Podcast # 218 from

http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2012/11/episode-218-how-to-recover-as-

fast-as-possible-after-a-triathlon-or-marathon/

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Introduction: In today’s podcast, how to recover as fast as possible after a

triathlon or a marathon? Also: losing weight with type 1 diabetes,

how to get bones to heal fast, how to train and race with an ITB

injury, how important is hamstring flexibility, and is the herb

Jiaogulan good for you?

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide

you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and

wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So

whether you’re an Ironman triathlete or you’re just trying to shed

a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge

content from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Brock: Hey Ben!

Ben: Hey Brock!

Brock: You know what today is?

Ben: What is today? November 20th – 2 days before lots of people eat

lots of turkey.

Brock: It’s that as well but I was actually referring to…this is my one year

anniversary on the show.

Ben: No way.

Brock: Yup!

Ben: You’re freaking kidding me.

Brock: I’m not.

Ben: It’s pretty amazing because you and I are off to spend an intimate

vacation together in Thailand after just one year’s of a podcast

relationship.

Brock: What’s the first year anniversary’s at? Paper?

Ben: I guess.

Brock: I’ll bring you some paper.

Ben: All right. Thanks. I’ll try and remember to do likewise, although

I’m kinda laid up right now.

Brock: What happened?

Ben: Well, I had a tennis match last night and I literally am just like

covered in ice on my hip right now and just doing some cold laser

on it this morning. I did it - a pretty narrowly lunged. I was

actually proud of myself. I put away a decent volley but yeah,

potentially gave myself arthritis in the process.

Brock: It’s not good timing ‘cause also today, and I think you’re leaving

tomorrow. I’m leaving today but we’re off to Thailand to do 2

back to back races so, that’s bad time to keep yourself for arthritis

of the hip.

Ben: They’ve got crutches over there. I’ll be fine.

Brock: Perfect.

News Flashes:

Brock: All right. You can get all of these news flashes hot off the presses

if you follow Ben on Twitter and Google+ and facebook and if you

follow him down the street, he’ll probably yell them out to you but

this is the time of the show where we go through a few of the

favorites and talk about them a little bit. What do you wanna

highlight?

Ben: I actually avoid bringing stuff like this in public or at parties. If

you ask my wife, I even rarely mention anything closely

resembling workouts or nutrition to her ‘cause it’s like being an

accountant and talking to people about their taxes. It’s just like

bringing your work home. Anyways though, my twitter feed may

not make that appear to be true. I do keep my eyes on stuff to

tweet and Brock himself happened to bring this study to my

attention. It was in the Annals of Internal Medicine about how

after subjects were placed into experimental sleep restriction

impaired their insulin signaling. The adipose sites, the actual fat

cells that they collected from biopsy samples after they had one

group go through normal amounts of sleep – meaning around 8.5

hours which is above normal for many folks…

Brock: That’s delightful, in fact.

Ben: Yeah. That’s great! And the restricted sleep conditions of about

4.5 hours and they looked at the insulin concentrations in these

fat biopsy samples and it was found that indeed, there were some

really impaired insulin sensitivity when insufficient sleep was

present which suggests increased risk for everything from

overweight to blood sugar fluctuations to energy fluctuations to

lack of the ability to use carbohydrates efficiently to risk for type 2

diabetes even. Related to this though, fortunately, if you’re

listening in and you want to get better sleep, I just wrote kind of

an Epic Sleep hack post over at bengreenfieldfitness.com. You

should definitely check it out – video, pretty much everything that

you need to be able to toss your valium or your ambien or

whatever else in the trash.

Brock: Awesome.

Ben: That was one thing. Another thing was I tweeted about one of the

best upper body exercises that exist. You’re gonna guess this.

What’s this?

Brock: Chin ups.

Ben: Close! Those are really good also. This was a study in the Strength

Conditioning Research that looked into muscle activity and

strength development with the gold shoulder press and literally

just taking something heavy and pushing it up over your head.

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In terms of chest, biceps, back, core, legs, triceps, shoulder

activation, that exercise blows a ton of stuff out of the water - just

the basic freeway overhead press preferably in a standing

position. When you looked at the electromyographic activity of the

actual muscles, it’s pretty cool what happens when you take

something and push it over your head. You wanna work even

more muscles, pick it up off the ground, deadlift overhead press.

You wanna introduce some bilateral component, do a stand on

your left leg, lift with your right arm, left arm deadlift to right arm

overhead press (which is a mouthful). But ultimately, what I’m

getting at is include some overhead presses in your routine into

fantastic exercise.

Brock: Yeah. Sometimes, I actually just grab the cat and pick her up and

push her over my head a couple of times. She loves it.

Ben: Must be a Canadian thing. Another study, finally, that I wanted to

note was if you feed your kids a high fat diet, basically, that is

associated with (I shouldn’t say that a high fat diet is associated

with lower body fat) but low fat intake in early life is negatively

associated with body fat (if you wanna put that correctly). And if

your head’s spinning now…

Brock: Yeah. Wait. So, if you feed your children low fat diet at an early

age, it has negative effects later in life.

Ben: It increases their susceptibility to both get overweight and also to

develop what’s called leptin resistance which is essentially the

inability to respond properly to hormones that regulate your

appetite. In other words, you could say that feeding your kids to

high fat diet would put them in the position to better grow up to

be leaner adults due to better leptin sensitivity. And lower

amounts of overweight propensity. So, high fat diet is super easy.

You just gotta start kids early ‘cause they’ll turn their noses up a

lot of times at stuff like avocados, sardines and olives and a lot of

these things that aren’t great little lunch package items for kids

but if you got young kids including as many full fat components

and as few low fat, fat-free components as possible in their diets,

is gonna just give them a step up when it comes to staying lean for

life.

Brock: And then combine that with the first study and get them to sleep

more in around 8.5 hours and they’re gold.

Ben: Yeah. What I do is I actually put my kids to bed with little ice

cream curtain full of lard and just lock them in there for 10 hours,

let them sleep and I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that good

things will happen.

Special Announcements:

Brock: If you like podcast, you’ll likely enjoy audio books and this

podcast is sponsored by Audible, fine purveyor of audio books and

you just need to go to www.audiblepodcast.com/ben and sign up

and you can claim your very own free audio book just by going to

that URL.

Ben: Dude, have you read the secret race or heard about it?

Brock: I have heard about it. I haven’t read it yet but I think I’m going to

download that ‘cause I’m spending a lot of time on planes as are

you in the next little while that’d be a great listen.

