Ben Greenfield shares his off-grid biohacking—solar power, well filtration, and HRV tracking via Aura rings—to avoid glyphosate and EMFs, while his New Year, New Dick experiment (sildenafil, Gaines Wave, PRP, stem cells) yielded months-long gains in erection quality and size despite risks like MRSA. He contrasts static stretching (linked to Super Bowl injuries) with dynamic sauna yoga, using binaural beats (528Hz), Palo Santo, and even cannabis for hormetic stress, paired with cold plunges to activate the vagus nerve and reduce inflammation. A 12-month UConn study with Jeff Volek proved high-fat diets burn fat efficiently without muscle loss, but Greenfield adjusts carbs for thyroid/testosterone balance, favoring plant-rich ketosis over engineered performance shortcuts. His unconventional hunting biohacks—pelvic floor massage, Human Garage curcumin treatments, and cricket-based family sausage—highlight a DIY approach blending longevity, athleticism, and sustainability, challenging conventional health and fitness paradigms. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I actually just read, there's a really good new book that came out.
It's called The Non-Tinfoil Hat Guide to EMF. I think it's the full title of the book.
But it goes into this idea of what are called voltage-gated calcium channels on your cell membrane, and all those actually get affected by Wi-Fi.
And apparently you see a change in In the electrochemical balance across the actual membrane in response to things like Wi-Fi, apparently Bluetooth affects red blood cells, and I haven't seen a lot of like actual, you know, in vivo research on that, but I know that I feel better when I don't have like the Wi-Fi router going or, you know, I turn off all my...
Everything at night.
There's kill switches in all the bedrooms.
So you walk into the house and it's just super clean.
Everything's HEPA air filters, negative ion generators, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth.
We structure all the water that comes in from the well, so it's the same.
I mean, the idea behind it, there's this cat up at University of Washington named Dr. Gerald Pollack, and he has done this research that shows, like, in plants or vessels, like blood vessels, for example, there's an exclusion zone of water.
I mean, there's like a positive charge on the inside and a negative charge on the outside.
And that might be backwards.
It might be positive on the outside, negative on the inside.
But either way, it causes fluid to move through vessels in a way that allows it to move more easily, like the water is actually charged.
So apparently when you drink structured water, it hydrates the cell a little bit better.
Well, I interviewed that guy, Gerald Pollack, and he has compared...
Basically, what he's compared is, like, how it moves in glass tubes and how if you structure it and you watch it, like, the water moves up through the glass tube way, way better.
And then I interviewed this guy, Thomas Cowan, and he talks about how the heart is not really a pump or doesn't act as much like a pump as we're led to believe.
And so if you drink structured water, apparently the blood moves better through the vessels.
I haven't seen a ton of research on it, but I structure my water just because it's cheap.
It's like this tiny little plastic piece that you put on your water filter.
So the water passes through a series of glass beads.
It vortexes it.
So it comes out of my well, and I tested my water, and I've got a bacteria-based iron.
High levels of manganese like I thought well water was just all like pristine clear like you know like if you drink out of a spring on top of a mountain, but Apparently there's there's crap in the well water So I filter it and then after it all filters it passes through the structured water filter I would imagine that you would get some stuff in the water because if somewhere along the line there's like a dead animal or beaver fever Yeah, there's dead animals all over my house, just piled everywhere.
Carcasses.
So I'm very careful.
Outside the woods.
Well, then the other thing is, like, what I get concerned about is, you know, you see, like, glyphosate and herbicides and pesticides.
They get sprayed all over the crops, and I live in farmland territory, right?
So I'm on this north-facing slope, and there's all, like, these farms above me.
So I figure if that's dropping down through the ground into that water, I might be getting some of it.
Like people who don't have a well and who just live off the municipal water supplies, you use a reverse osmosis water filter because it's a really, really fine filtration.
But it takes everything out.
Like it takes the bad stuff and the good stuff out.
So you want to add minerals back in after you filter the water.
So you get a reverse – and you could buy these on like Amazon.
So like a reverse osmosis filter with what's called remineralization.
Or you can just use reverse osmosis and then use like trace liquid minerals or sea salt or anything else that's going to be used.
And unfortunately, there's been a terrible myth that's been perpetrated a long time ago that salt gives you high blood pressure and it kills you.
That's a real tragedy because that's one of those ones that it was spread in probably, what was it, the 60s or the 70s when they started telling people that salt causes high blood pressure?
But it depends, too, because I used to do racing for Team Timex.
I used to do these Ironman triathlons, and they'd bring people in to test us.
And they would do sweat-sodium analyses, where you actually get a patch put on your skin, and it measures the amount of sodium released over X surface area of skin.
And then there's an algorithm that determines how much total sweat you lose, say, per hour during exercise.
And some people lose a copious amount of sodium in their sweat, and some lose barely any at all.
So you have like a sodium conservation mechanism that differs from person to person.
So there might be some people who store salt really well who might actually get higher blood pressure if they consume a lot of salt.
And I've heard, I don't know if this is true, But I heard that if you come from an area, like if your ancestry is from an area where they did a lot of that fermenting, pickling, curing, salting, that you have more robust sodium loss mechanisms.
Which would make sense for me.
Like on Northern European heritage, they did a lot of pickling, salting, curing.
So I would lose more salt than somebody who might have come from, let's say, like a Sub-Saharan African or Southeast Asian or somewhere where they might not have been using so much salt.
And the weird thing is that you can have no musculoskeletal soreness.
