal fatigue, and don’t get adequate zinc levels because they’re not eating red meat. So I think that’s really important as well.

Max Gotzler: Yes.

18:35 Maximizing Testosterone Production

Wendy Myers: So what is the importance of maximizing testosterone production? Just for some very basics why you need testosterone. What are the benefits of having a high testosterone level?

Max Gotzler: It’s an anabolic hormone. This means that it’s actually a building hormone. First of all, for men, it’s so interesting because it helps build muscle, it makes you feel more confident, it increases your libido, your sex drive. You get harder erections. You just overall feel more masculine.

Actually, there are very similar effects from women in terms of libido, and I think muscle growth as well, and mood-related issues as well. It raises mood.

There are also a couple of myths actually with testosterone that might be worth addressing, which is that it causes road rage. I looked into several studies, and this is actually not true. So it doesn’t make people more aggressive. It’s actually quite the opposite. It makes people more honest.

There’s one study that showed that people with elevated testosterone tend to be more loyal and more honest. And people that tend to be dishonest, they actually have lower levels of testosterone. I wouldn’t rely on just that one study that I found, but that was quite interesting, I thought.

Also, in the animal kingdom, it’s quite clear that the alpha males that have really low cortisol, high testosterone, that they are the more calm people even under stress. That’s why they’re more respected because they actually act quite rationally even under high amounts of stress.

These are all the benefits of high testosterone, that you actually feel able to deal with stress. You feel stronger and more confident. You have more energy. You’re more – what’s the word? Sexually prowess.

Wendy Myers: Prowess, yes.

Max Gotzler: So there are lots of benefits that come with it.

I wouldn’t even say high testosterone. Let’s say optimum testosterone for a given individual because for everyone, it’s a little different.

Wendy Myers: I know I had experience myself I was having some health problems that prompted my own journey into health, and my website, myersdetox.com. I was not feeling so great. I was having a hard time losing weight, yadah-yadah.

So, I went to my physician and did hormone testing. I had the hormone levels of a menopausal woman, which was really thrilling to hear at 37. One of them, I had very low testosterone levels.

But now, they’re completely normal since I’ve healed my adrenals, changed my sleep, detoxed, changed my diet and what-not. Now, they’re completely normalized.

So I’m very, very happy about that. But I know there’s a lot of women out there that are not having the most enviable lifestyle and diet that find themselves with no libido, and they’re in their 30’s and 40’s and what-not. They need to follow the tips that you’re talking about to improve their testosterone levels, and their libido and sex life.

Max Gotzler: Yes. Actually, at the conference, I met someone that, related to what you just said, told me that he always notices when women have impurities on their skin like this area on the chin, for example, that might be some testosterone issue. The liver is not detoxing correctly. There’s too much testosterone accumulating. Apparently, this is the problem of too much testosterone.

The other person, he was even working in the field. He told me that a lot of the products that people commonly use in the shower, shower gels, cleansers and so on, they contain some toxins that actually inhibit testosterone production. He referred a study as well. I only briefly talked to him. But this is actually something I really would like to dig in in this whole testosterone subject.

Wendy Myers: It makes sense because a lot of the – I study a lot of products and ingredients in products. Perfumes and preservatives like parabens are estrogenic. They block estrogen receptor sites or xenoestrogen. So, it makes sense that if you have an excess of estrogen, albeit a xenoestrogen, a fake estrogen, that could definitely block testosterone production.

Max Gotzler: Yes.

23:20 Working Out

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about working out. You do a lot of working out. What kinds of workouts maximize testosterone production? And does working out itself, lifting weights and other types of workouts improve testosterone levels?

Max Gotzler: Working out actually is one the better methods to increase testosterone definitely. But the one thing that really makes the difference is intensity.

It’s not really the length of any workout. And what I’ve noticed is really as short as four minutes isn’t enough in order to get benefits, and to increase not only your muscle growth, and to release off HGH, human growth hormone, and testosterone. But also your aerobic conditioning, it all gets better.

There’s one study actually where people performed four 4-minute workouts per week, for a total of 16 minutes in comparison to a control group that worked out four times for 30 minutes, so a total of two hours. And the 16-minute group with short, but highly intense workouts had a lot more significant results in terms of muscle growth, conditioning, and how they felt.

Actually, in this study, I’m not sure if testosterone was mentioned, but I’m pretty sure that they probably also had elevated testosterone compared to the control group.

And the control group was doing just 30 minutes of basic cardio workout, so not intense. So the intensity aspect seems to be highly significant.