Ben: Crazy, crazy book but a click goes into just like this complete

shadow world of all these doctors and team directors and athletes

and how they pretty much did like anything to win the Tour De

France and it kinda goes into how Lance Armstrong was basically

a ring leader and it was written by Tyler Hamilton. Anyways, I’m

not sure who reads it on audiblepodcast.com/ben but if you don’t

have time to actually read words or perhaps you just can’t read

words due to something else going on with your biology or your

life, audiblepodcast.com/ben, grab The Secret Race and speaking

of not being able to read, not having time to read, I just put a

plug-in what’s called the plug-in over at bengreenfieldfitness.com

if you over there and you scroll down to the bottom over near the

posts, you can actually download any of the articles and listen to

them read by a sexy robotic male voice. And that may seem kinda

cheesy to some people but what I wanna do is put it on there. If

you like the ability to be able to just listen to articles via audio,

regardless of whether or not they’re read by slightly computer,

just type a voice like being on hold on a voice mail type of voice,

then check it out. Leave us a…what’s the number for this show,

Brock?

Brock: It’s 218.

Ben: Okay. So, Episode # 218 over at bengreenfieldfitness.com. Leave

us a comment if you like the Insta MP3 capability I’ve got over

there.

[0:10:08.0]

Brock: How do you have your sleep, beat insomnia and get into a deep

sleep phase…

Ben: Brock, we don’t want people to know that’s actually you.

Brock: Yeah. It’s actually me. That’s my job these days. I just read web

pages.

Ben: We’d figured it would be incredibly time-efficient to just have

Brock read robotic with voice. A couple other things real quick

and we’ll get into the meat of the podcast, I promise. I want to

feature you on the podcast – you the listener. And as you know,

for every podcast that we do, we create what’s called the MyList

which is a list of all the things that we talk about on this podcast

that you could get your hands on. You could try, you can get a

convenient list ‘cause I know a lot of you are running or biking or

doing things like that and you just need a quick convenient place

to go and look like scroll through some of the resources and we do

that over at the Ben Greenfileds facebook page at

facebook.com/bgfitness but what we use for that is MyList. And

it’s such a cool app that allows you to come up with a particular

list of the things that you like and the things that you use and then

share them with your friends. What we wanna do is take any of

you listeners who put together your favorite MyList on the topic of

Health, Cooking, Fitness, Nutrition, Alternative Medicine, Fitness

Gear and Tools, whatever. You make your list and you share it

over at the Ben Greenfield Fitness page or even just shoot us an e-

mail or let us know or somehow ping us. Let us know that you got

your MyList up and running. We’ll go check it out and we’re

gonna pick one listener a month. I’m gonna personally call you on

the phone and interview you for 10-15 minutes about your MyList,

why you picked what you did, you’ve got to tell a little bit of your

story and we’re gonna feature you on special podcast episodes

that we’re gonna come around once a month. You can check that

out. We’ll put a link to MyList in the show notes. We’ll remind

you of the instructions of how to do that so, get MyListing away.

Brock: Speaking of getting away, make sure you plan to get away to

Spokane, Washington on March 8th and 9th for the Become Super

Human Live event.

Ben: I’m gonna put a video on the show notes for everybody but here’s

the deal. There is gonna be epic amount of learning and

discovering that takes place at this live conference that I’m putting

together on March 8th and 9th. You can listen to the audio that

we’re about to play on but basically, here’s what it comes down to.

You could pick this stuff up on the internet, you could pick up on

Google, you could get podcasting away and facebooking and

twittering but we’ve lost what it means to actually show up and be

in the same room with people and not work with people and

connect with people on that very cool physical way and nothing

replaces that. Not all these online summits that pop up where you

interact online with people and you watch the powerpoint

presentations on your computer – not any of these podcast or

audio books or anything like that replaces actually being there in

the flesh and blood and interacting with people live. The amount

of inspiration that happens and the amount of motivation that

happens and the relationships that you form showing up in

something like this are invaluable. We’ll put a link in the show

notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman and here’s more

details.

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

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

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

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

sleep and hormone optimization and get insider 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 wanna maximize fat loss, achieve an Ironman

triathlon, or push your body and mind to the absolute limits of

human performance. So, visit

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

in person March 8th and 9th, 2013.

Listener Q & A:

Bee: Hey Ben! Have you ever worked with type 1 diabetics? Really

tough to lose weight. If you have any advice, I’ll appreciate it.

Thank you.

Brock: All right. Yeah. Weight loss for a type 1 diabetic. It’s got to be

tricky.

Ben: Yeah. And type 1 diabetes is (just to clear it up) technically, here in

America, it’s actually the semantics or we’re supposed to call it

insulin dependent diabetes mellitus now or IDDM.

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And that’s a more fitting description because it does put you in a

state of being dependent on exogenous insulin. In type 2 diabetes,

you can still produce your own insulin. Your pancreas can still

churn the stuff out until you poop it out if you’re following the

typical American Dietetic Association recommendations for a high

carb whole grain diet. But in type 1 diabetes, you generally

(because of a genetic susceptibility or a genetic trigger or in some

cases, exposure to an environmental factor like an antigen or virus

that destroys your pancreatic beta cells) you can’t produce insulin

and so you have to have some kind of a source of insulin coming

in. And that makes exercise kind of tricky. I did an interview with

the captain for this team, Triabetes, which is a cycling and

endurance team that does triathlons and stuff like that and they

are type 1 (you also have team type 1 that is a professional cycling

team) and these are folks who literally have portable insulin

pumps that they carry along with them to make sure that when

they need these doses of insulin injected even when they’re

exercising for very long periods of time at a very high intensity,

that they’re able to get that hormone circulating in the blood

stream that’s able to deliver energy into tissue because if you don’t

have insulin circulating in your blood stream, you’re not going to

be able to deliver and drive glucose into muscle and in many

cases, even if you’re eating a high fat diet and you’ve got a lot of

ketones in your blood stream, you can even have difficulty driving

ketones because of the lack of insulin so you can go into, basically,

ketoacidosis. So you’ve got to even be careful with high high fat

ketosis type of DO2 or type 1 diabetes. Ultimately though, there

are some ways that I recommend that you go after controlling it.

This would be coming from both the nutrition and an exercise

standpoint. The first is that it’s really important that there is a lot

of linkage between celiac disease and antibodies to components in

wheat. And the development of type 1 diabetes especially in

children – kids with celiac disease are literally ten times more

likely to develop type 1 diabetes than kids without celiac disease.