Because a lot of time that subsides, you know, delayed onset muscle soreness, you see that disappear after like 48 hours.
And if you've crushed yourself, like we can talk about this later if you want, but I've been doing single set to failure.
Single set to failure exercises where it's just like a 15 minute long workout, but it's just full on isometrics as hard as you can go for 60 seconds to two minutes.
Isometric.
So you're pushing against, it's like this force plate machine that you push against and you just generate as much force as you can and it ties to your iPhone and it alerts you when you've dropped off 60% of what you're originally producing at the beginning of the set.
And then that's it.
Set's done, game over.
So you might do deadlift, squat, press, overhead press, pull down.
And that's the whole workout.
And then you're just recovering in between each of those sets.
So for example, you'll have like a bar that you're holding onto, and the bar is attached to the force plate via two stands, like two pillars on either side of the bar.
And you pull the bar, and then the force plate detects how much force you're pulling.
So if I'm bench pressing, it's like my elbows are slightly bent as though I'm just near the top.
Or squatting, it's like the knees are bent at about 30, 40 degrees.
So you get into that position, then you generate as much force as possible for 60 seconds.
When I first did it, I was at 30 seconds.
Now I can go a little bit over a minute where I can continue to generate As much force as possible before it drops off to just 60% of what I was originally producing.
It's a cool, efficient way to train, but you don't get that sore afterwards, right?
So musculoskeletal soreness is not a good indicator of recovery in many cases.
And that's where this HRV thing comes in, is your nervous system, right?
Your central nervous system, your neuromuscular system can be really beat up after a workout, even if the soreness has subsided.
So that's where you use something like HRV and you can say, okay, well, I'm not sore, but my HRV is still low.
Because if it was on my wrist or on my finger or wherever.
So this has a built-in computer, and you can put it in airplane mode.
And it'll still collect all the HRV data and everything else.
Then when you want to take it out of airplane mode and sync it to your phone and upload all your sleep data or your HRV data or anything else, you can do it.
So that's why I wear this ring instead of like a Fitbit or a Jawbone or Jamie's stupid Apple Watch.
But I think there was a class action lawsuit there because I think they tested the water and there was whatever the fuck the stuff that they used for fertilizer or pesticides.
Yeah, like how to make a small dick bigger, right?
And you put Marky Mark on the cover.
And now he can beat me with his four-foot-tall fisticuffs.
Anyways, though, so they had me go around doing everything that a guy could do to enhance sexual performance or increase the size of your dick or increase blood flow or increase orgasm quality.
They just wanted to find out what everything from, like, freaking gas station dick pills to—which, by the way, those things do not have in them what they say they have in them.
Yeah, we have a friend of ours who predicted accurately that John Jones was taking those things when he pissed hot because he was like, those things have everything in them.
You go down there, and I walk in, and the first thing they do is they hand me this syringe full of numbing cream, and I'm supposed to just put it everywhere, and so I smeared it.
My balls, I just went everywhere, because I didn't really know what they were going to do, and I wanted all shields activated going into this thing.
So I walk into the room and my dick's all numb.
They have me lay down and so my legs are splayed.
I'm on this exam room table and this gal comes in and she's got like this giant wand attached to a machine.
And they do this for women too, by the way.
They put like a condom on the end of it.
And she just basically goes to town for like 20 minutes like a jackhammer.
It was like brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr And then they follow it up,
and you get a nerve block first.
I thought, I don't know why, I thought they put the needle just like right in the pee hole, which to me made sense, but it doesn't really.
I mean, you want it in the actual tissue.
So they actually go like up where the dick attaches, like the tissue at the top.
They do two nerve blocks on either side and then the PRP. And later on, like a couple months later, they had me do stem cells.
They actually extracted fat from my back and we did a stem cell injection.
But this acoustic sound wave therapy with the PRP, like it wears off and you literally just like get boners all the time.
Fort Lauderdale, all the people hunched over the steering wheel, but all the guys have great dicks.
They can't drive.
They have their blinker on for like two miles before they turn, but their dicks are primed.
So the stem cell thing was at the U.S. Stem Cell Clinic in Florida, and I went in there, and they extract all the fat.
For me, they took the fat out of my back.
And what they do is they have—it's called an enzymatic process where they use something that breaks down the collagen in the fat, and then they have the stem cells that get separated from the fat.
And apparently it's very, very high in these angiogenic, like vascular or vessel-building compounds.
And so then you get that re-injected.
It's high in the— Mesenchymal, the MSC, the MSC cells, which are supposedly the very good ones to inject in.
So I injected those, or I had a doctor in Spokane.
So they shipped them to Spokane on ice, and they show up at my house at like 7 a.m., right?
Because you've got to get them delivered same day.
And then I had my appointment at the doctor at 9 a.m., and I went to the doctor, and it was like deja vu from Florida, right?
I went to this doctor in Spokane, and he injected these stem cells from my fat after they'd grown for like several...
In this case, I think they were down there for like eight weeks.
But, I mean, they can do same-day injections, but for me, I didn't have enough fat.
Because for me, it was right in the middle of...
I race professionally in obstacle course racing, so I'm just like lean as hell as I go in there.
So they could barely get enough fat, so they had to grow them for a longer period of time.
A lot of times they can inject same day.
So I went into Spokane at this clinic in Spokane, Le Nou Integrative Clinic.
It's like this osteopathic medical clinic with all these nice receptionists when you walk in the door and this doctor who, he's done stem cell injections before, but he never actually injected them into someone's dick.