When you work out, it’s better to do a short workout but highly intense in order to really initiate this release of human growth hormones, to give your hormone production going, and also causing testosterone to be produced.

Wendy Myers: So, walking by the lake maybe not so great for testosterone production.

Max Gotzler: It might not. Well, it might be used for some sort of creative boost. I also consider it a really important aspect to just relax and maybe go for a walk, and breathe in the good air there. It probably doesn’t really help your testosterone.

Wendy Myers: What about weightlifting? By building muscle mass, do you in turn build or increase testosterone production?

Max Gotzler: Yes. The same thing with intensity, it can be cardio-based, but it can also be weight-based. So, using higher weights with slower movements, getting a lot of strain on the muscle, causing almost damage to the muscle will cause hormonal release. This is also fairly clear finding. If you lift higher weights, if you do more intense exercises either with higher weights or more intense cardio workouts, then you will have higher testosterone.

26:31 Morning Routines

Wendy Myers: And so, let’s talk about what your morning routine looks like. What are you personally doing to maximize your testosterone production?

Max Gotzler: This is actually a really interesting topic because I’m totally obsessed with my morning routine. I’m switching it up quite a bit as well. Right now, I’m living in Berlin, Germany, which is quite dark. We have really short days in the winter, and now, it’s still winter.

One of the things that I just included, which is also related to testosterone production, is light therapy. Inspired by Dave Asprey, I bought this big construction lamp that I put diagonally above my head in the kitchen in one of the corners, and it’s shining on me.

Actually, the first time I used it, I left it on for five hours, and it’s a 500-watt lamp. And I had an engineer friend come by and he’s like, “Max, how long did you have that lamp burning?” I said, “I don’t know. The whole day?” He’s like, “Your power bill is going to be insane.”

Power is quite expensive here. So then now, I just keep it on for about 20, 30 minutes. But I love it because it’s telling my body that it’s day. And it normalizes my serotonin and the melatonin production. I very much noticed that.

When I switched that on, my body starts waking up. It normalizes this serotonin/melatonin metabolism, which is a major cause over here for seasonal affective disorder (which is the winter depression or the winter blues). So I use that.

Vitamin D is huge. Vitamin D is actually probably the number one supplement I would recommend for testosterone supplementation as well, naturally, because it’s not really a vitamin. It’s actually a hormone. It’s closer to a steroid hormone than actually a vitamin. And so it is a substrate for testosterone as well. It increases testosterone production. There are several studies pointing that there’s definitely a correlation between low testosterone and low vitamin D, and the opposite. This is one that I use.

Meditation is something that I think keeps my cortisol down, which is an antagonist to testosterone. That’s also related. I try to tie it to testosterone as you might notice.

I actually have it right here. It’s called the 5-Minute Journal. You might know that. I think it’s great, so I do a little bit of gratitude. I write down three things that I’m grateful for every morning, then I do 15 minutes of meditation, using the app Headspace. This keeps me going.

Then I have a Bulletproof coffee. Now, I actually do a short four-minute Tabata workout almost every morning. We have a rowing machine now here. My dad got one for Christmas, so I use that. I really like the four-minute Tabata rowing which is 20 seconds as hard as I can, 10 seconds break, 20 seconds as hard as I can for four minutes. After that, I break a sweat.

You’ll notice I have a lot of elements of my morning routine. But the next part is something that I got from Ben Greenfield, which are cold showers. And this is a lot of fun. I recently came across a study that says that this cold exposure releases gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which if you remember, is the first step of testosterone production in the hypothalamus.

So, cold exposure helps induce the release of this hormone. So, what I do is I time five minutes. I step under the cold shower and then I do the Ben Greenfield method, which is 20 seconds ice cold, 10 seconds warm, in order to really get the blood vessels opening and closing, and training them as well. And after that I feel super energetic, and ready for the day.

Wendy Myers: That’s a lot of components.

Max Gotzler: Say that again?

Wendy Myers: That’s a lot of components to your morning routine.

Max Gotzler: I’m not following it as so strictly that I always do everything. Sometimes, for example, I’d leave out the meditation or the workout because I could easily spend two hours on my morning routine.

Wendy Myers: And now, I’m going to add the infrared sauna to that morning routine, so that you can start detoxing.

Max Gotzler: Yeah, I’m really interested about that.

Wendy Myers: But we’ll get into that another time.

Max Gotzler: I’ve never seen it over here. I know that in the U.S. right now, a lot of people are talking about it in the health scene. I’ve never been in one, and I’ve never seen it here. I haven’t come across the like.