And you find a lot of the antibodies to wheat in something like

type diabetes. And it’s important to remember that in many

cases, your body has destroyed your own insulin-producing cells

in the pancreas and that would make diabetes what’s referred to

as an auto immune disease. Very very similar in the way that

we’ve talked about on the show before how gliadin (the protein

portion of wheat) can actually damage thyroid tissue and how

consumption of wheat in many individuals especially people who

are genetically susceptible or unable to properly handle proteins

including not just wheat gliadin but also glutens and lactins that

those can all be immunogenic and that can cause thyroid issues

and they can potentially cause some pancreatic damage as well. So

if you have type 1 diabetes, obviously, you’ve already gotten to the

point where your pancreas is fairly damaged but consumption of

wheat is definitely not going to help that issue. It’s not going to

help continue destruction of any type of pancreatic tissue and if

you don’t have type 1 diabetes but you’ve got children who you

know are gonna to be genetically susceptible to or who you are

concerned might be genetically susceptible to it, I’d really keep

wheat out of the diet. To get the 4 research and the skinny on that

so to speak, go read Dr. William Davies’ book Wheat Belly, for

sure. There are people out there though, who are successfully

managing type 1 diabetes with some dietary protocols and some

exercise protocols that go above and beyond simply cutting wheat

out of the diet. We’ve had Dr. Art De Vany on the show before

and he actually has, I believe, 2 children with type 1 diabetes and I

know that he and many people in the Paleo community had a ton

of success in terms of energy stabilization, weight loss, and blood

sugar stabilization following essentially a low carbohydrate diet

that cuts out a lot of these lactins and glutens and gliadin-based

proteins. But one book that’s really really good that delves into

this stuff is written by a guy named Dr. Richard Bernstein and it’s

called The Diabetes Solution book.

[0:20:05.0]

I’ll link to it in the show notes for you. Dr. Bernstein is a doctor

who has type 1 diabetes and he has this private clinical practice in

New York that’s devoted solely to treating diabetes and pre

diabetes and he’s fairly well respected. Basically, his program,

what it comes down to if you wanna look at some of the highlights

of his program and you don’t wanna read the book, (even though

you should if you have type 1 diabetes) is that he advocates a very

low carb diet to allow you much tighter blood sugar control. And

when I say very low carb diet for a regular adult, the allowed

amount of carbohydrate are 6 grams for breakfast, 12 grams for

lunch and 12 grams for dinner. And for those of you who…

Brock: So some 30 grams.

Ben: Yeah. That’s like 120 calories worth of carbohydrates which is not

that many at all.

Brock: That’s like a banana and a half.

Ben: But a ton of success to do this and obviously, that strongly poses

as the dietary guidelines from the American Diabetes Association

for both type 1 and type 2 diabetics ‘cause they all eat lots of carbs

to stabilize your energy levels and keep your bold glucose up and

lots of whole grains and blah blah blah… But Dr. Bernstein is

getting awesome results for this diabetes solution which is

basically that – 6 grams for breakfast, 12 grams for lunch, and 12

grams for dinner. You avoid all foods with added sugar, all foods

with starches and all fruits just because even though most people

can handle fruits in terms of the triglyceride and the cholesterol

and the way that fructose interacts especially when there’s

absence of insulin in the body, all fruits are out. Blood glucose

testing, getting to know your own body, having blood glucose

monitor and using it up to 8 times a day is highly recommended

in his book like literally just tracking and tracking and tracking

and targeting activities that keep you and the blood glucose levels

that are constant for the entire day so you’re trying to avoid blood

glucose fluctuations as much as possible. And then he

recommends something called (we don’t want to get into it too

much) basil and also bolus dosing for insulin dependent diabetes.

That’s basically just using single large doses of insulin at some

point throughout the day which a lot of folks are doing already.

That’s the Bernstein diet and If I were gonna recommend one diet

to you, that would be the one that I would say is going to be the

most successful when it comes to weight loss and I don’t wanna

sound like I’m giving out medical advice because I can’t. I’m not a

doctor. That is not medical advice. I just recommend that you

read his book, check it out and listen to some of the stuff that he

has to say. So that’s Dr. Richard Bernstein. Dr. Art De Vany, he

really is a fan of not engaging in activities that are going to really

deplete your storage carbohydrate significantly or place you into a

state where you’re getting really really hypoglycemic. Brief bouts

of intense cardio, brief bouts of weight lifting, yes, those use

carbohydrates but tend to be depleting and the hormonal

adaptation to many of those activities actually can help with your

blood sugar stabilization. I would recommend that you avoid long

runs, long bike rides and stuff like that even though you can do it.

I mean, if you enjoy doing that stuff, then do it. It’s not like

there’s this hard and fast rule that you can’t. When it comes to

weight loss, you’re gonna get more bang for your buck from the

high intensity weigh training and the higher intensity

cardiovascular intervals. He’s also written an interesting article

on type 1 diabetes could’ve possibly developed as an adaptation to

cold environment. Basically, the whole idea behind this is that

when humans are exposed to intense cold, they shed body water

by peeing more or through diuresis and that causes your blood

sugar to rise and just like in any solution, when you increase the

solution or you increase the amount of compounds in solution

that access an anti freeze - it lowers the freezing point of any

solution like if you have salt water or sugar to blood. That lowers

the freezing point of serum and it lowers the freezing point of

tissues and also reduces the propensity for sharp ice crystals to

form that could tear the tissues open right if your blood froze. And

this is why we still can’t just like freeze people to whatever, keep

them alive or something like that. It’s that once everything

freezes, you get all these ice crystals that form and that tears open

cells and tissue and you just toast. When you look at a

hibernating animal, they actually have elevated blood glucose to

keep themselves from freezing as an adaptation to intense cold.

And so there’s some suggestion that ice ages or periods of intense

cold or having genetic heritage that involves your ancestors being

exposed to intense cold could potentially introduce genetic factors

into your life that could put you at high risk for type 1 diabetes

and then you can pull that trigger with something like wheat

consumption or as you mentioned some interesting studies on

milk consumption and also baby formula consumptions as being

some of the triggers that can cause type 1 diabetes in children.

[0:25:30.6]

Anyways though, what I’m getting at here is that when it comes to

blood sugar regulation, it may be that some cold exposure and

some exercise in the cold could have a positive metabolic effect on

weight loss with type 1 diabetes basically, shivering now and then

and burning energy using your brown adipose tissue. What you do

need to be careful with is plunging into an ice bath ‘cause that can

really rapidly raise your blood sugar and constrict your blood

vessels. And if you already have issues with your blood vessels, if

you already have issues with hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia

(either one which you often do have with type 1 diabetes), that

type of cold exposure is not recommended but doing like using a

cool fat burner fast and using limited cold exposure to a certain

basis, that’s something I’ve seen Art De Vany recommend and I

know it’s something that he certainly does. That’s another

strategy that you can use. These are some of the main things. One

of the website that I point you to because it hit the mainstream

last year was the website that got banned. I was wondering a few

blogs that essentially got censored because they said that the guy

was giving out medical advices. His name is Steve Cooksey. He’s

got this website called diabeteswarrior.net. It’s entitled Diabetes

Management from a Paleolithic Perspective. I’ll put a link to his

website in the show notes but very very interestingly, his website

got shut down because he went from being a drug and insulin-

dependent, crankly sick, obese type 2 diabetic and he went to

being completely drug and insulin-free with normal blood sugar

and he logged how he did is using this whole primal paleo

approach and yeah, got shut down.