I've had MRSA, and I would not wish MRSA on your dick.
How'd you get MRSA? A triathlon.
I got it.
This was at the Wildflower Triathlon.
Like, coming back, my flight got delayed, and I was covered in all these, because it's like an off-road triathlon, and I had all these scrapes and wounds.
And I think my layover was in Vegas.
I don't remember where but I had to check in the hotel if I got delayed and I slept in this hotel room that I swear like there must have been something on the bed because within a few days like it was all you know it gets all nasty and cakey and then it was eating a hole.
I wrote a whole blog post about this on my website and you can see pull up the hole in the back of my leg it's nasty.
Yeah, so I think the stem cells kind of like stick with you.
Well, last week I got them, I told you I'm training for the RKC kettlebell cert and I was doing the 100 reps in five minutes snatch test with the one and a half food and I felt something just go.
I was at 84 reps and I felt something go in my back and I got stem cells injected all up and down my QL, my multifidus, my rectospinae into my psoas.
But then they also sent them to my house, and I did that same fat cell, the stuff that's rich in the mesenchymal stem cells, into the bloodstream.
So I did a push IV into the bloodstream.
That's the one that you would have to go out of the country.
It's technically not legal for someone to inject you with your own stem cells into your bloodstream, but if you get your stem cells extracted and they're stored and they send them to you, you can technically inject them if you do it yourself or you have a friend who's a nurse or whatever.
And it's literally just like a push IV. It's like 30 seconds.
We caught it on video for men's health films.
So they'll publish a video at some point, but I was super nervous because it's like a few thousand dollars worth of stem cells that You know, I'm trying to hit the vein and make sure that they go in the right way and then inject.
Yeah, I've had some friends that have got staff in their leg where they have a small golf ball-sized hole in their leg, and they literally had a packet full of that kind of gauze covered in medicine.
And once you get it, it stays with you, like it stays in your bloodstream.
I still have an essential oil diffuser on my desk, and I put thieves in it every day, and I just diffuse essential oils while I'm working into the air.
Yeah, it's like a nebulizing essential oil diffuser, just to play it safe.
I just want to be breathing that in during the day, just in case.
Fuck.
And that's the other thing, is I stand in front of this light, this infrared light, What's this?
They've done these studies on testicular and sperm production, and they've found that there's a wavelength that's like 600 to 800 nanometers wavelength of light.
That if you expose the testicles to that for 5 to 20 minutes a day, it's based on this concept of photobiomodulation.
So I originally got into this whole photobiomodulation thing when this company, because I blog and people just send me these weird things to my doorstep to try.
And they sent me this like nasal probe that you put up your nose and it's got like a helmet on it.
So this photobiomodulation, I'm putting this thing, you know, the probe in my ear, and you're not even supposed to use it too much because it produces so much ATP that if you amp up cellular activity and neural tissue too much, you produce too many reactive oxygen species.
Like, that's a byproduct of cellular metabolism.
It's just like if you eat too much, you produce a lot of byproduct of making energy, and that's one of the reasons why fasting is good for you.
It cleans up the system and you don't make as many free radicals.
The same reason ketosis is good for you.
You're not burning as much glucose.
You don't produce as many free radicals.
Same concept with this.
You don't want to use it all the time because you get too much activity.
You produce too many free radicals or too many reactive oxygen species.
This was a couple years, and it was like a cup of coffee for my brain.
Like, every time I'd wake up, I'd put this thing on while I'm working at my desk.
So then, this company that makes these lights that are very similar activate cytochrome C oxidase, It activates release of nitric oxide, but if you do it on your testicles, specifically the cell that it works on is the latig cells in the testes, which are responsible for producing testosterone.
So you're basically stimulating the latig cells in the testes the same way that you'd stimulate neural tissue using this one for your head.
So I'd had success with the thing for my head, so I tried this one for the balls in the dick, and what I did was I would just jack my pants down.
For 5 to 20 minutes a day while I'm diffusing my essential oils and I got the thing on my head.
And it works.
Like you actually get more blood flow.
I mean, I didn't do a control study just pulling my pants down and standing there for 5 to 20 minutes without the light on.
I should do that at some point.
Because maybe it's just like the whole, you know, it's like supposedly going combat style is supposed to be good for your dick too.
So this is all based on Chinese medicine principles.
I think it's called your jinn, or your jing, or something like that.
You have this energy, your chi, your prana, your chakra, your life force, and apparently orgasming is and coming, like ejaculating, is supposedly one of the ways that you give some of that life force away.
Like you release some of your vitality and by having sex but then not coming, you're actually creating that same hormonal response of oxytocin and testosterone and all these things that we release when we're having sex or when we ejaculate but without actually giving up that vitality, that life force.
I found tables where based on your age, there's a certain frequency with which you're supposed to ejaculate.
The younger you are, it's like every two days, every three days, and the older you get, it gets to a certain point where you're 70 years old and it's like every month or something like that.
Six months later, after they'd really grown a lot of these mesenchymal stem cells, I got them injected into my bloodstream and into, like, that injury that I'm fighting in my back right now.
Mm-hmm.
And I'd done some other things before that for the back and for tissue, like peptides, like this BPC-157.
I mean, it's not intended for human consumption, but it's also not banned by WADA. I mean, actually, it's legal to use, and it's a peptide.
Yeah.
It's called Body Protection Compound, BPC-157.
And the 157 refers to like the sequence of amino acids that makes up the actual compound.
