Ben Greenfield On Optimizing Endurance Training

Ready to get your athletic geek on? Ask and ye shall receive. The multi-sport, multi-hyphenate strength & endurance athlete / coach and overall fitness / nutrition authority Ben Greenfield joins the podcast to dive deep down the rabbit hole and get granular on: optimizing endurance training methods; periodization & setting proper training zones; the cross fit craze; using technology to monitor physiological markers & effectively bio-hack your body for enhanced performance; the importance of nutrition & supplementation for recovery; and much more. And if you have a moment, we'd love it if you could toss a quick review up on the iTunes page. Thanks for the support and enjoy the show! SHOW NOTES * Finding Ultra Excerpt * Ben Greenfield Fitness Website * Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook Page * Ben Greenfield on Twitter: @BenGreenfield & @GetFitGuy For links & to learn more about the tools, products & information Ben advocates in this podcast, click HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:11Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. What's happening? Welcome back to the podcast, episode 11. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening. Very excited. We just passed 100,000 downloads for the podcast since we started this little experiment at the very end of November, 10 episodes in. Super excited about that. So, really glad that there's an audience out there and very appreciative. We're all really busy. You guys are really busy. So, it means a lot to me that you would devote a couple hours of your day to listening to this podcast when we put it out.

• 1:53Rich Roll?

  And it's a responsibility, and it's a responsibility I don't take lightly. So, I'm really happy that people seem to be enjoying it. We're getting great comments on the iTunes page. So, I really appreciate that as well. It means a lot to me that you would take a moment to jot something down there, too. So, if you're enjoying the podcast, yeah, it would be great if you could do that. If not, don't sweat it. But... I appreciate those of you out there that did take the time to write a comment either on my blog at richroll.com or on the iTunes page. So, thank you very, very much. A couple of quick notes before we get into today's interview, episode 11. We have Ben

• 2:34Rich Roll?

  Greenfield on the podcast today. He's an amazing guy, a triathlete himself, a coach, and basically an expert in all things fitness and diet-related. He's a very knowledgeable guy. He really knows his stuff. He understands physiology incredibly well. So, if you're one of those people that likes to geek out, likes to biohack, lifehack, likes all the data, you know, beyond just, you know, the watts on your power meter, but people who really want to drill down and see how their body operates and understand it better, then like Ben's your guy. He has kind of a Tim Ferriss approach to monitoring how his body

• 3:15Rich Roll?

  works and what it's doing, and he talks a lot about it in the interview. And he was great. So, hopefully you guys will enjoy it. I enjoyed speaking with him. I've known him for a couple of years. I've done his podcast, or a couple of his podcasts. He's got a lot going on. And really wanted to have him on the show. So, I was glad that he was able to take the time, and we chatted for the better part of two hours. So, I don't want to spend too much time in the introductory here. I want to get right into the interview. But just a couple of show notes really quick. And if you have not, I haven't been mentioning, I don't really talk about my book that much in terms of like promoting it, because it came out in May. It's been a little bit, it's been a little while, but since the audience

• 3:58Rich Roll?

  seems to be increasing. If there's people that are just tuning in now, who don't know or haven't checked it out, I wrote a book that came out this past year. It's called Finding Ultra. It's kind of my story to rediscovering myself through fitness and plant-based nutrition. It's a memoir. You can find it, you know, basically anywhere on the internet, on Amazon and the like. My publisher, Crown Archetype, which is a division of Random House, published an excerpt of the book. It's basically the preface and the beginning of chapter one. So in the show notes to this podcast, I'll put a link to that. So if you're interested in the book but not ready to pull the trigger yet,

• 4:43Rich Roll?

  you can, you know, read the first part of the book and decide if you're interested in going further. The paperback of the book is coming out this spring, which I'm excited about. So I'm going to be gearing up to kind of launch that pretty soon as we get closer into spring. So anyway, Finding Ultra, Jai Lifestyle, what else do I have for you? Oh yeah, if you want to support the show, there is an Amazon banner ad on my website at richroll.com in the blog section or the podcast section. So if you're going to buy something on Amazon, it would be great if you first went to richroll.com to the blog there. There's a little black and white banner ad. Just click that first.

• 5:28Rich Roll?

  Click through to Amazon through there and then buy whatever you're going to buy. And it'll throw a couple nickels in our bucket as an affiliate thing. And we're using all that money just to kind of pay for the bandwidth and a couple pieces of equipment that we need to kind of make this a little bit more professional. We've really enjoyed doing it. And like I said, I take it seriously and I want to do it as professionally as possible. I want to increase the frequency of the podcast and I want to get a dedicated, devoted space with all the proper equipment so that we can elevate the production value of the show and really turn it into, you know, a really regular thing as opposed to kind of a hobby thing.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  I'd really like to make it something that I do upwards of three times a week and really be able to get the great guests in and continue to provide great content. So that's it. Let's get into Ben Greenfield. But before that, I wanted to let you guys know that That at the end of the interview, Ben talks a little bit about an event that that he's hosting and producing that's coming up at the beginning of March. It's March 8th and 9th up in Spokane, Washington, where he where he lives, and it's called Become Superhuman. It's a great event. He's got a lot of really cool speakers lined up, and it's it's meant to be an intensive

• 6:51Rich Roll?

  experience to really take your fitness and your nutrition to the next level. So he's been planning this for like, two years or something like that. So it's been a long time in the making, and you can go and you can learn from the best of the best in the realms of health, fitness, and nutrition, and really learn more and discover how to get your body to not only look great, but feel great, think better, and perform at the highest level possible. So again, it's scheduled for March 8th and 9th in Spokane, and it's targeted towards anyone who wants to discover the healthiest, most efficient way to get a better body, enhance the physical and mental performance, and live a long, high-quality life.

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  Ben has been lined up, I'm sorry, Ben has lined up a really great world-class list of speakers that range the spectrum of performance to fat loss to recovery, digestion, microbes, which is one of my favorite subjects, brain sleep, hormone optimization, and it's basically an intensive two days where you're going to delve deep and get into the cutting edge of all of this stuff to enhance your human performance, fat loss, fitness, and really walk away with health strategies that are sustainable, that you can implement into your life that will take you again to the next level. In addition to fantastic guest lectures, he is personally going to be sharing his top

• 8:21Rich Roll?

  body transformation techniques and secrets that he has yet to share publicly and on his website at bengreenfieldfitness.com and his other sort of social media outlets, and his audiobooks and audio materials and all this kind of stuff. So when you register, you're going to get two full days of hands-on coaching from Ben and his team. So if you're in the Pacific Northwest... It sounds almost like a no brainer, especially since you'd expect something like this to cost thousands of dollars, but he is offering it for just $297 and was gracious enough to

• 8:58Rich Roll?

  offer the listeners of this podcast $50 off. So if you go to the website, the signup registry website for the event, which is superhumancoach.com, where you can find out all the information about what's going to happen there. And you want to register, just enter in the affiliate code richroll, you know, get 50 bucks off. So it ends up being 247 bucks, which is essentially nothing compared to what you're going to get out of it. So check that out. And so I want to roll right into the interview now, waste no more time because Ben and I talked for quite a long time. This is a long podcast. So without further ado.

• 9:43Rich Roll?

  All right, everybody, we got Ben Greenfield on the line. How's it going, Ben?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  It's going good, Rich. I was just telling you, I'm still warming up. I've got my hoodie and my pants on, just got out of the hot shower because I've been snowboarding all day. So if you hear my teeth chattering, that's the reason. It was a cold one today.

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  Well, just living the active lifestyle, man.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, as active as you can be. It seems like that you spend much of your day on the chairlift up there, but you know, maybe I just need to do a little more carving and jumping to make it feel like I've had a hard day of working out.

• 10:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you're in the great outdoors, man. Spokane's beautiful up there.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Plus I'd wind up in the hospital if I did any of that stuff.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  That's true. But all right, man. Well, cool. Thanks for joining the podcast. I've been, you know, kind of following you for a long time. And I was trying to remember how we first met. I think, I think I did one of your podcast interviews a long time ago. That might've been the first time that we talked, like a couple of years ago when you did the, you had the Rockstar Triathlon podcast or program. Are you still doing that?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you you came on the onto the Rockstar Triathlete Academy back in the day like when we were just launching that. And I think you were on my my Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast too. You came on there to talk about um, uh, plant-based lifestyle. And then I think you also did an interview for Finding Ultra on there as well.

• 11:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  I don't I don't remember exactly. It all just kind of blends together, this podcasting thing.

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  Well, Ben is a guy who really has, uh, not only fitness and and nutrition worked out in his coaching program, but you really have the internet wired, man. It seems like you're all over the place and you have all the bases covered. You got your online coaching programs, you have eBooks, you've got multiple podcasts. I know you're doing stuff with Endurance Planet too, and Everyman Try, and these different, you know, blogs and websites and podcasts. And everywhere I turn, like, your name comes up as the host or sort of the front person on all these sorts of things. So you really have figured out how to use technology and new media to really create a career out of fitness and coaching and consulting and public speaking and all this good stuff.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Al Gore was really my mentor when it came to him inventing the internet. No, I'm just kidding. Um, yeah, cool. Thanks. That's good to hear.

• 12:13Rich Roll?

  No, yeah, I mean, you really are.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Out there.

• 12:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're you're everywhere and and you're a great resource. And, you know, I go to your blog quite a bit and it's chock full of great information. Um, you know, not just if you're a triathlete, but you just want to be fit, or you want to be stronger, or, you know, maybe of a diet question or whatever. Um, Ben seems to have it pretty well covered. So you could check out Ben Greenfield Fitness dot com. That's is that the best place to kind of begin the journey of understanding who you are and all the different things that you're offering?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's that's the hub.

• 12:47Rich Roll?

  Right, cool. So how did it all begin? I mean, did you? You know, did you always know you wanted to be in this field? Or were you just an active kid who was into a lot of different sports and got into triathlon? Or, you know, how did this journey start? And, you know, what's the story?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  No, I was a total geek kid. I, I was into like fantasy novels and computer programming and Warcraft and totally geeked out until I was 13 years old. And my parents built a tennis court on our property and hired a tennis instructor. And I just like got, I fell in love with tennis and just played all day long.

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  We gotta get this kid outside.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Got into like strength and conditioning for that and, and started my own business after a few years, teaching tennis and played high school tennis and went on and played collegiate tennis and just got into sports from, from playing tennis. And I began to love studying the human body and physiology and, you know, I went out and bought a bunch of exercise equipment and, you know, put a little, little TV in the gym. I'd sit there watching Rocky III and doing my, doing my workouts to get myself in shape for tennis and got interested enough in it to where, to everyone's surprise, I didn't end up going after computer programming or anything like that in college, but actually

• 14:11Speaker 01

  studied exercise science and studied it for four years and then decided I was interested in being a doctor. So I went pre-med and, and took all the pre-med courses and did some, some internships in, in hospitals and in sports medicine clinics. And after doing that, decided that I didn't want to go into medicine and went back and got a master's degree in, in exercise physiology and biomechanics and went on to going to hip and knee surgical sales out of college.

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  Why did you decide you didn't want to be a doctor?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  I became really disenchanted with it because what I wanted to do is I wanted I wanted to marry exercise science and medicine and go on and be basically like an orthopedic surgeon. And so most of the internships and the practicums that I did were in that setting and there wasn't a single doc that encouraged me to pursue that field. Every single one of them told me that I was gonna be overworked and frustrated with the system and spend a ton of time with paperwork and that I'd have a lot of money but not enough time to enjoy it. And after a good year of that, I had a lot of questions about whether or not that was something I really wanted to do.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  So, you know, that surgical sales job that I took was was kinda like my last opportunity for myself to really delve into that field and see if it was something that I wanted to do. And it was the same thing, you know, just standing there in the surgical ward day after day. I didn't really, really see what I saw going on there as my dream, as my legacy, as what I wanted to do as a career. So, so I just quit all that and walked into the gym that was next to the apartment I was living in and asked for a job. And started working there as a personal trainer and over time became a fitness manager and went on to manage a few other gyms, branched off and started opening my own gyms and my

• 16:16Speaker 01

  own studios here in Spokane, Washington, and also over in Coral Lane, Idaho. And kinda during that time, I was I was getting into triathlon as well. And I reached a certain point where I was, I was really doing well as a trainer, had a lot of clients, had a lot of other trainers who were training clients for me. And I was just really loving life at that point and felt like I was, I was making a difference in people's lives and enabling them to get fit. You know, I had a lot of Ironman triathletes I worked with, I had a lot of people who were going after fat loss and health and I was just really loving it. And then my kids were born and I was never home because I was at the gym.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  I mean, when you're a personal trainer, you know, you show up at six AM and you leave at eight PM because that's when people wanna train. Right.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  So I remember I was at a, I was, I was speaking at a fitness business conference down in California. And this guy got up and gave this long talk about how he was writing books online and how he was doing websites and blogs and, and working with some other partners online and, and he was, he was doing well. I didn't realize you could actually make, make a career as a personal trainer out of, out of doing that type of stuff. And the light bulb kind of went off for me that, that that was a way that I could still spend time with my family and still, still kind of make that difference that I wanted to make in people's lives.