Brock: Who shut him down?

Ben: I think it was the FTC or something like that. If you to his website,

he’s got this whole thing about investigation but he receives some

kind of a letter that advised him that he needed to basically shut

down. I think he was in North Carolina and it was this Board of

Dietetics and Nutritionists or something like that. The state board

opened an investigation into his blog and told him he had just to

stop posting posts and it was kinda controversial ‘cause it was like

the government vs. free speech type of thing. Check that out too

and I hope some of these resources help you and again, not

necessarily giving out medical advice here but those are some of

the things I would certainly bear in mind.

Brock: And it sounds like the original question was really about weight

loss advice but it sounds like you sort of nailed both sides of

things like controlling the diabetes or not controlling it completely

but definitely helping with the diabetes as well as doing some

weight loss as well so hopefully that is awesome for Bee. You

know, a lot of the time, this show does focus on getting lean and

getting fast and doing better your Ironman and healing your

broken bones and stuff but it’s really cool when listeners gain a

little more insight and do some remarkable things in their lives.

Let’s listen to what Cheryl did.

Cheryl: Hi Ben! I don’t have a question but I just really wanna thank you

for addressing the issue of osteoporosis and the female athlete

triad and secondary amenorrhea in your podcast. fell into

marathoning by accident a couple of years ago, I had no idea how

to fuel myself and went from 140 to 100 lbs in a few months, I’m

5’4’’. And at that time I thought it was great since I was running

faster and had a friggin 10-pack but then I also stopped having

menstrual cycles and I thought that was great too. Little did I

know then that that was not good. Fast forward a few years and I

was diagnosed with osteoporosis at age 35 years old – total shock.

I had already stopped running marathon but I was in the military

and I’ll still do extreme exercise routines and still not eating

enough, not eating enough with fat, not eating enough protein,

everything. I was still happy with not having cycles and I had no

idea that was also tied with bone density issue so I had to go

through a ton of blood tests and medications and it wasn’t until I

upped my good fats (ding! ding! ding!) and proteins and added in

interval and plyometrics that I fixed my health basically. Without

having to go on fast marathons, in fact I increased my bone

density. I don’t have a 10-pack anymore but I’m well with that

123-124 lbs plus that makes me so super athletic and I just wanna

thank you.

[0:30:00.5]

Not a lot of running magazines like favorite ones that we know of

or other podcast really talk about this and I really wanna thank

you. It’s super important to other women out there. They really

have to pay attention. Get the test, don’t be in denial not having a

cycle is not a good thing and basically, you could be one other

chick like me at 35 years old with osteoporosis and it’s horrible,

horrible, horrible. So please, take heed to what Ben and Brock say

and I just wanna give you guys big kudos. Thank you.

Ben: I think this is awesome, what Cheryl has done. Congratulations,

Cheryl. It’s always cool to see that folks kinda take some of the

advice that we give out on the show and get good results so, keep

up the awesome work and we do eventually talk a little bit more

about bone in this podcast as well. Right, Brock?

Brock: I think so.

Bill: Hi Ben, Brock! This is Bill from Pennsylvania. I want to do a half

Iron April 6th 2013 in North Carolina and follow up with a

marathon May 26th. I’m 55 and I have done one sprint and one

half marathon last year. guess my question is I just don’t know

how to structure the swim and the bike work that I should be

doing at the same time, trying to get ready for the marathon.

Maybe this is too ambitious but I think I can do this stuff and I

need to be adequately prepared and I just don’t wanna have injury

also. If you could give me some sort of a general guideline to know

what I’m really getting into as far as that bike and that swim. How

much real work do l I have to put in to that? Appreciate any

insight you can give to me. Thanks a lot.

Ben: This is actually a question I get a lot like how you combine

training for a marathon with training for a triathlon because a lot

of….

Brock: I’ve never asked you that.

Ben: You’ve done it 3 times since I started coaching you in the past

year. Brock’s a triathloning marathoning junky. I do have some

rules, Bill that I would suggest that you follow. And it will take a

little bit of tweaking every program but here are my rules. First of

all, during the time that you’re training for your triathlon, that

you’re gonna be doing a few weeks before your marathon, I

recommend that you reduce your running to no more than 3 days

per week. And this is because of all of the reasons I’ve given in

previous podcast about the risk of chronic cardio self-destruction

and inflammation. It’s also because there’s a pretty cool cross over

effect from cycling to running. Generally, cycling helps you to

become a better runner. It doesn’t happen vice versa. If you pull

a top canyon marathoner off the street and have him time trial,

they’ll do all that hot but then you can take somebody like Lance

Armstrong and throw him into a marathon regardless of how

much testosterone they’ve taken and they do okay (maybe I used a

bad example) but cycling can help you to become a better runner

so you need to realize all the cycling that you’re gonna be doing in

your triathlon prep will help you and you can reduce your running

quite significantly and still stand good shape for marathon. I

mean, you look at a lot of these folks who are top age group or

Ironman triathletes running marathons staying at Ironman and

pulling anywhere from 3 hour to 3 hour and 30 minute splits and

many of these people are running 3 days a week and then also

cycling 3 days a week. That is the first rule. The second thing

would be if you can arrange your schedule, try and do your swims

on the day after your run days so you’re basically using your swim

as a recovery from the run. The movement in the swim and some

of the capillary pressure and tissue pressure that occurs when you

get into water will actually help you recover a little bit more

quickly on the day after a run day. If you do your swims on the

same day as your run days, you might find that your calves cramp

and your form’s off a little bit but the day after your run day, try

and do your swim days then. And then another schedule tweak

that you can do is if you want to get a feeling for what it feels like

to run on fatigued legs as you may be doing during your

marathon, do your bike rides earlier in the day on the same day as

you run. So, a typical scenario might look like Mondays: you bike

and run; Tuesdays: you swim; Wednesdays: you bike and run;

Thursdays: you swim; and then Fridays: you bike and run. And

maybe you have an off day on Saturday and your long run on

Sunday. Something like that. The next rule that I would tell you

to do is just to pull out all the stops when you do get in to that

triathlon that you’re gonna be doing a few weeks before your

marathon because inflammation from something like a half

Ironman triathlon can stay in your body for over 2 weeks up to 3

weeks if you’re not careful. What I mean by recovering properly is

shutting down inflammation so you’re gonna have all these

creatine kinase in your blood stream from muscle getting broken

down and interleukin 6 and HSCRP and all these inflammatory

bio markers.