But you can buy it and reconstitute it.
And then if you inject it into an area, and it doesn't even have to be like a painful intramuscular injection.
It can be like a subcutaneous injection.
BPC supposedly stimulates angiogenesis, and it's a natural compound.
You find it in the human gut.
So they took this same thing that helps to heal the human gut, which is why if you were to consume this in drinking water, supposedly, and this is in rodent models, it apparently works to heal up an inflamed gut, you know, colitis, IBD, IBS, stuff like that.
But you can inject it into a joint or subcutaneously into an area around a joint.
And it supposedly stimulates the, I feel like this is a repetitive phrase on this show, the growth of new blood vessels.
So angiogenesis.
And then there's another one called TB500 that they use in racehorses.
Thymosin beta, that one is banned by WADA. But similar principle except that one acts on the actin and myosin fibers.
And actually causes regeneration of those.
So you could do both and you get angiogenesis and then also fiber regrowth.
And that's a strategy that would be like pennies on the dollar compared to stem cells.
And also, you know, a far less intensive procedure in terms of like collecting your stem cells.
I don't know the protocol that used to grow the stem.
Like I know the fat one, they use like a collagenase procedure that enzymatically breaks down the collagen from the fat and somehow concentrates the stem cells.
I mean, obviously I'm not a doctor, but according to these doctors that do it, and there's a place in Santa Monica that does it called Lifespan Medicine.
And you get all these pops up and down your neck, and it apparently realigns the atlas and the axis and some of the cervical vertebrae, and there's probably a bunch of chiropractic docs who are really pissed off right now because I'm describing this incorrectly, but it feels amazing.
It was invented by this guy named Guy Voyer, a French guy.
And...
Dude, you feel amazing.
You hold these poses for like a minute and it introduces a bunch of new blood flow to the joint.
See how he's doing that?
He'll like put his hand up and traction the fascia.
And so he's getting this intense pull.
If you were to do this, you get this intense pull on your back.
I do this one so I could show it to you after.
But you feel amazing.
I do this when I wake up now.
Who invented all this stuff?
This goes back.
This is like some French guy invented it.
And...
I don't remember how I heard about it, but I interviewed this guy named Jacob Schoen on my podcast, and he taught me all these moves and came to my house.
And it's another one of those really cool forms of stretching.
And I go in there because your tissue gets very pliable and hot.
So I had a crane drop a 19-foot endless pool out in the forest back behind my house in Spokane.
And I keep this thing just like super-duper cold, right?
So it's like 45, 50 degrees.
So that's like my cryotherapy cold water immersion.
How do you keep it that cold?
Well, during the winter and the fall, it just stays that cold.
I just keep the lid off.
And then during the summer when I'm coming back home and I'm going by the gas station up the hill before my house, I stop and I buy ice bags and I just dump them in there.
So it stays relatively cold.
And what I do in the mornings when I'm home is I do this sauna.
And he asked about yoga.
I go in there, and this is when I do a lot of this stuff, right?
Like I'll do some of my yoga moves, some of my aldoa.
There's another really good form of stretching called core foundation, a doc named Eric Goodman, and it's like a form of decompression for the spine.
He works with a lot of athletes.
It kind of like turns on your glutes, decompresses your spine.
So I just use a mashup of all these little moves, and I'll be in my sauna for like 30 minutes.
So I'm producing all the heat shock proteins, I'm getting the nitric oxide, getting the blood flow, and you just feel good when you do the sauna.
So I get all sweaty, and I get kind of woo-woo, I'll sprinkle essential oils in there, and I'll burn like Palo Santo incense and put on...
I've got to keep things somewhat, because this is getting kind of complex between the light and the balls and the essential oils.
You've got to draw the line somewhere.
Sometimes I'll have friends over and we'll vape or we'll smoke in the sauna and then we'll go out to the pool and then go roll around in the snow, then get back in the pool, then go back in the sauna.
I do this, and my wife is inside making dinner, and we just feel amazing.
We got the hot, we got the cold, and then we go in and we eat dinner.
It's amazing.
It's my favorite thing to do with my friends.
But in the morning, I do the sauna, and then the ice, or the cold pool, and then I finish with a quick dip in the hot tub out in the trees, because I put a hot tub next to the cold pool.
And everything's like super clean.
You know, it's clean with ozone and minerals instead of chlorine.
Well, I was speaking in, that's why I'm down here, I was speaking in Costa Mesa a couple days ago, and there was like this banquet dinner as part of the event, and I was sitting next to this guy, and I'm like, well, what do you do for your fitness routine, et cetera?
He does Bikram yoga every day, but like the Bikram yoga, like all of the poses that are part of Bikram yoga, because it's a set series of routines.
Well, it's the case pre-workout, but chronically, if you elongate tissue, and I don't know if they've actually done any studies on people who have done yoga for a really long time and compared their vertical jump before and after...
But I just feel almost too stretchy if I get too into it.
Like, I feel like when I run, it's a little bit more like Gumby running versus limiting the amount of yoga that I do.
I don't know if it actually goes into the actual stomach, like through the epithelial lining and into the actual intestine, but it has an effect, for sure.
You know what I just started using recently is topical CBD. I got some topical CBD and like a roll-on, almost like a deodorant roll-on kind of a thing.
Yeah, I know you guys don't melt a lot of ice in California, but, like, in Washington State, you can buy magnesium chloride, but, like, a freaking, like, concrete-sized bag, a concrete-mixed-sized bag of it, and it's the same stuff that they sell on these expensive websites as, like, magnesium salts.