Wendy Myers: You’ll have to introduce it to Germany.

Max Gotzler: That would be awesome. I have to research. There must be someone who produces it over here.

31:57 How to Increase Testosterone

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about any tips. So what are some practical tips that you can give the listeners on how they can increase their testosterone?

Max Gotzler: Hands down, first one, and I know this sounds very common sense, but it’s sleep – not only for testosterone, it’s the number one biohack. Your body is recovering, everything is normalizing, your hormonal production is being normalized in your sleep. Your muscles grow, your body recovers, your brain de-synchronizes and synchronizes. You start memorizing things that you experience over the day. So, sleep definitely.

And testosterone production is the highest while you sleep. The quality of sleep is also really important. So it’s not only the amount that you lay in bed, but it’s also the amount that you spend in deep sleep. That’s where the transformation from cortisol to testosterone is happening.

Number two, I would say, is switching to a high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet, eating a lot good fats and giving your body enough cholesterol to make testosterone and other hormones out of it. This is huge.

One good fat that you can include, which would be actually the next step, which I’d say strategic supplementation, is butter. Especially grass-fed butter is rich in vitamin A and vitamin K which both have shown to increase testosterone production and also help with the absorption of vitamin D, or at least with the absorption of calcium in your bones. Calcium is being regulated by vitamin D.

First sleep, second high fat diet, third strategic supplementation. I would actually also recommend to, if people don’t enough fish, to maybe have Omega 3 cod liver oil supplement of some sort and vitamin D.
Number four, I’d say cold exposure, which is my newest passion, which is cold showers. You can do cold baths. I’m not a big fan of that because it’s time-consuming. You have to get the ice somehow if you don’t have an ice machine at home.

I think cold shower is you get most of the benefit. Apparently, your body really starts transforming itself once you do the cold baths for 10 minutes really in ice cold water. I tried that before. I think cold showers, for me, worked fine enough.

Wendy Myers: I’ve been doing cryotherapy for the past couple of months. There’s a place in Los Angeles here. You can pay $300 a month and go as much as you want.

I went fairly often for about a month. And then I really began chickening out and driving the other way. I’d go to my gym and then I’d start going to the cryotherapy and then I would just chicken out. It’s really painful.

Max Gotzler: Is it really painful?

Wendy Myers: It’s not fun because the temperature is -240. That’s the temperature. You’re only in there for two minutes.

But a lot of benefits. I noticed that my inflammation went down in my body. I had a couple of injuries and I wasn’t having pain anymore as a result. Nice weight loss benefits because when your body is trying to heat itself back up that burns a lot of calories. But it’s not as comfortable as cold showers probably are.

Max Gotzler: This is actually something that also I got from some of the biohackers. They wear cold vests now. They [inaudible 00:35:58] gloves because your hands and your feet, they’re your antennas that tell your brain that you’re feeling cold. You can hack that.

So, they wear these cold vests to get the benefits of cold exposure, of cold therapy, but the body doesn’t really know that it’s feeling cold. But they have these cold suits.

Wendy Myers: I see Ben Greenfield doing that. He does a lot of posts with his cold vest on. Oh, God, poor guy. He’s torturing himself. But he gets a lot of benefits.

Max Gotzler: I’d be interested in doing that.

The next one would be exercise, definitely. That’s probably one of the top three.

Wendy Myers: You said you can do too much and too little. What is the sweet spot for exercise?

Max Gotzler: For exercise, what I found is that about 20 minutes being active per day is enough. This is really the minimum optimal to get all the benefits and to look great. Ben would say, to look good naked, and to live forever. So 21 minutes actually, I think, was the sweet spot.

That included also light exercise such as walking on the lake or having sex, for example, as well.
I’d say a 10-minute, really intense, workout, and a 10-minute walk, would probably do the work for someone who just wants to look good naked and be in shape. For someone running a marathon or competing in a bodybuilding competition, I think that doesn’t really do it. So you need to include a couple more exercises.

When I was playing professional basketball here in Germany in the Second Division, I worked out at least two, three hours a day, doing one hour of weight-training, and then one hour of cardio, and then we had just basketball practice. I think it differs on what goals you have. But I think your minimal optimal for someone just wanting to look good and to be in shape, I think it’s not more than 20 to 30 minutes per day.