[0:35:14.5]

There are things that you can do to decrease those. You can use

natural oral anti inflammatories. I like one called Capraflex. I like

another one called Phenocane. You can literally do 9-12 Capraflex

a day, 4-8 Phenocane a day. That’s a really good stack for a post

race recovery. I’ll be doing that in Thailand probably after our

first race to help me recover for the second one along with lots of

coconut water and electrolytes to mitigate the effects of alcohol.

Ice combined with compression is really good. I just did a big

article for this in the Lava Magazine basically debunking the

notion that ice somehow inhibits recovery. It’s very very

important that you combine ice preferably with a compression

and with elevation because what can happen if your don’t do that

is you can get a little bit of what’s called lymphatic vessel leakage

when you get a vessel really really cold but you don’t get some

pressure in there at the same time so it’s important if you’re

gonna ice that use compression at the same time and elevation so

you can do something like everyday you put on some compression

tights and you get some ice packs and you get them on your calves

and your quads and your hamstrings then you just sit there with

your feet elevated for 30 minutes and whatever, listen to your

MP3 player, watch some TV, something like that. But doing a

session each day that combines ice and compression can be super

useful to speed up recovery. Last couple of things would be get

some topical magnesium (you’ve heard me talk about

Transdermal Magnesium on the show before, probably), I

recommend that you do that to speed up your recovery and then

try and use something as a fuel during the event that is going to

provide you with amino acids so that your body breaks down its

own lean muscle less. So we’re talking about using a gel that has

branch chain amino acids on it. Look on the label there for

leucine, ice leucine and valine. Those are the 3 that you wanna

look for in your gel. You can take branch chain amino acids if

you’ve got the extra money to spend. It works even better to take

whole amino acids like Master Amino Pattern is really good for

that. And those would be some of the main things. Antioxidants,

I would also look into. There are some really good antioxidants

out there too. Lifeshotz is a good one, Solar Synergy is a good

one. These are just powders that can help to shut down

inflammation. I’m writing a note to myself, I need to add this

stuff to our MyList for the show, for sure. So, those are the main

things. What do we need to include on there? MAP, antioxidants,

topical magnesium, ice compression like the 110% pants that

compress you that you put the ice into, and then Phenocane, and

Capraflex. So that’s your stack for recovering super fast. And then

the last thing is so you’ve got that half Ironman under your belt

and you’ve got 4-6 weeks that looks like before your marathon.

That’s when you switch to your run block. Okay, so you get in

your recovery after the half Ironman, you’re probably gonna be

anywhere from 4-7 days of just light activities – some yoga, some

walking, some swimming, that kind of stuff. Then you switch into

a run block where you actually are running 4-5 days a week,

cycling becomes less important, swimming becomes less

important and you’re just focusing on becoming a better runner

and working on your running economy and efficiency. But up to

that point, up until after your triathlon, you just run 3 days a week

and then afterwards, as you lean up to your marathon, then you

switch it to 4-5 days a week of running. And that’s it. That’s what

we do.

Tony: Hi Ben! This is Tony from Maine. I’m calling in because about 16

weeks ago, I broke my 5th metatarsal, a stress reaction from

running and it broke in half and so I was on crutches for 10 weeks

and a walking cast for 6 weeks and despite that recovery time, my

bone is still only 70% healed. So, I’m calling in to ask your advice

on aiding my bone healing. Either nutritional or any other you

may have. I will appreciate you taking my question and I really

enjoy your show. Thank you very much.

Brock: Okay. So, first of all, I just wanna explain to anybody who’s

wondering out there. If you look down at your barefoot, your

metatarsal is the bone or the bones that run from where your toe

starts up towards your ankle but not all the way to the ankle. So

we’re talking like sort of mid forefoot. And when Tony says that

he broke his 5th metatarsal, that’s on the farthest outside, so your

pinky toe, basically.

[0:40:12.6]

Ben: And this is Ben. Another episode with Dr. Brock.

Brock: Thank you all for tuning in. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about your

femur.

Ben: Brock’s got it. He’s on podcast. It’s called Your Private Anatomy

Instructor. Actually that sounds kinda bad.

Brock: Actually. Yeah, that could go both ways.

Ben: Maybe just Anatomy Instructor. Basics of healing a broken bone

faster. Okay, I’ll give you the basics first and then we’ll jump in to

how to really hack it. First of all, don’t smoke. Smoking alters

blood flow to your bones. That blood flow is gonna deliver all the

necessary nutrients and cells to let your bone to heal that just start

off right there. So, if you’re smoking, don’t smoke.

Brock: I think you could just say that to serve as a blanket statement.

Just don’t smoke.

Ben: Yeah. Just don’t smoke if you’re living in general unless it makes

you happy. I wanna completely act like Nazis on the show and tell

people whatever.

Brock: I do.

Ben: Okay. So, eat a balanced diet. That’s preferably anti inflammatory

that doesn’t have lots of sugars that can also lead to calcium so be

careful with that. That also means caffeine and alcohol you need

to be careful with. Just pay attention to “no smoking”, “no

alcohol”, “no caffeine” and eat a balanced diet that’s low in

starches, low in sugars, low in soda, stuff like that.

Brock: Wait. Didn’t you just say you didn’t wanna sound like a Nazi?

Ben: Don’t worry, I’ll get to the stuff that you can do. It’ll be lots of fun.

Make sure that if you’re taking calcium, that you also use

magnesium. It is true that calcium is needed to help heal bone

faster but taking excessive doses of calcium is not as important as

making sure that you just get adequate calcium in your diet. Eat

full fat yogurt, kale and spinach and sesame seeds and stuff like

that. But make sure that you’re also getting magnesium preferably

2:1 ratio of calcium to magnesium because you’re gonna need

magnesium as a co-factor for calcium to work. You could use…in

Episode # 217, the last episode, we totally geeked out on

magnesium so just go read the transcript for that. And by the

way, if you’re listening every single episode is transcribed. I pay

good money to get that done so use it. It’s pretty much the

donations from listeners that they get this podcast transcribed.

Brock: It’s kinda hilarious to read the transcriptions ‘cause sometimes it’s

not exactly what we said but it’s more interesting than what we

said.

Ben: Yes. That’s because it’s done by human being and sometimes you

get stuck you know, when I get rolling, sometimes it gets tough to

understand everything you say. Calcium with magnesium. Let

me get into some of the stuff that I think can augment fracture

healing even better. From the supplementation standpoint, I love

lactoferrin. I talked about Capraflex before when I talked about

healing from half Ironman or Ironman or marathon more quickly

doing 9-12 of those per day. I swear it seems to double my ability

to go back from injuries. I popped 12 of those this morning. Just

pop them in my mouth and chew them and have a glass of water

‘cause of this hip thing I did last night. I swear by Capraflex for

that kind of stuff. So I’ll be doing Capraflex and then when it

comes to actual modalities that you can use, electrical stimulation.