And you blend this, and it blends on top of your counter for like eight hours, and all this stuff mixes together, and then you pour it into molds, and you can just put it in the freezer, and then I keep it in these little Miran glass jars so it doesn't degrade, and it's just like the best edible ever.
So I should try some before a float tank sometime.
And I want to, and usually it's like 5 or 10 minutes in.
So I spend the next 50 minutes trying to remember, like, don't forget this, don't forget.
And I try like these little mnemonic techniques where you imagine like, you know, like an image of what you remembered is waiting for you outside the door as soon as you open the float tank.
So it might work for you to remember.
But basically it just kind of screws up my whole ability to be able to just like let thoughts come and go and relax.
Well, they make these LED, you know, they're like, you know, because when I travel, I don't like to get all the blue light in the hotel rooms and I'll unplug things.
I try to make the hotel room dark, right?
Because when you flip off the lights in a hotel room, it's just like freaking Vegas, right?
There's blue lights on the TV and stuff flashing, you know, all over the place.
So they make these, and I had it for a while.
I don't travel with it anymore, but it's like a black tape.
Amazing book about all these cool things when you go down deep.
And he talks about how Olympic athletes are using this now to enhance their performance because your spleen compresses and you produce more erythropoietin, more red blood cells.
Same thing that you produce actually.
If you sauna, like if you do a workout and you get really hot and then you go in the sauna after, they've done studies on this and they found that 30 minutes of heat therapy after you've already gotten the body hot, you produce EPO the same as if you were to use the performance enhancing drug.
There was a study that just came out about cryotherapy, and this echoes something that Rhonda Patrick was saying, that if you do cryo, her advice was you should wait at least an hour after a workout before you do it and allow your body to have some sort of effect from the exercise.
But sauna, they're saying you should do almost immediately after.
So the idea with this, and there was a brand new study that just came out like three days ago where they showed that heat post-exercise enhanced the effects of exercise, whereas cold blunted the hormetic response to exercise, which makes sense.
For me, what I do, same thing when I do a hard afternoon workout.
I wait a couple hours afterwards because you get a bigger testosterone and growth hormone response when you wait after workout to eat.
Actually, Mark Sisson was the first guy who told me about this, and it turns out that there actually is a better hormonal response when you fast post-exercise.
Same thing with antioxidants.
There are a couple exceptions I can tell you about.
Same thing with cryotherapy.
Now, at the same time, if you finish up a hard afternoon or especially like an early evening workout, you have a very high body temperature.
So my theory is that a brief dose of cold, like I'll jump in the cold pool and get out, not a full, just enough to decrease the core body temperature, which is one of the ways that you enhance deep sleep cycles.
So I also sleep on this thing called a chili pad that circulates like cold water underneath my body while I'm asleep.
Yeah, and the cool thing is like your partner can put their temperature on and I can put my temperature on and you can sleep at whatever temp you want.
And there was a study they did last month on this that cold water immersion was very effective in reducing post-workout muscle soreness and that inflammatory response to exercise compared to cryotherapy.
You should wait a little bit before you do it, but I think part of that is due to you get like this hydrostatic pressure of water against the skin, right?
So it kind of pushes the cold against the skin a little bit better.
And then the other reason is that when your head gets wet, when your head goes under, you know, same thing as you would get with a cold shower, you get like this mammalian dive reflex, right?
Like that sharp...
Intake of breath, and that activates your vagus nerve.
So we talked about HRV and heart rate variability tracking.
Anytime you do something like that, that improves the tone of the vagus nerve, you would actually improve your ability to recover and improve the strength of your nervous system.
Vagal nerve stimulators and they've looked into like chanting, humming, singing, jaw, they call it jaw realignment therapy, apparently removes the pressure that the trigeminal nerve can place on the vagus nerve.
There's all these things you can do to enhance the health It's a vagus nerve.
And that's one of the things that improves your HRV or your heart rate variability.
It allows your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system to be more balanced.
The tone of the nerve, it would basically be synonymous with the health of the nerve.
I don't know if it's changing the myelin sheaths of the nerve or something like that when you're increasing the tone of the nerve.
More or less, it's healthy for the vagus nerve when you get your head wet or underwater.
So when I go in my cold pool after workout, I put my head under and then come up like five or ten times just to go up and down and up and down.
Then I get out.
And if I'm going to do a longer cold soak, it's not right after workout.
The two studies I found on antioxidant use after workout, right?
High-dose antioxidant like vitamin C, vitamin E, etc.
That supposedly blunts the hormetic response to exercise.
But there was one study that shows that green tea polyphenols don't do that.
So green tea would allow you to fight off the inflammatory effects of exercise without blunting, for example, satellite cell proliferation or building of new mitochondria or all of the things that you want to happen in response to a workout.
And the other one was, and this is a new thing, not a lot of people are talking about this now, but it's like hydrogen-rich compounds.
They call it hydrogen-rich water.
And there's these companies now, there's like four or five of them, they sell these tablets that you can dissolve in water.
And there's the Molecular Hydrogen Foundation.
They do research on this hydrogen.
They don't have a financial affiliation with any of these companies, so I respect some of the research that they do.
And they've found that it actually blunts or it allows for anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects to shut down like the inflammatory response to exercise without blunting the hormetic response.
It would be like green tea and molecular hydrogen would be the two things that I know of that you could do post-workout to blunt that inflammatory response without actually blunting the hormetic response to exercise.