• 17:43Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  So within six months after I'd, I'd gone to that conference, I'd, I came back and I sold everything I got out of the gyms, got out of the studios, um, and just shifted into writing and freelance writing and online coaching. And sitting in my underwear at home and doing my work from there. So.

• 18:04Rich Roll?

  Very cool. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I just, I had a doc, Dr. Michael Greger on the podcast, uh, a couple of weeks ago. Who related, you know, sort of a similar experience and, I mean, he actually obviously went through medical school and became a doctor, but he did become disillusioned with the business practices of, you know, what it actually means to be a doctor and, you know, basically realized, much like you, realized that he could have a bigger impact and, you know, spread the message that he wanted to spread by leveraging the internet and online sources and technology to, you know, promote his message or whatever, much better than seeing patients one-on-one

• 18:45Rich Roll?

  and being wed to kind of the billable hour, so to speak. And, and, you know, I think it's an amazing time right now where, you know, if you have a certain level of, you know, basic skills and something to offer that you can do that. And, you know, you've done a wonderful job of, of really wiring it up.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. Telemedicine is taking off too. One of the companies I work with is called Wellness FX. And it's literally, you know, basic biomarker testing where, you know, you get a requisition form sent to your house and you take it to a nearby lab and you get your, your blood and your saliva and your, your urine and whatnot tested and sent off. And then you've got a, you know, personal dashboard with all your biomarkers and you work with a practitioner, a medical practitioner or a nutritionist or someone like that over the phone to go over your results.

• 19:37Rich Roll?

  Right. Is that the same, is that, I think I've heard of that. Is that the same company that Tim Ferriss is involved with?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. I saw, yeah, yeah. I've read up on that and he put, I saw some video also where he went to their offices and, you know, it, it looked like a really cool thing. And I think that that is, you know, it, it plays into the whole kind of, you know, biohacking and life hacking thing. But, you know, giving the consumer or the patient, so to speak, the control mechanism to, you know, understand how the body works and give them the markers and, you know, empower them to make better decisions and using doctors more as like consultants rather than these people that you go to who are supposed to know everything about everything. And, you know, generally are, can be disappointing in that context.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's pretty slick. I mean, if you, if you break a leg or bust an eardrum or something, you still gotta go to a doctor. But, yeah, I mean, for, for this, for, for this lifestyle management and, and preventive health management, you know, it's, there's, there's a lot of power there in terms of, of being able to take advantage of technology to just follow your own biomarkers and have like, you know, an online advisor to help walk you through stuff.

• 20:50Rich Roll?

  Right. And then you can actually really track what you're doing and the impact of whether it's, you know, a certain exercise routine or dietary regimen, you can, you can physically see the impact on that, on those markers.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's one of the things too is there are some labs out there where you can test and just get like PDF sent to you via email of your results, but it helps to have like some kind of a dashboard or something where you can, you know, see that, you know, whatever in May, your vitamin D levels were 30 and then you got them up to 50 and then for some reason they, you know, whatever dropped down to 35 or something like that, you know, it's, it's good information to see if you can test a few times a year.

• 21:29Rich Roll?

  And so is that open to the public now or are they still in kind of a beta mode?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  I think it's in like 20 states, something like that.

• 21:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  So, you know, the, the deal is you gotta have licensed practitioners in each state and make sure that you pass all regulations necessary to, to do the testing and also that you're practicing medicine essentially when you're doing something like that, so.

• 21:50Rich Roll?

  Interesting. And so when did, when did triathlon kind of come into the picture for you?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Uh, early on, uh, in my last two years of college, I was kind of getting out of, I, I had made a transition from tennis into bodybuilding and was just a, you know, this jacked 210 pound bodybuilder and, um, got called over to the university triathlon club to teach a course over there on physiology. They wanted me to come into one of their triathlon club meetings and, and do like a physiology 101 type of thing, which is what I was studying. So I was, I was comfortable doing that and I went in and talked about, you know, slow twitch muscle and fat utilization and fast twitch muscle and carb utilization and all this stuff. And they invited me to do one of the local sprint triathlons that

• 22:39Speaker 01

  the university put on. And so I went and did it and was just, I was, I was wrecked. I was in a huge amount of pain, you know, because I was trying to carry and cool all this muscle. And I remember like my, my boobs were bouncing up and down from my, you know, my bodybuilding chest and it just, it hurt so bad. And I was, I was extremely sore the next day. Um, but I was hooked at that point and signed up for more triathlons and, you know, kind of started a cannibalizing muscle and, and catabolizing, you know, the, the body that I'd built to instead be fast for endurance sports. And yeah, from that point on, was doing a few triathlons a year and started kind of shifting

• 23:21Speaker 01

  my, my knowledge of physiology into doing a little bit more coaching and, and training. And, you know, when I was running some of those gyms that I was doing, I would do like eight week long triathlon courses and, and, you know, take a bunch of people at the gym and, and bring them through the, the pool and swim lessons and, you know, go into the spin room and do, do spinning sessions and we do runs and then we'd all go to a race. And so, you know, camps and clinics and coaching and all that I got into. And at the same time, you know, it's, it's a huge passion of mine. I love it.

• 23:51Rich Roll?

  So are you still training for them and, and competing? Or are you just focused on the coaching aspect of it?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Both, both. I, I race for Team Timex.

• 24:00Rich Roll?

  Oh, you do? Okay. I didn't know that. That's cool.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a blast.

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  And you've been a, you've raced at Kona before, right? A couple of times, I think. Is that right?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've done Kona four times.

• 24:11Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. Yeah. So just for listeners out there who might not be familiar with Ben, like he's, you know, he's very accomplished and very good at triathlon and Ironman. So he knows from whence he speaks. And, you know, one of the things that I kind of wanted to get into a little bit, um, in my, in, in my book, I talk a little bit about my, you know, journey into learning about endurance training and, and kind of comparing it to my background as a competitive swimmer in college and, and all the sort of things that I, that I learned when, you know, and sort of did wrong when I initially got into triathlon and kind of had to learn the hard way. And a lot of that revolves around, you know, periodized training and understanding, uh, you know, what your zones are and, and what

• 24:55Rich Roll?

  training in those different zones accomplishes and, and really trusting in, uh, developing your aerobic capacity with these long Z, Z2 zone two workouts and, and the like. And people seem to be, you know, sort of, you know, really respond to that and want to know more about how all of that works. I get emails and tweets and messages all the time about, you know, how do I set my zones or, you know, how much time should I be spending in zone two? And I spent a lot of time answering these questions. And, you know, I know that you understand this stuff really well. So I was hoping you could speak to. This a little bit and kind of addressing if somebody's like a beginner triathlete or doesn't really understand what it means to do zone training, you know, the importance

• 25:38Rich Roll?

  of that and the difference in, you know, the physiological differences that take place when you're trying to develop aerobic efficiency and your fat burning mechanism versus your sort of strength and speed and short, you know, fast twitch muscle glycogen burning system.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, the basic thing, and it's really easy for anybody to wrap their minds around, if you understand this concept, then you're going to know more about basic physiology than 99% of the people out there. You've got two basic muscle fiber types and three basic energy systems. And if you know those two muscle types and those three energy systems, that can form a basis for you to be able to make some really smart decisions in your training. So your two basic muscle types are fast twitch muscle and slow twitch muscle. And for those of you who are about to hang up on the podcast because you think this is going to be way too basic, just hold on, this will be, this will be

• 26:39Speaker 01

  worth it for you. And then you've got three basic energy systems. You've got your aerobic, basically what's kind of like your oxidative energy system. You've got your anaerobic energy system, also known as your glycolytic energy system. And then you've got your phosphogenic energy system. So that first one, that aerobic energy system, kind of kicks in and predominates anytime you're exercising more than about two minutes. And it uses primarily slow twitch muscle. Or it would be more fitting to say that slow twitch muscle primarily uses that aerobic energy system. And what that means is that slow twitch muscle has a very long

• 27:21Speaker 01

  time to fatigue, and it's also going to use an energy source that provides a long, steady source of fuel. Not a really fast release source of fuel, not a fuel that's very useful for explosive and short sprint efforts, but a fuel that's readily available for long periods of time, and that would be fat. So you've got your, your slow twitch muscle primarily utilizing the aerobic energy system and primarily relying on fat as a fuel. And slow twitch muscle has a, has a high, high degree of what are called mitochondria in it so that it can use oxygen fed to it by your body to turn primarily fat with some amount of carbohydrate into ATP or energy for the muscle to, to contract.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  So that's your, your one energy system and, and this will relate to zones in just a second. And then you've got your, your fast twitch muscle and fast twitch muscle is going to primarily use that glycolytic energy system. Glycolytic meaning that you're primarily breaking down glucose or carbohydrate for energy. So, um, much smaller amount of fuel available when you're relying on glucose or carbohydrate, but it, it frees up energy much more quickly. So you're able to produce ATP more quickly, you're able to move at faster speeds when you're using that energy system. And fast twitch muscle fatigues much more quickly. You're going to primarily use fast twitch muscle for efforts, you know, like sprint efforts up to about two minutes in duration. And then you're, you're going to have to slow down.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  At that point, you're, you're going to be making that switch just based off of the buildup of lactic acid into more of an oxidative, slow twitch muscle utilizing format, you know, which is why you, you can't sprint for 10 minutes as long as you can for two minutes.

• 28:59Rich Roll?

  Sure, of course. And you're also going to deplete your glycogen stores as well. You only have, I mean, my understanding is you've got about 90 minutes worth of, worth of that before that kind of runs out on you, even if you're

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:11Rich Roll?

  taking in the goos and doing all that kind of stuff.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Well, the, the average person walking down the street is going to have about 90 minutes. Uh, and an athlete can usually, um, enhance their glycogen storage capacity, their carbohydrate storage capacity to the point where they could go for two hours and sometimes a little bit more than two hours. I mean, you know, back in the day, you know, good triathletes like, you know, Mark Allen or Dave Scott could roll out of bed without breakfast and go out and do an Olympic distance triathlon, you know, and be out there for, for 150 to two hours and, and be okay. So i- in a trained person, you can, you can still be fairly glycolytic or, or at least use a, a high percentage of fast twitch muscle on a high percentage of carbohydrate for up to two hours. But for just about anybody, once you get past that point, you're kind of screwed.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  And you start to rely on fat as a fuel and that's gonna kind of slow you down. And like you just kind of alluded to Rich, exogenous sources of carbohydrate, meaning like, you know, taking in gels, four strings and things like that, they kind of elongate the amount of time that you can last utilizing carbohydrate stores. So it just kind of makes logical sense. If you've got carbohydrate coming in through your mouth and your gut and your bloodstream, it's gonna be that much less muscle carbohydrate and liver carbohydrate that your body has to tap into. And that's, that's why someone can, can even do something like an Ironman going pretty fast, you know, still using a decent amount of fast twitch muscle, still burning a lot of matches out there.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And as long as they're taking in, in some source of fuel can, can maintain a fairly decent speed. And then that last energy system is also used by fast twitch muscle and it's called your phosphagenic energy system. And anybody that's heard of creatine or like using a creatine supplement might be familiar with this. But basically creatine, kind of like glucose, kind of like fat, it can be used as energy. But it is a fuel source that predominates for efforts that are under about 25 to 30 seconds in duration. It's a really short explosive effort. So this would be like, you know, explosively doing like a bench press for five reps or something like that. And that's why creatine is a, you know, it's a popular supplement among weightlifters especially

• 31:21Speaker 01

  or, or powerlifting athletes, just because it lets you do it, you know, a few extra reps. And interestingly, there's, there's some research coming down the pipeline that shows that it may have some use for endurance athletes. Kind of a, almost a glycogen sparing effect, meaning if you, if you supplement with creatine, it may actually help you last a little bit longer.