Basically, electrical stimulation can cause bone cells to proliferate

because you get these electrical currents that have the cellular

effect on the bone that accelerates healing. You just wear skin

electrodes, you can get any electro stimulant that’s traditionally

used for muscle repair and recovery and you can use it. In this

example you’d have a couple of electrodes in the bottom of the

foot, a couple on the top of the foot, under the ankle or the back of

the Achilles or the back of the Achilles and you just run an e-

stimulant on there. So that’s something that you could get for

your house or you could do at a physical therapy clinic but

electrical stimulation has some good research behind it for

speeding up bone healing. That’s based on an article back in 2003

entitled The Use of Physical Forces in Bone Healing. That

appeared in the Journal of the American Academy for Orthopedic

Surgery. There is another modality called ultrasound that you’ve

probably heard of and ultrasound basically can cause temperature

changes in the tissue to even increase genetic expression of the

factors responsible for bone healing. That’s been shown to have

some beneficial effects in fracture healing as well and that’s

another one that you would have to get done at a physical therapy

clinic but it could be pretty useful for you as well. And then

finally, you could look into magnets.

[0:44:57.6]

There’s no scientific evidence that show that the use of external

magnets can alter fracture healing or help to heal a broken bone

but the only reason I bring it up is just based off of anecdotal

evidence in terms of magnets potentially having the ability to

improve circulation and increase blood flow used in Asian

medicine a little bit more than over in the states but there’s these

big companies like Nikken – that sell magnets that I know they’ve

got one because I used to do personal training for the guy who’s

like Nikken is a multilevel marketing company and I think he

listens to this podcast but he’s at the top of Nikken. It got started

30 years ago or whatever when it first came to the United States

and he gets million dollars a month just for being alive. That

company sells a lot of stuff but he’s given me some of their

magnets before to use and I’ve used them before with injuries and

I feel like they help. This is just anecdotal stuff and I’ve talked to a

lot of other people who swear by magnets for bone healing and

soft tissue healing and stuff like that too but they’ve got these little

magnets that are attached to adhesive fabric, almost like a band

aid and you can just put them in certain spots over the body and

you could try something like that too. From a scientific

standpoint, probably not gonna be as effective as ultrasound or e-

stim but it’s something that you could try. So e-stim, ultrasound,

magnets, get your hands on some lactoferrin from Capraflex, anti

inflammatory, low sugar diet, no caffeine, no alcohol, no smoking,

and yeah, that’s what I would do.

Brock: All right. Let’s move on to the next question from Mark. Mark

says, “I’m in a problem hole and I need help.” I don’t know what a

problem hole is but it doesn’t sound pleasant. “I’m 5 weeks out

from my first marathon. I’ve done a bunch of half marathons in 2

seasons of racing Olympic and sprint distance triathlons. But at 5

weeks out, I’ve caused a previous ITB injury to flare up and bring

my run training to a grinding halt. It’s been a week, I’ve still been

riding, swimming and doing gym workouts and tried some water

running and been icing my knee but I ran 10k today and the knee

was iffy. If I keep up the aqua jogging and all my other training,

am I just setting myself up for creating a larger injury that will

cause more problems or is it possible to keep this up and actually

run the marathon? Also, is there anything else that I should be

doing to keep myself on track?”

Ben: Roller skating while doing the marathon. That’s legal, right? You

can roller skate.

Brock: Oh yeah. That’s all the guys are doing like 2005, they all wear

roller skates.

Ben: For me, it’s less efficient than running. There you go. Yeah. It’s

iffy when you’re injured and you’re going to race and you still

wanna race ‘cause you’re registered and everything. Men, it’s iffy!

You could get injured. First of all, I’d pull out all the stops in that

IT Band fortune syndrome and here’s where I’m gonna get all

sales and markety but just go to bulletproofknee.com. I wrote a

fall on program for healing IT bend injuries as fast as you can. So

go check that out at bulletproofknee.com as of all my programs

comes with 24/7 support group from me. So if you ever have

questions you’re going through, you can just ping me and I’ll help

you out. So bulletproofknee.com, check that out. But also, as

you’re going through that, and you decide that you still wanna go

run this marathon, I can tell you exactly what I would do, what I

planned on doing for the New York marathon until I decided not

to go and be it got cancelled anyways, would be a run-walk stretch

protocol. There’s 2 guys out there that have really fantastic run-

walk protocols. I’ll put links to them in the show notes but it’s

Bobby McGee who has a run-walk method and then also Jeff

Gallaway who has a walk-break method. Both methods are fairly

similar – you break 26 miles of the marathon down in 2 segments

and there are even sub 3-hour marathoners who are using run-

walk break type of scenarios. And basically, what you’re doing is

using walk breaks in most cases up until about the 18 to 20-mile

mark of the marathon at which point you just break into a

survivalist 10k type of protocol. But it is anywhere in the range of

a 4-minute run to a 35-second walk to do 8 minute miles down to

a 30-second run to a 60-second walk to do 16-minute miles.

Again, I’ll put a link so you can kinda look at your target mile

scenario. This would be on Jeff Gallaway's website and kinda see

based off how fast you wanna run the marathon, what you run

breaks would you want to look like. But that will help you a lot if

you’re not able to do the conditioning where you’re gonna be

actually ill to do your marathon training exactly as you want to, as

your program calls for.

[0:50:04.4]

Those walk breaks are gonna save you but you’re still gonna get a

ton of soft tissue tightness going on just if you’re not use to

pounding the pavement because you’ve been staying off of your

legs doing elliptical trainer or aqua jogging or whatever. That’ll

keep you fit for a while but it still is not gonna train your muscles

and your tendons for literally pounding the pavement for the

period of time you’re gonna be doing so in a marathon. So a

couple other things I would do: when you do your walk breaks or

at least once every 3 miles (1, 3, 5 k), stop and do a hip flexor

stretch and an IT bend stretch minimum (lunging hip flexor

stretch or your lunging and reaching towards the sky, IT bend

stretch where you’re doing like the yoga pigeon pose or just like

the standing IT bend stretch). There’s a bunch of different IT

bend stretches out there but I’d be stopping and doing those

frequently throughout the marathon. And the other thing I would

do is really take care of your fascia leading into the marathon. Do

lots of foam rolling, just get yourself as on adhesed (if that’s the

word) as possible before you go into that thing. So, lots of foam

rolling, trans squeeze and a few massages, and just make sure that

your fascia is really really good to go when you’re starting that

thing out. If you’re gonna run it, that’s what I would do.