One of the things I think that's probably really good about cold immersion therapy also, I think there's a meditative aspect of getting into that incredible cold and just relaxing and calming and I think it does something for your mind.
What I tell people is you have a strong, and I take my kids out there, and I've trained them since a very early age.
They go out there, they jump in the cold pool, but they'll stand in front of the cold pool and calm their nervous system, calm their heart rate.
One of them visualizes a sea otter, and the other one does a polar bear.
So they'll visualize these animals that are just impervious to cold.
And then they get in the water, and they know there's no sharp intake of breath, there's no Like people do when they take a cold shower a lot of the time.
If you can get your body to that point, I think that it probably has a pretty—it's a good indicator that you're building that nervous system resilience, right?
Like if you can just get in cold and not freak out.
I've heard that argument about the sauna as well, that it also builds like a mental toughness to be able to just sit in there and calm yourself and get used to the adverse...
Took me from 15 feet over five days down to 80 feet where you're like, you actually, they put a rope in the water and you go vertical and you have like your, you know, the big fins, like you have the big fins and you have the mask.
They're carbon, they're stiff, and you just swim so fast in them.
And I contacted the editor of Spearing Magazine and asked him, what's the best gun to buy?
What are the best fins?
So I got outfitted with all this stuff, and then I went down there.
Learned how to hold my breath.
Learned how to equalize.
And now, when I spearfish, and I still, again, I haven't got to the point where I've gone, like, I go after the grouper and the parrotfish, like the little ones.
I haven't gotten to the point now where I'm hunting the big fish.
You know, we got on this topic from the float tanks.
Similar experience.
Like, you're just at peace under the water.
You're not wearing all the scuba equipment, so fish swim up to you, and you can kind of, like, lay on the bottom of the water and, you know, shoot something as it comes.
And I go with my kids, and they, like, sit on the shore with, like, buckets and knives, and, you know, they'll help brain the fish, and then we take it back, and you have, like, fish cook-offs.
Oh, wow.
It's amazing.
It's very similar feel to bow hunting, except it's like that peaceful setting in the water.
Well, it's a great workout, because not only are you cold, so you're getting all the benefits of cold thermogenesis, you know, like the white adipose to brown fat conversion, and the shivering, and the calorie burning, and, you know, the Angiogenesis and all the stuff you get from cold, but then you're also, you're freaking hunting, right?
You're not sitting on the edge, like, with a fishing pole over a boat, which I find intensely boring.
Yeah, it seems like an interesting mental exercise too because you have to keep your shit together while you're underwater and you want to take a breath.
That's why this guy sent me down to Fort Lauderdale, because this guy, he teaches safety, right?
You don't do, like, the Wim Hof breathing and blow off all the carbon dioxide so you can hold your breath longer, which is great for holding your breath longer, but carbon dioxide is your body's signal to take a breath.
Two-count hold, and then ten-count breath out, two-count hold.
and you're just like getting the heart rate down.
You're getting the nervous system calm.
You're not even supposed to do like a lot of caffeine, which jacks up the nervous system and causes you to not be able to hold your breath as long.
Dairy makes the mucus more thick.
And so you can't hold your breath as long if you do a lot of dairy.
So you don't do a lot of dairy.
You don't do a lot of caffeine.
And then you just dive down.
And I did, I brought ketones down because a lot of like a, Dominique D'Agostino, he's done research on divers and reducing a lot of the effects of reduced flow of oxygen to the brain that apparently these Navy SEAL divers get.
And he does research on the use of ketosis and ketones.
And one of the days that we were out there, I actually took ketones and they increased my breath hold time just using these exogenous ketones.
Yeah, they came up with that for rebreathers, right?
Like, that's when they started getting people, yeah, Navy SEAL divers, when they're using rebreathers, apparently, a certain percentage of them are susceptible to seizures.
And he had one group of athletes follow just a normal endurance athlete diet for 12 months.
And another group follow like a high-fat, low-carb, ketogenic diet for 12 months because he wanted to see if you would maintain your glycogen levels and if your performance would be synonymous to the group that did not eat the high-fat, low-carb diet, what would happen to inflammatory markers, what would happen to the gut microbiome.
A lot of these studies on high-fat, low-carb diets, they'll follow people for two weeks or three days and have them eat high-fat, low-carb, and then see what happens when they go jam on a bike for 30 minutes or exercise, but they want to do a long-term study to see if the body can adapt to burning fats as a fuel with long-term utilization of a high-fat diet, which I don't do anymore, by the way.
I save all my carbohydrates for the evening, then I eat a bunch of carbohydrates in the evening.
Oh, like red wine, dark chocolate, tubers, starches, yams, sweet potatoes.
My wife's a cook, so she does this amazing slow-fermented sourdough bread, which pre-digests all the gluten and lowers the glycemic index.
It's pretty much quinoa, amaranth, milk.
I don't follow a specific diet in terms of restricting certain food groups.
My philosophy is you just make them digestible.
I've read that about eating carbs at night, that it's a good thing to relax here as Well, technically, you're more insulin sensitive in the morning, but you can make yourself more insulin sensitive in the evening.
And the advantage of that is if you consume a bunch of your carbohydrates in the morning when you're in an insulin sensitive state, what are you going to rely upon as your primary fuel during the rest of the day?
Instead of teaching your body how to be a fat-burning machine and tap into fats and generate ketones.