• 31:41Rich Roll?

  That's interesting because I, yeah, I've heard conflicting things about that in the endurance sports con- context. And, and it's interesting to hear you talk about it as an energy source because I always thought of it as sort of a, more of a recovery oriented supplement, like a muscle building kind of thing as opposed to something that's going to give you a burst of energy in the weight room.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  No, it's, it, think of it the same as glucose. It is, it is simply an energy source. It's, it's not really gonna do a lot for recovery or do a lot for soreness as much as it's going to give you a source of energy outside of glucose and fats. And in, in a lot of folks, um, they're, they're creatine non-responders because they genetically hold decent amounts of creatine in their muscle anyways, and they don't need that extra creatine.

• 32:24Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Isn't there, is there a water retention aspect to taking that?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  There is, and that's also something that's highly variable. You'll, you'll find some people really tend to bloat when they take creatine and some have no issues at all. Um, and, and the interesting thing is that you, you gotta realize, I just explained these three energy systems, the oxidative, the glycolytic, and the phosphogenic. But the, eh, eh, any, any given energy system is not going to be the only energy system that you use for 100%.

• 32:54Rich Roll?

  You're bleeding into one or the other at any given, it's, it's more like the predominant one that you're using.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Right. So when you're running a marathon at a decent pace, you might be 70% oxidative, 25% glycolytic, and 5% phosphogenic. So, you know, you're, you're gonna be tapping into any of these, and that's why you, you know, you, you can't, um, for example, just use 100% fats or, or just rely on 100% carbohydrate. It's always gonna be a mix of these fuels. And that's where, where we kinda get into this, this zone thing that you brought up. You know, in, in any given triathlon book, or exercise training book, or endurance book, you're, you're gonna find heart rate zones or power training zones. There's usually like five to seven of them typically. I, I tend to coach with five just because I think seven

• 33:41Speaker 01

  is, it just starts to get confusing. And sometimes three is, is almost too basic and doesn't give you enough different variables to coach with or, or to train with. Um, basically, your, your first two zones, zone one and zone two, those are gonna be primarily aerobic. They use primarily slow twitch muscle, usually fat as a fuel. Usually you don't need a lot of carbohydrate as you're, as you're exercising in those zones, and they're used to either enhance blood flow and help you to recover, um, or else help you to, to do like a, a long exercise session without fatiguing. You know, like zone two, you should be able to just go all day long using fats as a fuel.

• 34:19Rich Roll?

  And you'll never deplete your fat stores, by the way. I mean, no matter what you do and how lean you are, you still have more than you would ever need to go all day on... You know, burn all that fat.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when you are out on an exercise session, like a long exercise session, and you're not eating anything, and you bonk, and you're wondering why, because you've kept it really low intensity, and you've stayed in zone two, and you've stayed aerobic, and, you know, shouldn't your slow twitch muscle be able to utilize your tens of thousands of calories of fat for, you know, all day long? What's bonking is your brain. Your brain does need trace amounts of glucose, and just about everybody has basic glucose requirements, you know, for your kidneys, for your liver, for your heart, for your brain, for your basic physiological function. You usually need right around 600 calories of some form of glucose.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And your body can make some of it from protein, and some of it from fatty acids, but at least, and it kind of varies from person to person, but about half of that, 200 or 300 calories or so of that, have to come from some form of carbohydrate. So what that means is if you're completely void of carbohydrate, you can go out on a zone two session and be trying to utilize fat as a fuel, and you're still gonna bonk because your brain runs out of glucose, and at that point it just starts to shut everything else down. So, and then you've got your zone three, which is kind of like a mix. It's kind of like the, it's not the no man's zone, but it's kind of, it's a combination of oxidative and glycolytic energy systems.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And this is the zone at which you're kind of starting to make that switch from using primarily slow twitch muscle and using more fast twitch muscle. The way I like to think about this is that's kind of your racing zone for a lot of Ironman events, and for marathon, for like beginner half Ironman, kind of around in that range. Zone three is kind of the money zone for racing.

• 36:18Rich Roll?

  But hardly the money zone when it comes to training. I mean, it's really the gray zone in terms of training, is it not?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there was that, there was that talk going around, I think it was because in, in one of Joe Freel's book, he said something to that extent. I think maybe he, he, he was, he was misinterpreted, but the, the thought for a while was that zone three training was kind of just hard enough to beat you up, but not hard enough to give you a, a training response. And, you know, while it is true that you get a little bit more bang for your buck out of doing interval training, rather than just like going out and doing a long, moderate session in zone three, because it's your race pace, it is a zone that you do, you need to do some training. So for example, for an Ironman athlete training for marathon,

• 37:09Speaker 01

  you know, I'll, I'll prescribe a 90 minute zone three run with like a two to one work to rest ratio. So you go out and you warm up and you do 20 minutes zone three, race pace, 10 minute zone two, and you do that, and you do that three times through and trains you how, how to eat at race pace, how to, what race pace feels like, what your pace at race pace is, if you're using your, you know, your heart rate zones. So there, there is some benefit, you know, zone three training, if I'm writing out a, a program for an Ironman triathlete, for example, they're usually going to have, uh, in, in their build up to a race, at least one workout in each skill per week, like for swimming, for biking and for running, that has a zone three workout in it.

• 37:51Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I don't mean to interrupt, but every workout has a purpose, right? And, you know, if you're not training with that frame of mind, you're probably wasting some time because, you know, what I'm hearing you say is basically a, a zone three workout is more sort of getting used to what that feels like and acclimating the body to what it's going to feel like in a race and, and training your digestive system to be able to. You know, digest the foods that you're going to need to take in an Ironman, but it's not the optimal zone to do what, like, for example, a zone two workout, you're trying to increase those blood pathways to the mitochondria, build more mitochondria, increase the efficiency with which your body can can burn fat for fuel and utilize oxygen, et

• 38:36Rich Roll?

  cetera, et cetera. And a zone four and above is more about strength and speed and all of that. When you're in zone three, you're not really developing your aerobic engine as well as you could if you were in zone two, and you're not really getting that much stronger or faster. But what you are doing is is learning what it feels like to be in that zone and getting your body acclimated to that. Is that accurate?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. And what happens is a lot of athletes go out and they do every session at zone three.

• 39:06Rich Roll?

  That is the, that's what, that's what most amateur athletes do. Every workout is a zone three workout, and that's why they plateau.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. Every run is, you know, either outdoors or on the treadmill, seventy five percent. So you feel like you're doing something, but it's not so hard that you're totally uncomfortable. And you just, you know, every single day you go out, you got a moderate training session. And and that's where the zone three training is overused or misused. It's like you only really need to do a zone three session and think of it as like a race prep session once per week for for each skill that you're training in.

• 39:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And of course, you are getting, I mean, there is an effect to doing that zone three. You will reach a certain level of fitness proficiency, but you will hit a glass ceiling pretty quickly that you're not going to. So many, you know, sort of middle aged athletes or amateur runners or whatever, you know, they run the same time every year, every year, every year. And they, why am I not getting faster? Why am I not getting better? And it's, I think a lot of it is because of this very reason of just sort of thinking, hey, I'm getting a good workout in, you know, why am I staying the same year in and year out? And I think it's this zone three kind of focus without really knowing any better.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and some of it is that, some of it, as you know, because, you know, I know you really understand nutrition, you know, it's not optimizing the diet of micronutrients, some of it is perhaps not weight training, or not, you know, building a foundation properly. But yeah, a big, big part of it is just too many moderate sessions, it's not enough, a combination of easy aerobic sessions and hard sessions. And it's a concept that came up in research recently called polarized training. You heard of that before?

• 40:46Rich Roll?

  No, no. What's that?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Polarized training is the concept of, most of your training is either done at very low intensities or very high intensities. And they've compared that with training where you've kind of got more of the training done at a moderate intensity with a little bit of aerobic and a little bit of high intensity, and the polarized training wins in every study. And, you know, if you look at, you know, the stories that have been told about like, you know, Kenyan runners, for example, they're doing a lot of really like low intensity, easy runs, and then they're including very, very hard, high-intensity intervals, kind of sprinkled throughout that type of training and getting fabulous results versus going out at, you know, race pace for each of their training sessions.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  And interestingly, you know, I think this adaptation really has almost like an ancestral type of flavor to it, to where if you think about, you know, like a hunter-gatherer or a farmer or something like that, you're working at a relatively low intensity, you know, walking, gathering, moving, staying lightly physically active throughout the day, and you have brief periods of time where you're lifting a heavy rock or a log, or you're running from a lion, or you're chasing down game, and it makes sense that the human body responds pretty favorably to that type of scenario versus, say, just like, you know, tracking an animal at a moderate intensity all day long, which would just beat you up after like, you know, a good, you know, 48 hours or even just a day of that.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  So I think it's interesting how the type of training that we respond to most favorably possibly reflects just almost like what we're well adapted to from an evolutionary perspective.

• 42:29Rich Roll?

  I've always been somebody who does really well with lots of volume, lots of zone two. I don't know if I'm... I realize everybody's different and that seems to work well for me. And when I try to do programs that are more quality oriented and less volume, I end up not performing as well. And I've learned that about myself through swimming in college and my experiences in triathlon, and that just works for me. But I also think people misunderstand, I talk a lot about the importance of zone two and slowing down, and the discipline that it requires to not speed up when you want to feel like you need that workout or whatever.

• 43:09Rich Roll?

  And sort of readjusting the focus on efficiency as opposed to speed, especially in the context of an Ironman. I mean, most people, it's like you don't have to run that fast, you just have to like train your body so that you don't slow down as much. And when I'm sort of training with that in mind, especially since I'm doing ultras or whatever, where speed just isn't really that important, that really works for me. But I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this kind of new movement that's going on with CrossFit and these guys like Brian McKenzie who are advocating really truncating volume and doing this high intensity work to prepare for things like even like a marathon.

• 43:53Rich Roll?

  Like when I was flying back from Hawaii the other day, I got the new Outside Magazine, and there's a whole article on this guy and his 12-week program to crush your marathon PR and never run longer than 13 miles, and how this is controversial. And the typical runners or endurance bloggers or whatever are saying this is anathema and this guy's crazy, and yet he has all these people that are following him that seem to be doing really well. And for me, I think it is that polarized training. You've got to get those, you've got to work both systems responsibly. And this guy's telling people kind of what's nice to hear, which is, not that it'll be easy, because it'll be very difficult to do his program with all this high intensity.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  It will wear you out and rip you apart and all that kind of stuff, but you don't have to do all that long stuff and you can save time. And you seem like a guy who probably has... I know you have a really good grip on this, so I'm interested in knowing what you think about this guy and what he's advocating.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think I've had Brian McKenzie on my podcast wants to talk about this a little bit too. Just so I don't leave people hanging in case I bring up these terms at all as we're talking, we didn't mention zone four and zone five.

• 45:05Rich Roll?

  Oh yeah, sorry, I interrupted you and got you on a

• 45:08Speaker 01

  No, that's okay, I love tangents.

• 45:09Rich Roll?

  Sorry about that.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  I love tangents. But to come full circle on those, zone four is when your body starts to use more fast twitch muscle as a fuel and starts to build up lactic acid more quickly, then you can actually remove it. And the reason for that is that when you when you burn glucose for fuel as fast twitch muscle does, the byproduct of that is lactic acid. And lactic acid isn't bad, a bunch of it gets shuttled back into the liver and kind of reconverted to glucose and you get to use it again. But it kicks off these acidic hydrogen ions in that process. And that's what creates that muscle burn and it creates a lot of ammonia and basically

• 45:52Speaker 01

  your your brain starts to sense that that things are building up a little bit too quickly and there's a lot of damage occurring and a lot of acidity and a shift in the in the body's pH and things start to shut down if you stay at that intensity too long. It also rapidly depletes carbohydrate stores. But you get a really, really great training response when you're doing like intervals in zone four. And so, so that's the idea behind that one. And then zone five, I just call sustained speed, meaning that you're you're going pretty much as hard as you can without hurting yourself, meaning like a, you know, 100 meter sprint, you're using almost purely fast twitch muscle. And it's, you know, those are the type of intervals I'll pull out quite a bit in someone as we're getting ready in those last, you

• 46:36Speaker 01

  know, several weeks leading up to a race to just get that top end speed and to also train the body how to literally pull on as many muscle fibers as possible. Because what you get when you get up into that zone is more what's called neural activation of muscle tissue, meaning You build new, uh, new, um, nerves in, yeah, nerve, nerve pathways in the muscle tissue and you activate more what are called motor neurons at that speed. So, so that's, that's zone four and zone five and that, that's kind of like the high intensity interval stuff. And, you know, like you mentioned about this, you know, this CrossFit or, or CrossFit endurance, they're really predominantly going after not only those two pathways, but, and I think that this is-

• 47:19Rich Roll?