Brock: Yeah. I’d probably, I’ve mentioned it on the show before but quite

often, I’m asked to be coach on the marathon course during the

race and I often get put sort of, because I like to run a long way,

they usually make me the sweep, so I’m following the very last

people. And when they’re out there for like 6 or 7 hours to finish a

marathon, there’s a lot of IT bend prompts that happen and one

thing that I found that really works well for certain people and

myself included, is when you are taking those walk breaks, if you

walk sideways and do really big crossover steps, you actually get a

bit of a dynamic stretch down your IT bend and you also keep that

forward momentum so you don’t feel like “oh man, I’m totally

screwing my time ‘cause I’m pulling over to the side of the road

and stopping” but you can actually get a good stretch, keep the

forward momentum going just do really big crossover steps.

Ben: And it just makes you look great in those photos that they send

you after the race when you’re the guy explaining to your family

about why you’re walking sideways.

Brock: Where were you going? Everybody else was going that way? All

right. Our next question comes from Dave and Dave says, “I

recently recovered from a back injury and my physical therapist

thought a lot of it was caused by lack of flexibility particularly in

my hamstrings. At the time, I was only able to get to about 45

degrees.” (I’m assuming that’s from a standing hamstring

stretch.) “I’m better now after several weeks but I still can’t get to

90 degrees. I’m a hobbyist triathlete and my lower back is often

sore after a long ride or a hilly ride. I got to wondering whether

my hamstring flexibility is getting to me on my down stroke. A

friend recently noticed that I wobble a little in my seat while

pedaling. Coincidence? My physical therapist has me doing

compress-relaxed hamstring stretches against the wall. I was

struck by your podcast about flexibility where you said it’s only

required for the range of motion you need and also how dynamic

beats static. Long story short, I’m wondering if you can

recommend dynamic stretches for hamstrings.”

Ben: Yeah. This kinda confuses especially lot of cyclists. This is

something that I’ve certainly been in the air of preaching at one

point or another in my life of how I really work on yoga and your

flexibilities that you can get into the right position for cycling

whether you could into a low time trial position or you can ride

more aggressively. That’s not why hamstring flexibility is

important. The reason that hamstring flexibility is important is

that if your hamstrings are tight and your seat is high enough to

be able to optimize power for you on the bike, what’s gonna

happen is that at the point where those hamstrings attach in your

pelvic bone, it’s gonna tend to cause you to tilt your pelvis back.

Okay? When you tilt your pelvis back, that collapses your

diaphragm and it robs a lot of your breath control. It puts a lot of

strain on your low back and it keeps your quad muscles and your

hip flexor from getting up over the pedal at the top of the pedal

stroke. So it’s not…

Brock: So you’re talking about a pelvic tilt forward, not an arching of the

back, right?

Ben: I’m talking about what would be referred to as a posterior pelvic

tilt which…

Brock: Yes, you’re holding forward.

Ben: Yeah. It would technically be similar to basically rotating the hips

around clockwise.

[0:55:02.0]

Now, all the listeners are cross-eyed. Basically, what it comes out

is you don’t need a ton of hamstring flexibility in order to keep

your pelvis from tilting backwards and causing this type of issues

if your bike fit is dialed in properly. So, the main thing you need

to make sure of first of all is that your seat is not too high. Make

sure that your seat is not too high that is should put your knees

somewhere in the range of 25-35 degrees but that’s really

important especially if you’re wobbling in your saddle. If you’re

wobbling in your saddle, it’s not because your hamstrings are

inflexible, it’s because your seat is too high. Now the next thing

that I would look into is regardless of how flexible your

hamstrings are, if your pelvis is immobile, and it’s not moving

properly, you’re gonna tend to posteriorly rotate your pelvis from

one side to another and it’ll be locked in place unable to move

properly and so, you’re going to wobble no matter what if that

happens. And the way that you fix that is you can go get your

sacroiliac joint adjusted. You can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com

and do a search for “SI joint” because I’ve talked about it with my

personal chiropractor on the show before in the importance of

sacroiliac joint adjustment combined with glute strengthening

specifically to keep your pelvic aligned properly. Super important

for endurance athletes. The next thing is make sure that your

sacroiliac joint is mobile and you can work with a sports

chiropractic physician to do that. It’s not gonna be a chiropractor

who does little pushy thing that pop or _____[0:56:44.3] and put

up and down your... We’re talking about a back cracker.

Somebody has to mobilize you. They have to mobilize your SI

joint and it requires a great deal of force. You want someone who’s

gonna work on you. And that’s I say sports chiropractic doctor

‘cause they’re usually aware of this type of things. And now let’s

say that your hamstrings actually are inflexible, you’re right that

there are ways to stretch them that are better than static

stretching especially in terms of making sure that you don’t

elongate the muscle to the point where it’s gonna reduced your

force production or your power production capability which is

important. You can get too flexible. I like that stretch contract-

relax method where you’re leaning against the wall or your leg is

against the wall and you’re lying at your back, contracting against

the wall and then relaxing and pulling that hamstring into a

stretch. There is a style of stretching. Those made very popular

back into 2008 Olympics when Dara Torres was making her run –

the 40-year old phenom swimmer. And she had a style of

stretching called Resistance Stretching. I’ve got the Resistance

Stretching DVD. I interviewed her therapists and her stretchers

on the show. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Basically,

resistant stretching is very unlike static standard stretching

because what you’re doing is you’re using your own body to resist

the stretch and you’re allowing the muscle to both contract and

lengthen at the same time so you get strong as you’re doing it and

it’s based off of the same idea as this contract-relax type of system

that you’re using for stretching that your physical therapist gave

you, Dave but I like this DVD. It’s a 20-minute stretch protocol

and I still throw it in and do it every once in a while. It’s Dara

Torres leading you through the protocol and she’s easy on the eyes

too so that doesn’t hurt or she looks like a freaking Russian

machine - that guy from Rocky 3 or Rocky 4. What’s his name?

Ivan Drago?

Brock: Yes.

Ben: Female version of Ivan Drago. She’s an extremely impressive

physical specimen. She’s leading you through that workout and

it’s called Resistance Stretching. I’ll put a link to the DVD and

also the interview that I did with the people who invented

Resistance Stretching in the show notes ‘cause that’d be a really

good one for you. So look into the Resistance Stretching, and then

look into your hip mobility by getting SI joint evaluation and SI

joint adjustment if you need to, look into your seat height and

then finally, if you’re gonna stretch your hamstrings, do

something like resistance stretching and as I mentioned in my

response to Mark about running that marathon, take care of your

fascia too. Do some firmerling on the hammies, do some stick

work on the hammies or get some deep tissue work on the

hammies just to make sure you don’t have any fascial adhesions

going on there as well and that should help.