So you save your carbohydrate intake for the end of the day, but I also save my hard workout for the end of the day, which is when your body temperature peaks and your grip strength peaks.
And you can do a hard workout.
Anybody who rolls out of bed and tries to do a CrossFit WOD versus doing it, you know, 5 p.m.
in the afternoon knows this.
Like, you can do a pretty good hard workout, like in the later afternoon or the evening when you're warmed up.
But that also upregulates insulin sensitivity and the activity of these GLUT4 transporters that can, you know, shove glucose into muscle tissue, for example.
And so then you can have your cake and eat it too, right?
You create your own insulin-sensitive state and then you go off.
And typically I'll finish that workout around like 6, 6.30, right?
And like I mentioned, I don't eat dinner for a couple hours after the workout.
It's like 8, 8.30, we sit down to a family dinner.
And I'll just eat as many carbohydrates as I want because I'm in an insulin sensitive state by the next morning.
And I tested this for a while.
I did like the blood ketone and the breath ketone testing.
I'm back in a fat burning state by the next morning.
I've also replenished my glycogen stores in my liver and my muscle to be able to do the next day's hard workout.
So I like this strategy for athletes because they can get all the benefits of a fat burning state, the reduced free radical production from excess glucose intake.
the reduced glycemic variability, which is honestly, it's a pretty big marker for, in my opinion, like your risk factor for a host of chronic diseases, like spiking your blood glucose multiple times during the day.
So instead, you just don't eat carbohydrates all day, do a hard workout at the end of the day, and then have your carbohydrates to replenish all your energy levels Then you go into the next day.
Well, when you raise a garden bed, you can just add whatever type of soil that you want to, versus digging down.
Because my wife does a lot of composting.
We have chickens and goats, so she used a lot of the dung from the chickens and the goats and the leftover food from inside and does composting.
And so we use a lot of this in the raised garden beds.
I started gardening this year indoors.
I'm growing something called splilanthes, which I can tell you about later.
It's amazing.
I found it in Kauai.
But what I do during the day is eat a lot of wild plants.
So when I'm coming in from that cold pool in the morning, I'll gather some plants and I throw those in a blender with some fats like coconut milk or coconut oil.
I'll do some bone broth and some lemon because when you mix vitamin C with collagen, you make the collagen a lot more absorbable.
So I'll mix the vitamin C with bone broth.
I'll put that into the blender.
A whole bunch of superfoods.
I'll blend it for like two minutes.
Because if you blend it for a long time, it gets a texture like a Wendy's Frosty.
And you can eat it with one of those long...
You've had a Wendy's Frosty before, right?
unidentified
You look confused for a minute when I said Wendy's Frosty.
Well, I'm trying to make it into like a drinkable...
A drinkable form.
Something that will stay in that form?
Yeah, I'm going over to see Rick Rubin after this over in Malibu, and he does the same thing for breakfast.
And that's actually one of the things we're talking about over there.
Did you teach him how to do this?
No, it's so random.
We go sauna together over there in Malibu, and we were...
We both do the same thing.
Like, his is a little bit different.
Like, he puts some different things in it, the same thing.
And it's an amazing breakfast, because you can sit there and, like, I do a lot of dictation on my computer, so I'll sit there and I'll dictate emails while I'm eating my smoothie with a spoon.
And then dinner, like I mentioned, is just, you know, whatever my wife happens because dinner is like my free meal, right?
It's just whatever I want to have.
But for this study, for Jeff Volek's lab, it was 12 months, strict ketosis.
And they brought us into the lab and me and the group of ketogenic athletes and also the whole group of endurance athletes following a traditional carbohydrate-rich diet do a VO2 max test the night that we got there.
And then the next morning, they punched a bunch of holes in our thighs with needles and did a biopsy of the muscle to see how much glycogen was in the muscle.
And then with these big holes in our muscles, we had to go run on a treadmill for three hours.
And they were testing fat oxidation rates at rest and at exercise.
So I'm wearing this mask.
It does what's called indirect calorimetry, where based on the carbon dioxide that you breathe out and the oxygen that you consume, it approximates your carbohydrate and your fat burning rate.
It's kind of like the gold standard of metabolic testing in laboratory situations, like in an exercise physiology lab.
And so you're testing how much fat you're burning during exercise, how much carbohydrate you're burning during exercise, something called your respiratory exchange ratio is what it's called.
And the prevailing research and the literature suggests that you can burn about 1.0 grams of fat per minute during exercise.
Like that would be about how much fat you would burn, 1.0 grams of fat per minute.
When they tested, this was called the FASTER study, F-A-S-T-E-R. They found that the folks who followed a high-fat diet, like me and these other people who are eating high-fat diet, we were burning 1.5 to 1.7 grams of fat per minute during exercise, during this three-hour treadmill run.
We had no deficit in performance.
Our VO2 maxes were just as high, and we maintained our levels of muscle glycogen.
And so basically there was no, we didn't go any faster.
I'm not saying like a ketogenic diet is going to make you better at endurance sports because I've never seen any evidence that that's going to happen.
But we did go just as fast and we actually burnt, we turned our bodies into fat burning machines over the course of 12 months.
A lot of people, they get gut rot and fermentation from eating a lot of fermentable carbohydrates.
Some people get small intestine bacterial overgrowth.
Some people get blood glucose fluctuations.
You see a drop in what's called the first phase insulin response.
Normally, you're supposed to produce a lot of insulin when you eat a meal, or at least enough to be able to shove that substrate into storage tissue and Normally, you'd be able to produce this, and by getting a lot of glycemic variability during the day, you eventually produce insulin insensitivity, right?