  For, for, basically zone four and five.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Zone four and zone five, ton of training in zone four and zone five. But, and I, I think this is important, mixing that with a very, very high amount of, of eccentric muscle damage. Meaning that when a muscle lengthens under load, that's called an eccentric load. And that is when a muscle fiber tears and there are some very significant recovery implications from that. You build up quite a bit of what's called HSCR P, which is your body's primary inflammatory, uh, response. And a lot of, of cytokines, which are your little inflammatory messengers, because everything in your body is rushing to heal those damaged muscles. And where that occurs is during the actual CrossFit workout itself, you know, during, during the clean jerk and the push press

• 48:07Speaker 01

  and, and the muscle ups and the pull ups and the jumps on and off the tires and the sledgehammers. You know, and, and I've, I've done quite a bit of CrossFit and I know what it feels like after you do a CrossFit workout properly. And there are recovery implications that mean that not only does your risk of injury go up when you're combining this with zone four and zone five efforts, but you never really reach your peak because your body is always beat up. And, um, you know, that, that's why we mentioned earlier, you know, Rich about zone three intervals and people doing too much of that and just getting into this rut, you can get into a high intensity rut too.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And, you know, in, in, uh, in those Wellness FX consultations that I do where I'm looking at people's biomarkers, I see a lot of CrossFit athletes and, uh, it's, it's a classic scenario every single time. It's, it's high levels of inflammatory markers, high levels of, of also creatinine and blood urea nitrogen, which are also markers of, of muscle damage and indication that the body has not had a chance to recover properly. And you know, I think that the biggest issue with with a training system like that is there was simply way too much intensity, not necessarily with the with the swimming and the biking and running, but with the weight training.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  And that combined with the intense swimming and biking and running creates this this over training scenario that's highly catabolic, meaning that the muscles and the energy systems never get that chance that they're supposed to during rest and recovery to grow more fit.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Yeah, it's I mean, it's advocated as sort of an alternative to people who have persistent, you know, overuse injuries from running too much or whatever, like this is a way, a different way that will help you avoid those, but you're saying there's a different kind of injury and overtraining, you know, kind of equation that you have to look at if you're going to entertain doing something like this.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and you know, I I do anywhere from a nine thirty to nine forty five Ironman. And I train eight to ten hours a week, but I I don't do a lot of that.

• 50:23Rich Roll?

  For the uninitiated, that's not very much training for for going that fast in an Ironman. That's impressive.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  But the thing is, I stay physically active throughout the day. And what I mean by that is I have a standing workstation. I'm always on my feet, got a pull-up bar installed in the door of my office, I do a few pull-ups every time I walk underneath that. I'm I'm always, you know, walking around everywhere I go, I'm moving. I don't really have like a sitting desk job, so I'm physically active throughout the day, which I think helps quite a bit. I don't do my intensity with weight training per se. I I do weight train two times a week, sometimes up to three times if I throw an extra, you know, core session or whatever in there. But these are not CrossFit-esque box workouts where I'm competing with ten other people for a time.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  It's me, my body, making sure that I don't beat myself up so much that I'm not able to swim, bike, and run properly. And then I do basically a interval training. I use a lot of that zone four and that that zone five training. I have one completely full rest day per week that's basically foam rolling and some yoga.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  And then I have one high quality, long workout. What I mean by that by high quality long workout is my Ironman bike is usually around two to three hours long and it's a lot of those zone three intervals that I talked about, training at race pace, but backing off enough to where I'm not, you know, digging myself into a hole. My runs are typically right around 90 minutes in duration for my marathon training runs. And I have one, it's just one, whereas a lot of, of Ironman triathletes put these in throughout the whole year. I have one 18 to 20 mile run that I usually put about four to five weeks prior to the race. That's the only time I ever run long, just to give myself that, that mental feeling of

• 52:15Speaker 01

  having that time spent on my feet. And then my swims are 20 to 30 minutes in duration. Usually I, I go for more time in the water or, or more, uh, more frequency in the water than, uh, splitting it into longer sessions throughout the week. So 20 to 30 minute swims, it's usually four to five times a week. Uh, again, with a big, big focus on interval training, with some skills and some drills thrown in. And, and that's how my training scenario works.

• 52:41Rich Roll?

  Interesting. So you never go out and do the four, five, six hour Saturday morning rides?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Never. I don't, I don't even know how to do that. Like, you know that-

• 52:52Rich Roll?

  I wouldn't know what to do without, without doing that.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Now, one of the things that, that I do have typically every single year, because I teach camps, I teach clinics, is there's usually at least one five to seven day period where I do have a, a week where I'm, I'm out there training athletes and we're doing, you know, a three hour ride in the morning and, you know, maybe a swim session and a run session in the af- you know, typical camp week. That's, that's higher volume. And I, I think that maybe that helps mentally a little bit. Um, last year I didn't have-

• 53:24Rich Roll?

  You have to be comfortable with being that uncomfortable for that long of a period of time. Just like you were talking about with your zone three workouts. It's, there's a certain physiological adaptation and a mental adaptation. I mean, maybe because you've been doing it, you've done it so many times that you don't really have the need to train it that much anymore. But, you know, certainly you have to get to a place where you can be at peace with, you know, being in that uncomfortable situation for, you know, the better part of 10 hours.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  I think for me, it come it came down to a stupid mistake followed by, um, you know, trust at that point. Stupid mistake, meaning that I signed up for Ironman Cortalane without knowing what I was getting myself into and did not train adequately for that race at all. Um, you know, my long ride was right around 80 miles. Um, and I'd I'd run 16 to 18 miles and had never swam 4K before.

• 54:23Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  And so, um, you know, I went out and did that race and and just basically I had my I had a heart rate monitor on the bike and I had a heart rate monitor on the run and I just tried to stay in that zone that I knew based on my exercise physiology training would be my fat burning zone, you know, zone three, uh, intensity. And I I didn't really pay that much attention all to my watch. And when I rounded the corner to to go to the finish line, I looked down, I saw I was at about 957 and I ran in and and did it in 959 and kind of realized that I didn't have to train that much to actually do Ironman. And at that point, it it was simply a matter of every single time I stood at the starting

• 55:06Speaker 01

  line of an Ironman, knowing that even though I hadn't done it in training, you know, ridden 112 miles or or ran a marathon or anything like that, that the human body, uh, is is capable of endurance feats that don't require it to necessarily, um, do the same thing in training. And so from that time, you know, that's that's the way that my training has been going high intensity, squeezing a lot into a short period of time, making sure I'm not, you know, sitting around a lot during the day and really taking care of my body. I really take care of my body from a from a nutritional and kind of a supplement standpoint in terms of doing, you know, things like that biomarker testing and paying attention when my vitamin D levels are down or when my inflammatory levels are up. I use quite

• 55:50Speaker 01

  a bit of heart rate variability testing, too. I'm starting to use more more pulse oximeter testing, testing my oxygen saturation values in the morning.

• 55:57Rich Roll?

  So how do you how do you do that test?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Well, I've been using a pulse oximeter.

• 56:03Rich Roll?

  So it's just this- Explain what that is.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  A pulse oximeter basically uses a, like a light to test your, your oxygen saturation on your fingertip. I'm not sure if it's like a laser or exactly how it takes the reading, but it's the same thing they use in the medical setting when they put that thing on your fingertip when you go in-

• 56:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  You know, to the hospital or to the ER room or whatever. And it tests your oxygen saturation and you'd ideally like that to be at ninety-six to ninety-nine percent in the morning when you test. And if it's consistently dropping below that, that value, that's a pretty good sign that you might be overtrained or that you might have some type of a nutrient deficiency.

• 56:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  You know, such a, you know, anything that would be involved with, with your red blood cells like B12 or folate or, or ferritin or, or anything else when it comes to your oxygen saturation. Or it could simply be that your red blood cell turnover is too high because you're beating your body up too much without giving it enough rest. So I'll test that. And in the past I've done it with a pulse oximeter, which you can get off Amazon or wherever else. They're, they're not expensive. I just got a device though, in the past couple of weeks. It's called a, um, now I'm, now I'm gonna blank on it. It's made by a company called Nomadix, I think. It's like a, it's a Tinkst or something like that. It's one of these things like a MyBasis or a Fitbit or any of these other portable devices.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  But it's, it's a little dongle that you plug into your iPhone and it's a, it's a pulse oximeter that you, they have on your iPhone. So it allows me to-

• 57:32Rich Roll?

  Just like an appendage of your eye, so you can just do it yourself and it, it will read it right on your phone?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can upload it to your dashboard. But the cool thing is that it takes my heart rate variability at the same time. And that's, that's another huge value that I track. It's basically a, you've got the vagus nerve is the nerve in your body that feeds into your heart. And that is innervated by the two branches of your nervous system, your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. So if, if both of those branches of your nervous system are communicated properly, then your heart rate variability, which you can think of as your heart rate responsiveness, tends to stay very high. You get a very high heart rate variability score, meaning that-

• 58:15Rich Roll?

  Meaning your body's ability to react to a certain stimulus, whether it's exercise induced or otherwise.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. So if you've overtrained your sympathetic nervous system, as might be the case with, you know, like a, like somebody doing CrossFit endurance, then your, your heart rate variability tends to jump around a lot from day to day in your measurements. It's typically a sign that your sympathetic nervous system is overworked, your, your fight or flight nervous system is overworked. And if you tend to have consistently low heart rate variability values, typically a sign that your parasympathetic nervous system is overworked, or perhaps, you know, perhaps you've been doing too much of that zone three training, just day after day, you know, painting yourself into an aerobic hole. So you test your heart rate variability, and this is something I just do for a few minutes

• 59:02Speaker 01

  every morning. And you keep track of that, and when it starts to dip low, it's a very, very good predictor of whether or not a few days later, you're going to get injured or ill. And a lot of the athletes that I coach also just track their heart rate variability and upload it to a dashboard that I'm able to log into and see. But that's a, that's a great way to, to, to gauge what your workout should look like for that day, or gauge whether, whether you need to, you know, take a full rest day. So those are two values that I pay attention to quite a bit as well, you know, in addition to just the normal things like sleep and stress and soreness and those qualitative variables.

• 59:39Rich Roll?

  Right. So you've really embraced this sort of biohacking approach to, to coaching, and it's pretty cool. And I want to talk about the supplements in a minute, because I know you're a big proponent of those, and, and I'm still learning a lot and have a lot, you know, I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Before, before we kind of close the chapter on the training stuff, you know, I, it, it is interesting that you're able to go so fast in an Ironman with, with so little training. I mean, I, maybe it's just my own insecurity, like if I didn't train that much, I'd, I'd be nervous that I'm not, you know, doing what I need to do. And, and I've always, there's different ways to skin a cat. So your way, your way works great. My way has been a different path, and, and

• 1:00:21Rich Roll?

  obviously a much more time consuming path, because I'm much more zone two focused.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yes. It's like a, it's like a Mafetone approach.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. And Just so, just for the listener out there, like when you're in that zone two focused kind of approach to training, you're going to end up spending a lot more time out, you know, on the bike or on the run. And yes, that could lead to certain overuse injuries for people that have, you know, chronic running problems or whatever. But for me, it's always worked because it's kind of the reverse, it's kind of the bottom up approach to building your body as opposed to the top down. And when you're, when you're working that aerobic system, you are building those additional blood pathways and you are, you're stimulating your muscles, your muscle cells to produce additional mitochondria. So you're improving

• 1:01:14Rich Roll?

  that mitochondrial density. And that leads to, it doesn't make you faster, but it makes you more efficient. And so what I've found is that if I'm just doing, let's say I go out and I just, I'm really meticulous about staying in zone two. When I first kind of started doing this, and I talk about it in the book, you know, I couldn't run faster than when I was out of shape, I couldn't run faster than, you know, nine 30 miles or something like that without my heart rate going over my zone two. And then just by sticking with that and not doing any interval work and not going into zone three, you know, fast forward a couple of years later and I can run, you know, seven minute miles at the same heart rate. So it's just a different way of kind of getting to the same place, I suppose.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think that, that you do have an increased risk of injury or overuse syndrome using that approach.