Brock: Hammy yams! Okay. Emily asks, “On a whim, I bought an

interesting plant from a local nursery called Herb Jiaogulan ( at

least I think that’s how it’s said), brought it home and

transplanted it, then did some research, turns out it’s

Gynostemma Pentaphyllum and it appears to have many potential

benefits – cholesterol reduction, antioxidant, adaptogen, just for

starters. Do you have any experience or thoughts on making the

most of this plant? The nursery suggested adding the fresh leaves

to a stir-fry and of course, you can make tea from fresh or dried

leaves.”

[1:00:26.6]

Ben: You’re in trouble reading today, Brock.

Brock: Jiaogulan, Gynostemma Pylophyllum.

Ben: Jiaogulan. Yeah. It’s an interesting herb. I’ll get into that in a

second but I just realized something that I wanted to mention to

people. You, not being able to read, made me remember this.

When we’re going over to do these races in Thailand, I’m trying to

raise money for the Phuket Learning Center over there which

basically travels around to these rural areas in Thailand because

there’s a huge problem with illiteracy in Thailand - 20 million

people. 20 million and one people one Brock gets over there, can’t

read literally. And there’s this major need in Thailand to help

people to read and to overcome this illiteracy. And I basically

haven’t told this Friday to be able to raise as much money as

possible for this. My goal is $3000. Here’s the problem: I’ve

raised so far 200 and so I would love for podcast listeners if you’re

able to even give just 10 bucks, we’ll put a link right there smack

dab in the show notes. We’ll just put it up at the top of the show

notes for people, Brock.

Brock: I’ll make it as easy as possible.

Ben: Top of the show notes for Episode # 218. If you can just give a few

bucks to help, it’s gotta be by this Friday but it’s for the Thailand

mobile learning center. So that being said, let’s jump in to this

herb which interestingly is an herb from Asian medicine, from

Thailand and also it grows wild in China as well but is used in

Thai, Vietnam, Korea, Japan. Jiaogulan, also known as

Gynostemma. It does have some pretty cool cholesterol lowering

properties that have been studied. It increases the levels of an

antioxidant called super oxide dismutase which is one of the more

powerful indigenous cellular antioxidants that you have which can

also act as a tumor inhibitor, interestingly. It is an adaptogen. We

talked about Chinese adaptogenic herbs before in the show so that

can help with your adrenal glands and it’s even been shown to be

useful for things like jetlag and altitude sickness. And the biggy in

terms of the studies were shown to be most effective is its ability

to lower cholesterol which I don’t really think is quite as

important as the fact that it can lower triglycerides and raise HDL

which means that the actual cholesterol reduction effect is

clinically significant when it comes to reducing risk of heart

disease because high triglycerides and low HDL put together are

really kind of a big red flag when it comes to heart disease risk

factor. They’ve studied it in randomized control top trials in type

2 diabetic patients and it may have some potential as a

hypoglycemic treatment or blood sugar stabilizer. And so, yeah, it

certainly has some cool things going for it. I personally haven’t

done a lot with it. The studies that have found it to have some cool

medical effects were using about 10 mg of this stuff 3 times a day,

so 30 mg a day and you can use it in tea, I know. You can make

tea out of it just like any herb. I do not know how to cook with it. I

could not tell you how to make spaghetti sauce with Jiaogulan or

anything else for that matter, just because I personally don’t have

experience with that. However, with the research that I’ve seen, I

would vouch for it as something that could be useful for high

cholesterol or for high blood pressure or potentially just

increasing resistance to environmental stress like jetlags since it is

an adaptogen. Those of you who have heard me talk about this

blend of adaptogens that I take everyday that should be illegal

because of its mental performance enhancing effects. It’s called

Tianchi and that’s just powder that I personally use everyday and

add to water. Throw in some into my bag and I really hope that

they let me bring it in to Thailand because it’s got such a cool

effect. It’s almost like a smart drug. It’s crazy. It’s called Tianchi.

[1:05:01.3]

Anyways though, this Jiaogulan stuff, yes, I would vouch for the

benefits but I don’t know how to make stir-fry with it or anything

else. I would just make tea from it and as far as making tea from

dried leaves, and growing those type of herbs in your home, we’ve

got all sorts of resources on stuff like that in like in the Ben

Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle, you can use Dr. Google to learn

how to make tea from fresh or dried leaves so I may have to leave

that one up to you. I can’t get into the cooking part of it too much.

But yeah, so hopefully that helps point you in the right direction a

little bit.

Brock: Once you’ve made the tea from it, you’ll definitely get a taste for it

and you can probably make some good guesses of what it would

taste good in from that point. I mean, start throwing it in

whatever you like.

Ben: Yeah. And it may taste just nasty as hack in which case, I

apologize. So you have it.

Brock: That wraps it up.

Ben: That does and I’ve got a podcast coming out this Saturday for

those of you who wanna know what muscle activation is, muscle

activation technique is that thing where they curled at your arm

and people pushed on your arm to tell if you’re sensitive to this

stuff.

Brock: Oh yeah.

Ben: I personally thought it was complete bonk for a while.

Brock: You don’t anymore?

Ben: No. I looked into it quite a bit and I got this guy on and I

interviewed him and he’s one of the world’s leading experts on

muscle activation technique and then I interviewed Dr. David

Minkoff who I’m doing an interview with on heavy metals that I’m

releasing the week after. This guy’s been using this stuff and

they’re putting me to some resources that I was pretty impressed

with in terms of the potential for it to build the highlights

specifically on your muscular deactivation or activation in the

presence or absence of certain compounds or emotional trigger

and stuff like that. We’re gonna geek out on that with Dr. Ken Best

and that’s gonna come out this Saturday so listen to that. and

there’s also a huge Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal coming up

this week that you’re gonna wanna stay tuned to. I am gonna

release as early as Thursday for my VIP text club members in the

US so, if you text the word “fitness” to 411247 and you’re gonna

get my Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal on Thursday.

Brock: On Grey Thursday.

Ben: Grey Thursday. Is that really a thing? Grey Thursday?

Brock: No. I just made that up.

Ben: So if you got any last minute Christmas shopping to do or early

bird Christmas shopping to do, stay tuned to that. I’ll also be

releasing it on facebook and everything and also in that Dr. Ken

Best post on Saturday but still the last Black Friday/Cyber

Monday, Thursday through Cyber Monday for my VIP Text Club

people and it’s pretty much something I’ve got that I’ve only got a

hundred of that I’m gonna be hooking a hundred lucky people up

with. So check that out, stay tuned. What do you think, Brock?

Will you be going on the plane?

Brock: Absolutely! I’ve got, well, 4 hours before I have to fly to Thailand.

Awesome.

Ben: All right, man, I’ll see you on the flipside in Phuket.

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