Wendy Myers: And so when you’re exercising, say that three hours a day, and everyone has a different tolerance. Some people can do ultra-marathons, and they’re okay. They can tolerate that. Other people like myself would die. But if you’re working out three hours a day, and you’re releasing a lot of cortisol, do you think that’s blocking the testosterone production, perhaps that’s why you’re having a problem?

Max Gotzler: Yes, actually. That’s definitely the case of over-training. This is also something that I haven’t really dug into yet. I think I’ve been over-trained before. I’ve never really tested for it. But it’s definitely an issue with athletes. And that’s why a lot of athletes tend to compensate with supplements or also with the substances that might not be so helpful for your body, and they overdo it with proteins and with creatine, and so on.

I think also with them, that’s not always the sweet spot. So to get it right, to get the training and the recovery and the supplementation, whatever your body needs, this is the science in itself. And I think recovery, especially in professional sports, is still underrated. Athletes don’t get enough recovery.

Our performances throughout the season always decrease, so we always increase in the off-season, and then over the course of the season, you over-train at some point.

40:01 Biohacking

Wendy Myers: And so you use a lot of biohacking. On your website, you talk a lot about biohacking. So why don’t we talk a little bit about how we can use technology to biohack and understand our health better. Just talk a little bit about what you do on your website.

Max Gotzler: So the website is called Flowgrade. That’s important because the name came because I was really fascinated with the concept of flow. Csikszentmihalyi who started this whole fascination with flow with his TED Talks, and then Steven Kotler, who wrote the book, The Rise of Superman, really explained that flow is not only an esoteric concept, being in flow or being in the zone as an athlete. But it’s actually a biochemical process.

And so whatever I produce on the website content, it’s a biohacking website, but it’s supposed to help you get into this state of flow, which for me, is this moment where you’re as present as you can possibly be, as much in the moment as your body and your is possible to be.

So, time dilutes. You totally are involved in whatever activity you’re doing. Your prefrontal cortex is shut off, so your ego vanishes. You’re pretty much really just living. And studies have been shown to be the state that people are at the most productive in. And also, when they experience more flow in their lives, they’re happier, they’re more successful, they have more successful relationships.

So a lot of times, they’re already in. Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, the founders of the Flow Genome Project, they’re digging this up right now, and they’re spending all their time and resources right now on really researching flow.

That being said, I think that the art of biohacking, which for me is using technology and nature in order to really find the best version of one’s self, is an ideal way of creating more flow in your life, so this all ties together.

And this technological aspect, as well as the natural aspect, are really important concepts. With technology, I think of quantified self instrument of sleep, trackers, of activity trackers, of brain wave trackers and so on, in order to understand your biology a little better, and how it interacts with your environment, with other people.

Once you understand what’s happening, you can try to tweak it. You can experiment with that.

And I think as biohackers, this is our job. So on the website, I’m showing a lot of stuff that people experiment with, because experimentation, at first, it might not be valuable to the individual because it might only be some sort of feedback.

So if someone is doing a test on experiment with the sleep tracker, he might find out something about himself. And this might be valuable or might not be so valuable.

On the website, I’m trying to really dig up the value for my readers, for people. Biohackers, I think, are experimenting a lot, and they’re finding they’re getting feedback. There’s this one saying that I love which is, there is no failure. There is always feedback. Even death has feedback.

But once you have the feedback, you can create conclusions, and then you can actually create value, and give it back to the readers. And this is, I think, how then I come up with five steps to increase testosterone, four methods of how you can have optimal sleep, or how you can burn more fat with a four-minute exercise.

So this is the content that I create but it’s much more than just that.

44:21 Where to Find Max Gotzler

Wendy Myers: So tell us what is your website again. Where can we find you?

Max Gotzler: So Flowgrade.com is the major hub where I do stuff. I only want to direct people to that because everything you need to know is on there. I also have a podcast. Actually, Wendy, I’d love to have you on there.

Wendy Myers: Yes, I would love to. I love talking about biohacking and your detox.

Max Gotzler: Yes, that would be awesome. I’ll sign you up. So yes, everything is on there. And we actually just recently launched the English-speaking website, so everything is now translated. I think everything I do is on there.

Wendy Myers: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Max. I really appreciate I met you in person. I was really excited to have you come on the podcast. I’m glad that finally, eight months later, had you come on.

Max Gotzler: I’m really happy to be here. I feel quite honored to be on such a cool podcast.

Wendy Myers: Well, thank you so much for coming.

Max Gotzler: No worries at all. Always a pleasure.

Wendy Myers: And listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to my website myersdetox.com and learn all about detoxification and my version of paleo, the modern paleo diet.

Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.