• 1:02:03Rich Roll?

  Well, you're not going to, if you're staying away from zone three, then you're not going to, you're, you're, it's, you're a better chance of not overtraining, you know, if you're doing it properly. And the overuse injuries have to do with things beyond training. It's, you know, the way your foot falls, it's your stride, it's, you know, it's running mechanics and what kind of shoe you're wearing and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Right, that, that Mafetone style of predominantly aerobic training come out with, with some, um, some high intensity thrown in here and there, that can work very well, especially if you've got the commitment and, and the time to do it. Um, and, and the idea behind the Mafetone philosophy for the listeners is that you find out what your aerobic zone is, and it's typically about 20 beats below your, your zone four, you know, the point where your legs start to really burn and you start to breathe really deeply, you subtract 20 beats from that, and that's approximately kind of like the, the top end of your aerobic zone, and you're generally doing much of your training in that aerobic zone. And like

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Rich said, um, your, your aerobic capacity, your mitochondrial density, the, the capitalization of this slow twitch muscle and, and all the muscle really tends to favorably respond to that. And it, it can be a very good way to train many, many pro athletes, pro triathletes, pro marathoners, and like the, the Kenyan marathoners I was talking about earlier, they respond quite well to this approach. And I actually have nothing against it. Phil Mafetone is actually coming up to, to speak at my live event in March, and, um, he's actually not talking about the, uh, the aerobic zone, he's talking about music and sound and how to use that.

• 1:03:42Rich Roll?

  He's an interesting guy. You go to his website and it's like, one half is like him as a musician and the other half is him as an endurance genius. And it's like, well, who is this guy?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  He's a, he's a Renaissance man, I guess. But, you know, the, the issue with, uh, the, the long training, um, is when people venture into going above that zone two, and like we already mentioned, hopefully we're not kicking this horse to death, get into just doing that moderate zone three training and thinking that that's the way that you do long aerobic training. Usually everybody who does it, not everybody, but the majority of people who do it, do it too hard. So you can do it correctly in the way that you just described, Rich. And I actually, if I, if I had the time, or let's say I wanted to be a professional, uh, like a professional triathlete, I would use that approach because really if you want to get down to like, you know, closer to say like an eight hour Ironman,

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  you do need to begin going more after that type of training scenario.

• 1:04:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it also takes, takes not just time, you know, out of your day, but it takes years, you know, it's, it's, this is a, this is a multiple year process to getting to where you want it.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so your diesel engine is going to be bigger than mine with your approach. And if I ever wanted to go and be much, much faster than Ironman, I'd have to start doing that. But for me, it's a family, it's a career, it's a hobbies thing.

• 1:05:08Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  I like to play the guitar and cook and do all these other things. And so I don't have the time to be able to use that training approach. So what research has shown is that the higher intensity intervals give you a similar training adaptation in terms of mitochondrial density and capitalization and all that. What they don't give you is that same diesel engine to where if you really wanted to get super, super fast at aerobic exercise, you'd have to get to that level. But what I'm trying to get at here is, like you said, there's more than one way to skin a cat. There is that approach that you just described, and then there's the approach that I'm using. What you don't want to do, and where the chronic injuries come in, where

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  the plateauing occurs, and where a lot of the frustration comes in for endurance athletes who just can't seem to, whatever, get below a 12-hour Ironman or 13-hour Ironman, is doing that zone three workout, moderate intensity, day after day after day.

• 1:06:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  So yeah, it's interesting how there's a few different ways to do it. There's definitely a wrong way to do it.

• 1:06:13Rich Roll?

  Sure, of course. So, you know, short of going and getting a proper lactate test, I mean, not everybody has sort of those labs at their disposal or the kind of facilities. I mean, I like to go in and get on a bike and use the power meter and get a really specific test done where I'm getting my finger prick for lactate and it's reading heart rate and watts and all that kind of stuff, and really drill down specifically to what my zones are. But not everybody either can afford that or is able to do that. So what is a good way, if somebody just on a DIY level wants to figure out what their zones are, what is the best way for them to do that? I mean, I usually point people to like Joe Freel's book or his blog or whatever because

• 1:06:57Rich Roll?

  he has some simple tips and tools for people to do that. But what would you recommend?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Two ways to do it. The first way, if you're a geek and you're a biohacking type of person, you just go to lactate.com. And if you like to own nice things, you won't mind doing this anyways. You pay $400, $500 and you get a blood lactate meter. It comes with full instructions on how to do it. You or your spouse can sit there while you're on the bike for 20 or 30 minutes, doing slightly harder efforts every four to five minutes. And that's about how long you need to go for your lactate levels to stabilize. And you just prick the finger every four to five minutes and you take the blood, or you just prick the ear once and take the blood kind of in a steady stream from that.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  When the values reach four, you look at your heart rate and that's your lactate threshold. The other way to do it, slightly less invasive or expensive, would be you warm up well, and that's very important. You want to warm up for a good 10 to 20 minutes prior to doing a lactate threshold test. Because otherwise, what you're going to find is that your heart rate tends to rise throughout the test because you were insufficiently warmed up. But then you do a time trial. For the run, I like to use about 20 minutes. For the bike, I like to go closer to 30 minutes. And you want to exercise at the maximum sustainable pace that you can hold with good form. What that means is that if you are slowing down

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  throughout those 20 minutes on the run or 30 minutes on the bike, you're going too fast. If your cadence is decreasing on the bike, you want your cadence to be ideally between 80 to 90 for this test. But if it's dropping and your legs are getting rubbery and things are getting slow and you find your form is suffering and your breathing is becoming labored, that means you're going too hard. So it's maximal sustainable pace. Start of that 20 minutes to the end of that 20 minutes, you know, at that same steady pace. And sometimes you got to do this test a few times before you really nail that pace. But what you do is for the run, you take your average pace, for your average heart rate, rather, for that 20 minutes. And for the bike, you take the average heart rate for that 30 minutes. And that's going to be a pretty good approximation

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  of your lactate threshold heart rate.

• 1:09:15Rich Roll?

  All right, so to explain how, understanding what your lactate threshold is, what your heart rate is at that level, or what your watts are, how that applies to setting the zones.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. So now you're, now you're equipped to set your zones. So if you really wanted to look at this from a simple standpoint, what you do is you look at that heart rate, that average heart rate that you're able to sustain over that time trial, over that maximum sustainable pace effort. And that's going to be your zone four, and I like to add and subtract three beats to that. So let's say you ran for 20 minutes and the average heart rate for the test was 155. Then subtracting three, you get 152, adding three, you get 158. So your, your lactate threshold heart rate zone is going to be 152 to 158. As we mentioned a little bit earlier, if you subtract 20 beats from that 155 and you get that value

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  of 135, then that's going to be about your aerobic training money zone. So you can add and subtract, you know, around three beats to that and get 132 to 138. And that's going to be kind of your aerobic zone. And that, that area in between the 138 and the 152, that's kind of like your zone three, your, you know, that, that area where you got to be kind of careful, but that's going to be more of like your race pace zone. You go below that zone two range, which we just established would be like 132. If you subtracted three beats from 135, that's going to be more of your zone one recovery. So during like a really easy workout, you'd go from your, you know, your, your resting walking round heart rate up to 132, and you wouldn't go above that for, for recovery workout,

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  like an easy swim. And then for your zone five, sustained speed, we jump back up to where we found that lactate threshold range, and that was 158. And we would basically have your zone five be 158 up to about the point where you, are you were really feeling like you can't go much harder. And then anything higher than that would just be like, you know, power workout, zone six, whatever you want to call it. But that's how you would use something like a lactate threshold test to set up your heart rate zones really easily and, and kind of elegantly. And, and then you, whatever, you write them down on a, on a little, you know, laminated note that you, that you stick on your bike or, or that you, uh, you know, I don't, I don't think you have to get a, a quarterback, a football quarterback's, um, wrist sleeve to put it by.

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  Or you could set your garment to like beep every time you go above it or below.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  You set your, you set your heart rate up. Exactly. And um, yeah, that's how you do it.

• 1:11:43Rich Roll?

  So, and as a rule of thumb for people out there, if you do the, uh, if you do one of these DIY lactate tests, like let's say you're doing it, um, running as opposed to cycling and you get all these values that Ben just explained, then what does that mean on the bike? Well, the rule of thumb, and Ben, let me know if you subscribe to something different, is to subtract, subtract, excuse me, 10 beats. So if you did, if you're, you know, that 155 number was done on a run test, well, that would be 145 for cycling.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the issue, the only issue with that is a lot of times your, your running threshold, um, tends to be, or that, that range tends to be even higher because we're very, very efficient on a bike. Meaning that if you find out that your lactate threshold is 155 on the bike, um, and then your, your lactate threshold, um, you know, let's say we use your, your scenario and we say it's going to be 165 for the run. That's, that's pretty good for the average person, but for a really good runner who's really efficient, really economical, sometimes their lactate threshold is the same as or just a few beats above what they're at when they're cycling,

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  because they're a very, very efficient runner. And a runner who is overweight or, or who, who runs with poor form, or who maybe swings their arm too much and it moves around and huffs and puffs when they run, I've seen values as high as 20 beats or run above what their, what their bike lactate threshold is when we're doing lab testing.

• 1:13:11Rich Roll?

  So if you really want to geek out, if you want to super geek out and just biohack to the hill, you would do a full lactate test in both disciplines and really get the exact values?

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  You could do that, or I mean, a lot of labs that you go to, like a sports performance lab or sports medicine lab, they'll, you know, try and get you to pay for the full meal deal, the VO2 max test and the lactate threshold test. But, you know, kind of the dirty little secret is that if you do a VO2 max test, you're going to know your lactate threshold, because during that test, you, you get a point where there's a, there's a Sharp spike in what's called your ventilatory output. It's called your VT, your ventilatory threshold. And that's pretty much your lactate threshold. So you'll get that point where you start to consume a lot of oxygen or more specifically breathe off a lot of CO2 because that's how your body gets rid of all these hydrogen ions from the lactic acid. So you're blowing off all that CO2. That's your ventilatory threshold.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  And you don't even have to do blood lactate. If you do a VO2 max test, you can save yourself a few bones and you know, just do the VO2 max.

• 1:14:21Rich Roll?

  What is the VO2 max of value? I mean, is it really that? Like, why is? I've never had a VO2 max test. And my understanding is that your VO2 max is pretty much what it is. I mean, you can, through, you know, long, you know, many, many years of training, you can, you can sort of move the notch a little bit up on that or whatever. But I mean, what is that a predictor of really? I mean, it's interesting to know what it is. But in a sort of a real world context, like, how valuable is knowing what your VO2 max is?

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Well, here's where the real value of the VO2 max test comes in. Because you are correct. It's something that can't be increased a whole lot. So your maximum oxygen utilization, if you're an athlete, is not something you're going to be able to increase a bunch. If you're untrained, you know, and you'll see this all the time. Somebody who's untrained, they decide they're going to do an Ironman triathlon. And they come in and they do a VO2 max test and they find out their maximum oxygen utilization is, let's say, 35 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute. Well, after a couple of years of training, you can see numbers up in the 55s to 60s. I mean, you can see significant increases in VO2 max. Part of that is not a true increase in VO2 max. Part of it is learning how to actually push yourself

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  during the VO2 max test. That's where you're supposed to. And part of it is a significant increase in the stroke volume of your heart, the filling capacity of your lungs, and then also the ability of your muscles to grab oxygen as it rushes past in the bloodstream. So there is a training response that is significant with VO2 max when we're talking about untrained to trained. And when we're talking about trained to elite, it's a pretty small shift. But the value of the actual test is, there's a few values of going in and doing a test. One is that you're able to see how many calories your body is deriving from carbohydrates versus fats during every single heart rate and speed during that test because you're breathing

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  carbon dioxide out and breathing oxygen in. So you know your caloric utilization, or more specifically your macronutrient utilization and your caloric utilization during any given heart rate. So you could technically walk out of there with all these values and look at it and see, okay, I went for a bike ride, my average heart rate was 140 beats per minute. Well, I was burning, you know, 300 calories of that from carbohydrate and 400 calories of that from fat during that workout. And, and you can, you can set up your, your refueling or your fueling scenario accordingly. So that's one significant thing.

• 1:16:54Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. I didn't know that. That's, you know, that's very interesting.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another one is, is that ventilatory threshold value, meaning that you don't have to go out and test your blood lactate because that will tell you what your lactate threshold approximately is. And then the last thing that is, is important that you get from it is your lactate threshold as a percentage of your VO2 max heart rate. And that is something that I really like to, to see if, if someone is going in and testing is if someone's below about 90% in terms of the heart rate at which their lactate threshold occurs as a percentage of the heart rate at which their VO2 max occurs, then they need to be doing some more intervals. They need to be doing some more zone for

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  work to push up that lactate threshold to get it above 90% of VO2 max. You'll usually see someone start to perform very, very well and race very well. Once their lactate threshold exceeds about 90% of, of VO2 max heart rate. So that's another, another thing that you can look at and that you can't get unless you, you know, that you find out what your VO2 max heart rate actually is. So, so there are, there are some good reasons to go test.

• 1:18:02Rich Roll?

  Another thing that, that, that I found pretty, pretty informative in terms of lactate testing, when I, when I do do like the formal test and I do it on the bike or whatever and you, you get the graph, right? And you can see the increase in your, they have different lines for the increase in your heart rate and the increase in the watts, the, you know, period over time on the X axis and. And then how your lactate increases with, you know, with each four minute interval and the watts going up on the bike, et cetera. And what's important, not just are the increase in values and sort of identifying where those zones, you know, those where you're going from one zone to the next, but also, you know, how, how much those numbers jump within a certain period of time.

• 1:18:46Rich Roll?

  Like when you're trying to develop your aerobic capacity, you know, that it's going to curve upwards on the Y axis, but you don't want like a massively, you know, a super incline. You want kind of a gradual increase, you know, that as the intensity goes up, your heart rate goes up gradually, the lactate goes up gradually. And, you know, with the greater aerobic capacity you have, you're going to have a flatter curve as opposed to one that's going to jump. And then there's the, this sort of how much space between your aerobic threshold and your anaerobic threshold and trying to increase that space so that, you know, when there isn't very much room between your, your aerobic and your anaerobic, well, you might have a great aerobic engine, but you don't have very much top end strength or, or speed because

• 1:19:31Rich Roll?

  as soon as you go above your zone two and kind of get into your zone three, you're kind of starting to fall apart already.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should, you should be an exercise physiologist first.

• 1:19:40Rich Roll?

  I was pre-med too, but I abandoned it like you.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And full credit to, I think it was Bob Sebuhar who first kind of, kind of brought this to light or gave it a turn, but when it comes to metabolic efficiency, the other thing that you can see during that test, since you know how many calories you're burning, how many of them are derived from fat and how many of them are derived from carbohydrate, you can see that point of peak fat utilization kicked out from the, from the nutrient utilization of a, of a test like this. And so you can also get a gauge of, of your metabolic efficiency or, or your, you know, kind of, kind of the point at which your body reaches its peak fat utilization. And ideally that's going to occur if you're doing multiple tests at a higher power or higher speed for, you know, subsequent tests. So that's a cool number to track too.

• 1:20:28Rich Roll?

  Interesting. All right. Well, we're getting super geeked out on this. We should probably shift gears. I think we've beat this horse down as much as we could.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Take off our propeller hats.

• 1:20:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, but it's, it is funny. Like, I think, you know, it's interesting. You said you kind of started out as a geeky kid and into this, you know, I was very similar. And I think triathlon is really kind of a great, you know, sort of physical receptacle for that because you can drill down and get so detailed and get into the data and just get super geeked out on this stuff. And I love doing that. So.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also, you tend to be a social outcast and nobody wants to hang out with you. So all you can do is go out and ride, ride your bike anyways. So.

• 1:21:07Rich Roll?

  Well, there's guys like Tim Ferriss who are making it cool. So.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:12Rich Roll?

  Lean into that a little bit, I suppose. So, anyway, I want to talk about supplements a little bit. You know, we're in like an hour and 20 here. So I don't want to take up too much more of your time. But, you know, why don't you, well, first of all, let's do this. I want to, I want you to kind of, in your experience as a coach, what do you think the biggest mistakes are? We'll get into nutrition in a minute. But what do you think the biggest mistakes are that most amateur kind of runners and triathletes make? In their training, training specific?

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  We have talked about one of them.

• 1:21:48Rich Roll?

  We talked, we already talked about, you know, the one, probably the biggest one already.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that is a big one. Another one, and it falls into a similar vein really, is not periodizing the training. That means not, not sitting down and in the buildup to the race, having a clear idea of when your focus is going to shift from strengthening your body and building your engine to actually doing race specific efforts and backing off on that foundation building to actually, you know, prepping with, with higher intensity efforts that grab more of those motor neurons that I was talking about. And then finally, where the taper begins, you know, you gotta have that stair stepping style build up to the race rather than just doing what a lot of people are doing. And, you know, for typical Ironman, it's, well, I have the, I have my group that does the four hour ride on Saturdays.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  And then every single Sunday, I do my, my two to three hour run. And either on Saturday or Sunday, I go and I try and swim for as long as I possibly can in a horizontal position. And then I rinse, wash and repeat until I get like two weeks out from the race. And then I try and sit around as much as I can.

• 1:22:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's a better way to do things. So that's a. That's a biggie in addition to doing primarily the zone three, moderate intensity training. And then the other thing that's huge is not paying attention to your nutrient status and to your biomarkers and to what's going on with your internal biology. And a lot of athletes simply do not, they do not track this using methods like I was describing, like heart rate variability, or pulse oximetry, or they do not pay any attention to their lab values or what's going on with their blood, with their cholesterol, with

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  oxidized cholesterol, with inflammation, or any of those values. And usually a big, big part of that is because they're not paying attention to what they eat. They're typically eating a very acidic diet, you know, high amount of processed food, sugars and starches, and a typical endurance athlete fare. And it's very, very easy to do, even if you think you're eating health food. It's very, very easy to be still doing lots of canola oil and vegetable oils, lots of gluten-free quote-unquote "health" foods, where you're doing, you know, pulling foods off the shelf to have a really high glycemic index and still throw your blood sugar levels into a roller coaster ride. And, you know, doing lots of big boxes of sugar-filled cereals.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's quite a bit of food damage that can occur out there if you don't know what you're doing from that standpoint as well.

• 1:24:29Rich Roll?

  Absolutely. And I think just to inter-

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Those are three biggies.

• 1:24:32Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, to interject on that, I think it's almost even, it can be at times even worse with triathletes because there's a little bit of an entitlement, like I've been out training so many hours, like, you know, I deserve, you know, I can eat this because, you know, that's part of why I train, so I can come back and eat whatever I want. And, you know, they end up overdoing it or not paying enough attention to what they're eating. Interestingly, I had- Last week on the podcast, I had Garrett Weber Gale on, who's an Olympic swimmer and two-time Olympic gold medalist. And he's in the midst of a training camp out in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center out there. And I was asking him about nutrition and how do elite, you know, professional swimmers eat these days? And it's very much

• 1:25:17Rich Roll?

  of the same thing. It's sort of, you know, we're training all the time. So, you know, we don't have to worry about it. And, you know, part of that is they're young or whatever, you can get away with that. But you would think that there'd be more attention paid to, you know, at that level for those kind of people than is what is actually going on. And to hear him speak about what they're actually serving in the, in the commissary and the cafeteria at the Olympic Training Center, it's, it's really kind of embarrassing, actually. And so I think that there still is a lot of work and understanding that needs to go into, you know, the nutrition aspect of performance. And nobody questions that you need to train, you know, in order to get better. But not enough people really

• 1:25:58Rich Roll?

  understand that, you know, eating is, is just as important, you know, just as important in many, in many ways. And there's just a lot to be learned. And I'm glad you touched on the acidic diet thing. I mean, I think that that's a huge, a huge part of it. And I think that that contributes the, you know, inflammation, which leads to getting sick or overtrained and all these kinds of things. And, you know, most people eat processed foods. That's what's in the grocery store and it's hard to avoid. And, you know, it's hard to not eat an acidic diet with what's being offered to us.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you want to quantify this stuff in two simple ways you can do it. There are still slightly geeky, but simple. One is test your urine pH for a month and just basically track what, what your acidity or alkalinity of your body actually is. And how it responds to food intake. You know, that's literally how my wife used to get a bunch of migraines, got rid of her migraines, is she got her body alkaline by shifting to, you know, she, she just basically worked out almost all omega six fatty acids from crackers and roasted nuts and nut butters and things like that. And, you know, started doing a lot of alkalizing greens and things of that nature. Completely got rid of her migraines with that kind of dietary shift.

• 1:27:11Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  One thing that you can do is is pH measurements. The other thing that you can do is, you know, I mentioned heart rate variability and paying attention to how balanced your nervous system is, um, and how that affects your heart and it also affects your, your brain as well. But basically you can, you can use an app, like one app that I use is called the Sweet Beat app and it has a food sensitivity setting in it. And so I can measure my heart rate variability at the beginning or at the end of each day and also input my food into the app. And if you take your heart rate variability after a meal as well, you can see how your nervous system is responding to food intake and that's a very, very

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  easy way without going out and doing a blood test or a stool test to see what type of food sensitivities you might have and see how your body is responding to, you know, something that, that you thought may be healthy to it. And if you notice that your heart rate variability consistently drops after a meal, maybe that meal isn't good for you. So, you know, for you geeks out there, that's another cool tool that you can use if, if you're trying to figure out how to eat the right way.

• 1:28:12Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Yeah. And I'll put a link in the show notes to that, to, to that. So you guys can check it out. Um, supplements, let's talk about supplements a little bit. I mean, what do you think are, uh, you know, where people are missing the most and, and what should they be focused on? I mean, it seems everywhere you turn, there's this supplement, that supplement, you need this, you need that. And, you know, you can't trust the marketing messages on, on any of this stuff. And there aren't enough people, you know, who are providing kind of an objectivity here.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it, it all comes down to, to biomarker testing. And I'm at the point where I've, I've literally seen hundreds of, of athletes labs, you know, a lot of people who are, who are CrossFit or triathletes primarily, and gotten a chance to look at, at what biomarkers tend to across the board be affected, um, from heavy training. And the, the basics here, uh, that, that I see without throwing any, any weird fringe supplements out there, um, would be number one, um, HS CRP, levels of inflammation to be high. And

• 1:29:16Rich Roll?

  So explain what that is a little bit.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  HSCRP is basically a protein, C-reactive protein, that the body kicks out as a repair mechanism. And so when your body's in a high, high state of repair, recovery, fixing things, so to speak, you're gonna see high levels of HSCRP. It's a, it's a response to the cytokines in, from, from inflammation that are produced from anything, you know, such as a heart damage or heart injury, you know, so you'd see this super elevated in someone who was about to or had had a heart attack, to people who have, who've done a bunch of, you know, heavy weightlifting, or run an Ironman triathlon, or, or even just done too many hard workouts. One of the reasons that HSCRP can be high, however, even in people who haven't done

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  a hard exercise session, you know, when I talk to someone and I see their HSCRP is high, and then, you know, I found out they haven't been exercising for two or three days leading into that test, usually the body doesn't have enough anti-inflammatories on board to actually help shut down inflammation properly. Because HSCRP shouldn't be elevated in someone who's been resting and recovering for a few days. So, for, for that, I do like to see people taking some type of a, an anti-inflammatory blend. And that can be from real food sources. So you can do ginger, turmeric, cherry juice, um, you know, curcumin extracts, garlic, things of that nature. Blackberries. Yeah, exactly. Um, and you, you can also take supplements that, that have those type of things in it.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  There's a variety of, of kind of natural anti-inflammatory supplements that are out there. Um, but that's something that on hard workout days, like, there's, there's, um, you know, basically, one that I take that's a mix of glucosamine and chondroitin, and just like ground up, you know, turmeric and, and cherry and ginger and all that jazz. That's one that I think helps out quite a bit. Vitamin D tends to be low across the board.

• 1:31:12Rich Roll?

  It's interesting, even in endurance athletes that are outside all day training.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just because of the high turnover of cellular membranes and the high amount of what's called pregnenolone, which is a hormonal precursor, being shifted to cortisol production from a lot of training and a lot of stress. That tends to deplete and turn over vitamin D very quickly, even if you are spending lots of time in the sun. So vitamin D can be another supplement that you can take. I like to encourage people to include lots of healthy fats in their diet and also to do something like, for example, you can do like a cod liver oil or something like that. You can do vitamin D as well, but I'm not one of those guys who says like 10,000 international units of vitamin D a day or something like

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  that. I like to make sure that food sources of vitamin D are as high as possible. And then in most folks, 2,000 to 4,000 international units of vitamin D, right around in that range. That's kind of another supplement that across the board, that value tends to be low in a lot of folks. Magnesium is another. That's depleted in almost anyone who goes out and gets like, it's called a spectrocell analysis or a red blood cell analysis of magnesium values. I almost never see it within values. And it's because of a very high rate of mineral depletion in exercising and perspiring individuals, combined with

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  low rates of magnesium in commercial and fertilized soils. And where a lot of the vegetables and fruits are grown, they should be high in magnesium and they aren't. So I like to see folks using, preferably if they can afford it, a topical transdermal source of magnesium because it bypasses gastric absorption and just goes straight through the skin. But also, like a magnesium citrate or magnesium glycinate, 400 to 600 milligrams a day, around in there.

• 1:33:11Rich Roll?

  It's actually calming. Like I take magnesium citrate in like a powder and just put it in hot water at night with some lemon or whatever, and it helps me go to sleep at night.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, a ton. Yeah, I use it for my naps. I use about 400 milligrams of this thing called natural calm magnesium.

• 1:33:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Is that citrate or is that just natural magnesium?

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  It's citrate. The one you want to stay away from is oxide. Magnesium oxide is the one that's not well absorbed at all. And then I just I just rubbed the transdermal magnesium into my legs after workout to get a little bit extra. So magnesium, vitamin D, a good anti-inflammatory. If your diet is low in fruits and vegetables, I tend to see Apple B, which is a marker of potential for cholesterol inflammation, as well as very high levels of oxidized cholesterol being an issue in lots of folks. A lot of times it's simply due to grain, sugar, and vegetable oil intake. But to get a little a little step up in terms of of keeping cholesterol from getting oxidized like that,

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  either a diet that's very high in natural antioxidants, like, you know, pomegranate and kale and mustard greens and things of that nature, or else using a full spectrum antioxidant. So I'm not talking about like high dose synthetic vitamin C, which is basically just ascorbic acid, or high dose synthetic vitamin E. I'm talking about using like a like a whole food source of antioxidants that's derived from typically seeds, nuts, berries. You know, you'll find these things in powdered form a lot.

• 1:34:44Rich Roll?

  Resveratrol or grape skin extracts.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Grape skin extracts, yeah, there's there's a variety of different, um, different like powders that you can get, uh, that that you can use when you're having a difficult time just eating enough of the fruits and vegetables to get the amount of antioxidants that that you're needing when you're kind of unnaturally tearing your body down. So that would be one. And then the last thing that I'd look at, and this is another value that when you look at at labs tends to be really affected in folks, is the omega three index, meaning your your levels of of essential omega three fatty acids tend to be affected.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Um, and and you can you can influence that by using either like a good triglyceride based fish oil or like a fermented cod liver oil. And in vegans or vegetarians, I like to see preferably like an LGL source. That's going to be the best absorbed absorbed form, allow you to get the the EPA and DHA, you know, like flax. Not seeds, things of that nature. They tend to really not give you the omega-3 fatty acids in a highly absorbable or utilizable form that's that's converted into what you need.

• 1:35:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, flaxseed oil is problematic anyway for other reasons, but yeah, an algae-based one for the vegans out there is is is fine. And when it comes to the the cod liver oil or the the fish oil, you just have to be a little bit wary of toxicity issues and make sure that you're getting them from a clean source and you don't want to go low rent on that stuff because there's problems with that.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, with with any with anything fat-based, you get what you pay for and you're you're generally going to do more damage than good if if you're just like grabbing, you know, fish oil out of the bargain bin at super supplements or, you know, off the shelf at at, you know, Costco or something like that. So, but yeah, those those are the basics, basically an omega-3 source, a vitamin D source, magnesium source. And then if you're really working hard, an antioxidant and or an anti-inflammatory.

• 1:36:45Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, that's a lot of information, man. Good. So this has been awesome. I, you know, I'm conscious of the time. I could talk to you all night and geek out on this stuff forever, but you got a family and twins, so I'm going to let you go in a minute. But I wanted to kind of wrap it up and just say-

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  Although I I need to thank you because I think you actually allowed me to skip out on bath time tonight, so.

• 1:37:08Rich Roll?

  Get a little quiet time.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Duck to that curve ball.

• 1:37:11Rich Roll?

  Well, we can keep talking, man, if you want. We'll go as long as you want.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  No, I've I've still got wine to drink, Rich.

• 1:37:18Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, you can drink it while we're talking. That's fine. We'll just see. Well, then we'll see where it goes.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  It it it could spiral out of control, but if if folks want to listen in-

• 1:37:30Rich Roll?

  No, you're a very measured young man. You know, I'd like to see you get a little bit out of control and where where that might go.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  You have not been at triathlon after-parties with me, apparently.

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  All right. No, I guess I haven't. All right. Well, I'll have to I'll have to put that on the bucket list.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:37:46Rich Roll?

  Um, so, you know, let's talk a little bit about, well, let me let, is there? Boy, you're really articulate right now, Rich, aren't you? Is there anything else that you can, that comes to mind that would be helpful for kind of the amateur? And most of the people that are listening to this are, you know, they're marathon runners, they're triathletes, or they're looking to get faster. But they're people with families, you know, men and women both, kids, time crunched. Are there any other kind of tips that you could leave people with to kind of, that they could take with them and incorporate them either into their dietary regime or their training regime? That would be helpful and help them kind of be more efficient with the limited amount of time that they have to, you know, prepare for a race?

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the biggest thing is to recover as fast as you possibly can from your workouts, so that you can train as consistently as possible and so that you're never sidelined. And there are a few different things that you can do in addition to what we already talked about from a nutritional or supplement standpoint to do that. Some of the things that I use, number one, electro-stimulation. If you can get your hands on what's called an EMS or an electro-stimulation unit, it's something that you can use, you know, just two or three times a week while you're sitting around, watching TV. You hook the electrodes up to muscles that you worked pretty hard and you just basically run a light current through them.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  And it really helps to improve blood flow. You don't have to get something fancy. Usually the fancy, you know, thousand-dollar units were designed to give your muscles a workout, too, which is fine if you want to work out that way, you know, sitting on the couch, eating bonbons and doing squats with your electrodes. But for recovery, I like an EMS unit.

• 1:39:36Rich Roll?

  Is there a particular one, like, that I could put a link to for people and make it easy for them if they wanted to pick something up like that?

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  You know, you know what? The Compex is good. You just don't have to buy the high-end version necessarily. Don't think that you gotta get the, I think it's like thirteen hundred or something like that for that. And I mean, you can't, if you, again, if you like to own nice things, it's a fun toy to play with, but you don't have to go all out with electro-stimulation. Just get something that's going to give you a little bit of a, a little bit of a blood flow. When you ice muscles... For recovery, it's okay, but what you tend to get is a lot of backflow when you ice, meaning that you can actually get backflow of some of that lymph fluid as you're icing. And that can actually inhibit recovery and cause swelling in an area when you ice,

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  after you've finished icing. So it's best when you can to combine ice with compression. And there are a couple of ways you can do it. There are tights that you can get, like compression tights, that you can put ice sleeves into, so that the muscle is being both iced and compressed at the same time. The ones I use are called 110%. You can also, if you like to geek out and you want to go buy something, you can get what's called a game-ready device. A lot of physical therapists have these, and these are literally sleeves that will not only compress a muscle, but they'll do a pumping action, you know, like these recovery boots that you see at triathlon expos sometimes where they pump and release.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  But this one, not just that, but when it pumps and releases, it's pumping icy cold water through the boot. And then as it releases, that icy cold water flows back out. So those

• 1:41:20Rich Roll?

  are- So it's not like, so what about wearing compression gear like in the, in an ice bath? Like you would wear tights while you're in an ice bath, or is it, would it be okay to just take your ice bath and then put the, put the tights on afterwards, or that's not so good?

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  So think of it in levels of geek dome, Rich. You could-

• 1:41:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're talking about the final .005% here, aren't we?

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the age groupers that I coach, I teach them these techniques. And, you know, it sounds like it's something for lead athletes, but when you can just go have a smile on your face and be training, you're fair how to work this stuff in your day, right? Like, a lot of times, I'm doing electrical muscle stimulation while I'm recording a podcast. Or I'm doing the ice, like I mentioned, the ice with the compression tights, I can wear those while I'm walking around the house doing stuff. I can wear those while I'm cleaning the garage, versus sitting in an ice bath, wearing compression tights. You're sitting in an ice bath, wearing compression tights, and there goes 20 minutes of your day.

• 1:42:16Rich Roll?

  Well, you could do a podcast from the bathtub.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  You could.

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  Sorry.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Could wind up in the hospital, but you could do it. Just make sure it's it's audio only.

• 1:42:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Um, so, so that's another thing you can do is combine the ice with the compression and, um, you know, the few different ways that you can do that. Uh, you can get a cold, low level laser units and these are very, very effective at helping to shut down tendonitis, shut down inflammation in an area. You can buy handheld units if you were to do a search for, for infrared, like on Amazon. Handheld units aren't quite as powerful as what they can, they can give you in like a physical therapist or an alternative medical practitioner clinic, but they still are efficacious. I have one and when I've, when I've tweaked something, for example, if I've tweaked a knee during a bike ride or a snowboard session or something like that, I can use that infrared on it for

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  about 10 to 15 minutes, you know, at night and, um, you know, basically feel, feel market improvement the next day.

• 1:43:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm a full believer in, in the laser therapy. I've had great success with it. And what it does also is it, it really, it, it sort of breaks up the, the, you know, the sort of the tissue that starts to accumulate around, um, you know, muscles that are, uh, how, how do I articulate this? Like I've had calf problems, right? With running and, and so I go in and I do laser therapy and, and you can, you can actually break up those where the, the tissue starts to accumulate and it's causing a problem like a muscle knot or what have you. Um, it really helps loosen that up and, and it, it works. It sounds crazy. You point this little red light, you know, at your muscles, but it, it really does work.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it works very well. And then from a recovery standpoint, one other thing that's simple, but it, it's highly effective is I foam roll two or three times a week and I don't just use the, the cheapo foam roller at the gym. I have a really hard roller that has these deep ridges sticking out of it. It looks like a medieval torture device, but it works. It's called a rumble roller and that's something that I'll do foam rolling with a few times. And again, I'm always multitasking. Usually I'll do that while I'm, you know, uh, watch a TV show or listen to a podcast or something like that. So I'm trying to get something at least done while I'm, while I'm doing my foam rolling. So in terms of recovery, those are some ways that you can really step up recovery.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  A couple of the last things that I do that really I've found to affect me hormonally when I'm testing my hormones and also I've found to really affect the way that I feel throughout the day in terms of my focus and my productivity and also the quality of my workouts. One would be utilizing intermittent fasting on a consistent basis. Meaning that I try and insert 12 to 16 hour periods during each 24 hour daily cycle that I'm not eating food. Meaning that I might go to bed at eight and or not go to bed at eight. Not that much of a social outcast. Go to bed at 10, but you know, eat dinner at eight and you know, wake up at 6 a.m. and not eat again until nine or 10 a.m.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  And then, you know, stop eating again at 8 p.m. There is what's called a hormetic response to fasting where your body upregulates cellular repair and recovery. And not only that, it also teaches your body how to utilize fatty acids more efficiently as a fuel, which is a great tool for endurance athletes to have in their toolbox. So intermittent fasting.

• 1:45:49Rich Roll?

  It's like that calorie deprivation workout that you do once in a while.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you can even on your full recovery days, you can work in almost a full fast day where you're just using green supplements, maybe a little bit of amino acids so that your body isn't going into a full, you know, catabolic muscle tear down state. And then just like some green tea and some coffee thrown in here and there. That'll help you get through a day of full on fasting easily and that can just be a good way to hit the reboot button on your body. Your body does shut down inflammation pretty well when it's in that fasted state. So that is one thing is fasting. The other thing that I use is cold, cold thermogenesis. So what I mean by that is I never, ever, ever take a hot shower.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Except I take that back. When I got back from snowboarding this evening, I took a hot shower. But it's very, very rare.

• 1:46:42Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's hardcore.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  Icy cold shower for three to five minutes when I get up and again at the end of the day. Um, there's some evidence that there may be a testosterone response to that. But I also find that it seems to help me recover a little bit faster and also shut down my body's core temperature towards the end of the day. So I get a bigger release of melatonin and I sleep a little bit better. So I'll do that and then I also wear a vest that has ice packs in it. When I'm working in the morning, when I've woken up in that fasted state and I haven't eaten anything. To upregulate the amount of brown adipose tissue activity and again, kind of help me stay lean without exercising as much as I would normally need to, to stay lean.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  And also do, uh, to get that fat burning response, um, from, from the cold. So, uh, those, those are a couple of things I use quite a bit is fasting and cold thermogenesis. So those are some other little things for listeners to try if they'd like.

• 1:47:39Rich Roll?

  Right, cool. Well, that is more than, uh, more, more information than I was expecting to get from you. I mean, that's an amazing, you know, amazing amount of stuff that, you know, are easy things that you can incorporate into your day. So, thank you.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:55Rich Roll?

  Again, like I'm, I'm wearing that. Each one is a little thing, right?

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I'm wearing the vest while I'm working on my computer. It's not, it's not like any of these things, I'm, I'm taking up time in my day, because that's super important. At the end of the day, you could add up all this stuff and be spending three or four hours of non-productive time or time away from family, just, you know, being selfish with recovery. But if you can, if you can fi- find out ways to just work this into the day, it just becomes a lifestyle habit and it's super easy. And, you know, you feel like a million bucks during the next day's workout. And, you know, knock on wood, I'd, I'd rarely get injured. And I, I think a big, big part of it is because of these little things that I do, so.

• 1:48:32Rich Roll?

  And, you know, you don't get overtrained, you don't walk around like a zombie feeling tired all the time, all that kind of stuff, which, you know, all relates to quality of life. So it's not, you know, if, if you go, you know, eight, 10 in the Ironman, but you gotta walk around like the walking dead, you know, for nine months, like, and you have a family and you're married, you have kids, I mean, is this, you know, is this really what you want to be doing?

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that's a, that's a whole other can of worms. Maybe we can talk about some, sometime, but the issue of, of endurance and the trade off between health and performance when you get to a certain level. And there are, you know, some of the things I just outlined help you to achieve that balance a little bit, a little bit better. But that is one of the reasons that I, I'm not full on, you know, going after the, the pro triathlon type of scenario is because there's, there's that health performance trade off when it comes to libido and how long your skin's gonna last and, you know, how soft your hair is and all that good stuff.

• 1:49:31Rich Roll?

  Well, and also just the balance you want in your, in your life and the quality of life, you know, the quality of your life and what's important to you and what your priorities are.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  No, I think hair is more important.

• 1:49:42Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, that's a good place to stop. But before we do that, I want to hear about your upcoming conference, the superhuman, uh, the superhuman conference. We're becoming, it's called become superhuman, right? Live event up in Spokane. So tell us what that's all about.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's not a conference as much as it is really an, an event. Um, what I wanted to do was create something really, really special for folks where they could show up here in my backyard for a couple of days and just get hands on instruction about how to do things like, you know, fix their gut, optimize their hormones, enhance their performance, recover a lot faster, um, even do things like, you know, think better and, and improve IQ and, and mental performance. And so I hunted down the experts in each of these areas and, um, paying them all and bringing them all out here to Spokane to be available to folks for a couple

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  of days to teach sessions, um, to do, you know, some, some after hour party type of scenarios where... And people can come up and rub shoulders with and talk to a lot of these folks. And also a chance for somebody who really wants to get inspired to take things to the next level, whether they want to, you know, change their body, transform their body, or whether they want to do an Ironman triathlon faster, or, you know, whether they just want to learn how to feel the way that, you know, the human body is capable of feeling, to be able to learn how to do so, and just a really intensive 48-hour time span, and come away knowing everything that they need to know, kind of being equipped and inspired with what they need to accomplish that for themselves. So, um, yeah, it's called Become Superhuman.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  It's, I'm kind of nervous because it's the first, you know, aside from camps and clinics and all this stuff, the first big live event that I've put on. And, um, I'm trying to make it as special for people as possible, you know, way different than just listening to a podcast or reading a blog post. Um, I really want to make it an event where people come away with all these connections and relationships that allow them or enable them to get what they want out of life. So, um, yeah, it's March 8th and 9th, uh, coming up, you know, here pretty soon. There's still seats available, and, um, there's a, there's a whole page for it up over at superhumancoach.com. Superhumancoach.com is where I train a lot of other personal trainers to get better results

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  for their clients, to be able to, to basically help them, you know, lose fat faster, perform better. And, you know, all the people in the Superhuman Coach Network that I work with, they're coming out to the conference as well, so there'll be a lot of coaches in the room, too. And, um, yeah, that's the website, though, superhumancoach.com, where people can get in.

• 1:52:26Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Well, everybody check that out. It's an impressive lineup of speakers, and it seems like a super cool event. So if you're gonna be, if you live in Spokane, you live nearby, or you are gonna be there, or you're interested in going there, I highly recommend you checking it out. So, superhumancoach.com. And, you know, usually things like this cost like thousands of dollars, man. You're offering it pretty cheap. It's like 300 bucks, right?

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's $297. Um, I'm taking a significant personal financial hit on this one.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  But you know, my, my goal in life is, is to equip as many people as possible with what they need to kind of defy the status quo of what we accept as, you know, health and performance parameters and instead be able to tap into the true potential of their bodies. And, um, you know, and it's, it's just, it was one of the things I really wanted to do was put on a special, special event for people. So lots of people coming from around the country, um, a few international folks coming in and it's definitely not just for people in Spokane. I've, I've worked with the hotel to get us some discounted room blocks for people flying in and, um, yeah. So, so if you've got that weekend free from March 8th and 9th, uh, it's, it's gonna be pretty cool.

• 1:53:42Rich Roll?

  All right, cool. So a, as you heard in the intro to, uh, to this podcast, Ben's been kind enough to, uh, offer a discount code to the listeners of this podcast. So if you, if you want to go to the event, um, space is limited. The seats are going fast. So you gotta jump on it, but go to superhumancoach.com. If you use the promo code richroll, you'll get 50 bucks off the already super low price. Uh, what does that make it like 247 bucks? So pretty good deal. So go check that out. And, uh, Ben, there's a couple of ways for people to, uh, learn more about what you're doing. You have your Ben Greenfield Fitness dot com website and on Twitter, you're at Ben Greenfield, but you also have, are you

• 1:54:25Rich Roll?

  Get Fit Guy too? You got two Twitter guys up there?

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a few podcasts up there.

• 1:54:31Rich Roll?

  All right. So because you have multiple podcasts and multiple things that you're doing, right?

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also run Endurance Planet, which is another podcast if they want to.

• 1:54:41Rich Roll?

  You should be.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  And, and the Rockstar Triathlete Academy podcast. If you want to learn the sport of triathlon, yeah, there's, there's a few out there for you.

• 1:54:49Rich Roll?

  All right. So podcasts, you've got Ben Greenfield Fitness. That's one podcast. Endurance Planet and, uh, Rockstar Triathlon Academy.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  And Get Fit Guy.

• 1:55:00Rich Roll?

  And Get Fit Guy. Okay. Dude, how do you have time to do anything else? You write four podcasts? You're like a network.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  I've got a little, little recumbent bicycle and I just ride my bicycle while I'm podcasting. Did you hear the pedal squeaking while you were rolling along?

• 1:55:15Rich Roll?

  No, I didn't.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  I'm just kidding. I don't have one.

• 1:55:18Rich Roll?

  Well, listen, based on what, everything you just told me, I would not put it past you. You'd be doing anything right now, I have no idea.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  I am not, I'm not wearing a, an ice vest or walking a treadmill or riding a bicycle or any of the above.

• 1:55:30Rich Roll?

  Like, you have electrodes all over you right now?

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  About, about the, the extent of my biohacking was I downed a glass of homemade kombucha while we were talking.

• 1:55:39Rich Roll?

  Alright, well, good. I can live with that. And you're also, you, you're on Facebook too. Ben Greenfield Fitness, is that the best place? I mean, where, where do you want people to be able to find out more about it? You tell, you tell us.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com. You know, that's, that's where all the free stuff is, so.

• 1:55:56Rich Roll?

  Cool. Alright, man, well, you are a font of information and I appreciate your time. You're doing great work and, uh, you know, educating the masses, man. I love it. I always love talking to you and, um, this has been great, man. Thanks so much for, for doing this.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  Um, thanks for what you do, Rich. And I love your message and, and your books and everything you produce, so keep up the good work.

• 1:56:20Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. I, I look forward to crossing paths sometime soon. I, I don't know where that'll be, but I'm sure it'll happen sooner rather than later.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope so.

• 1:56:28Rich Roll?

  Alright, man. Take it easy, Ben. Thank you.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Alright, later, Rich.

• 1:56:31Rich Roll?

  Alright, peace.

• 1:56:36Rich Roll?

  Hello?

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 1:56:37Rich Roll?

  Still there? Yeah, I'll just, I'll cut it off there, but I just wanted to thank you.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:56:41Rich Roll?

  After the thing, that was cool.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Rich Roll?

  So if you think of anything, you know, in the next, I'm, I'm gonna get this up probably late tonight, so if you, anything in the next couple of hours you wanna email me about or, or a link or anything like that you want me to include, just shoot me an email.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, I think the only things that people might need, um, that I think may not have been clear was the, uh, that heart rate variability thing that I was using because I couldn't remember the name of it. I'll have to go check. And, um, yeah, I'll shoot you an email with that. So.

• 1:57:14Rich Roll?

  Okay. Cool. Yeah. And if you have like, uh, links to particular products of some of the stuff you mentioned that you have affiliates code links with or whatever, I'm happy to just, you know, put that in the show notes.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Cool. I'll ping, I'll ping something over.

• 1:57:29Rich Roll?

  All right. Cool, man.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:57:31Rich Roll?

  All right, buddy. Thank you.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  Go get my wine.

• 1:57:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, go back to your family. Thanks, Ben. Take it easy.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  All right. All right. Later, Rich. Bye.

• 1:57:38Rich Roll?

  All right. That's it for the podcast today. Hope you enjoyed Ben as much as I enjoyed speaking to him. Got lots of great guests lined up over the next two weeks. Uh, I had hoped to get Brendan Brazier on the show, uh, this week, this weekend, but, uh, he was super busy trying to get out of town. The guy travels all the time. So we had to reschedule that. He's going to come back, uh, at the beginning of February for sure, but not to worry. Got lots of great people that are going to be coming on. I'm really excited about what's to come with the podcast. So thanks again for stopping by and listening. Uh, you want to support the show, click the Amazon banner at richroll.com and the pod, and the podcast

• 1:58:19Rich Roll?

  or blog page, uh, click through, through there and it'll throw a few nickels in our bucket to help keep this thing going and it won't cost you anything else. So if you're going to buy something on Amazon anyway, just consider doing that first. It would really help us out a lot. Of course, Jai Lifestyle, uh, for, uh, our supplement products and nutritional products. Check that out. You can find me on Facebook. Um, uh, it's Rich Roll Fans. It's a fan page. That's the best way to find me on Facebook. On Twitter, I'm at Rich Roll. Those of you who have been enjoying Julie as my co-host on the podcast, she's going

• 1:58:57Rich Roll?

  to be back soon. Uh, and you can find her on Twitter at, at Jai C, J-A-I-S-E-E-D. And she's on Facebook as Julie. And Instagram as at Srimati, S R I M A T I. Srimati is her, the name that she goes under for her music. You can check out her music at Srimatimusic.com. What else? I think that's it. Let's wrap it up. It's been going on too long anyway. So thanks a lot again. Until next time. Peace. Plants.

• 2:01:17Rich Roll?

  You are a high-precision speech recognition engine. Your only task is to listen to audio and transcribe it into text with extremely high accuracy, word for word.