Like, you don't have that normal first-phase insulin response.
And you can restore.
You can use things like bitters and chew your food a lot and, you know, strength train before you eat a carbohydrate-rich meal, you know, things like that.
But ultimately...
Yeah, it's more of like a health and longevity thing.
It's not like eating low carbohydrate makes you faster.
It's just that you avoid a lot of the potential issues, the potential health issues that would come with a large amount of glucose fluctuations.
But there's exceptions to that rule, right?
Like you could go get your genetics tested and you might find out you have, let's say, familial hypercholesterolemia, in which case if you eat like a ketotic diet, you'll produce a lot of like oxidized cholesterol.
400, 500 and really high LP little a and all these issues with a high amount of fat consumption because their bodies are unable to deal with that amount of cholesterol.
It is, but I mean, like, in very simplistic terms, I've told some people this, right?
You could at least test your genetics, and there's actually a really good book about this called The Jungle Effect by Dr. Daphne Miller, and she goes into how, like...
She'll put, like, her Hispanic clients on, like, a traditional Mexican diet comprised of, like, you know, soaked and sprouted legumes and low glycemic index, you know, tortillas and non-GMO corn and take them back to what their ancestors would have eaten.
Like, she'll literally take, like, what the Taramahara Indian tribe is eating in South America and put her Hispanic clients on that.
Or she'll put, like, her African American clients on a fiber-rich fermented, like, Cambodian diet.
And you could easily do it.
It's not rocket science.
You go get your genetics tested, you see where your ancestors came from, and you try to approximate.
And obviously we're a genetic melting pot in America, and there's going to be some people who are just like, oh crap, I come from Japan and Europe and Ethiopia.
There's some people who come from all over the place, in which case you would have to take a deeper dive.
You can get blood work.
What I tell people is get your genes tested.
Get a comprehensive blood analysis.
Get your gut tested, right?
So you could look at your bacterial balance, presence of parasites, yeast, fungus, all those kind of little things that affect gut health and personality and everything else that the microbiome affects.
And then like a urine test for hormones, which is more accurate than a blood test.
And that's a lot of testing, but I mean, if you really, really, truly want to dial things in, it's genetic testing, it's blood testing, urinary testing for hormones.
There's a test called the Dutch test.
It tests like your testosterone all throughout the day, the metabolites of testosterone, your cortisol all throughout the day, the metabolites of cortisol.
So you could actually see like, you know, do I really have high cortisol or am I just not breaking it down quickly enough, for example?
I just wish there was a place that you could go that was very comprehensive that the average person could go to where they could do all this stuff for you and break it down for you.
It seems like there's more and more of a market to that every day.
But I think for the average person that's listening to this, it's a little confusing and maybe a little frustrating because it would be nice if there was a place you could go that's like the dentist.
You go to the dentist, hey, Bob, you've got a cavity.
It was like my bodybuilding days where you go way in in the morning before the show and then the rest of the day you eat freaking ice cream and bread and you look like an Olympic god when you get up on stage because everything's popping.
All that glycogen gets restored after about eight hours.
How does that work?
I don't remember what my first meal was.
Well, when you don't eat many carbohydrates, you upregulate levels with something called glycogen synthase, which is an enzyme responsible for helping to get glycogen into muscle tissue.
There's not necessarily a benefit in that you go faster if you've trained your body how to operate well on a low-carbohydrate diet.
I've never, like I said, seen any evidence that a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet makes you go faster than if you were eating a regular carbohydrate-rich diet.
But I also haven't seen that if you do like I did and follow it strict for a long time...
There's not a lot of evidence that makes you go slower either.
It's more of like, hey, if I can live a longer time and feel better and produce less reactive oxygen species by doing this versus the high carbohydrate intake, then why not do it?
And I mean, when you look at like the Nike project and how they were trying to break the marathon record in Italy They were using these crazy engineered forms of carbohydrate where they went way above these maltodextrin fructose blends that a lot of companies like Gatorade use, and they were using these super engineered carbs.
It's possible that some of these newer carbohydrates that are engineered for extremely high absorption could beat out.
If we were to study those in a high-fat, low-carb athlete who'd followed that diet for a long period of time versus a traditionally fueled athlete who was eating these newfangled engineered carbohydrates...
It's possible the newfangled engineered carbohydrates could make you go faster, but unless your paycheck is on the line and you're a pro, I still say, you know, why not get that balance between health and longevity and speed.
My thyroid, though, did not like that high-fat ketogenic diet paired with high levels of physical activity.
And I explain this to a lot of athletes who I work with who want to do the ketogenic diet thing.
You read a book like, you know, there's some fantastic ketogenic diets out there that are plant-rich, which a lot of ketogenic diets aren't, right?
They'll be like coconut oil and butter.
And that actually creates a lot of gastric inflammation in the absence of like, you know, high amount of polyphenols and flavonoids and high fiber and plant intake.
Like you want both.
I wrote an article about this called The Dark Side of Coconut Oil that gets into the fact that if you're going to do like a high fat, low carb, ketogenic type of diet, you would want to include a lot of plants.
Dr. Terry Walls has a book called The Walls Protocol.
That's got a plant-rich ketogenic version in it.
Stephen Gundry has his book The Plant Paradox, and he has like a ketogenic version in that book that's like very plant-rich.
So if you're eating like a plant-rich ketogenic diet and you're following what a lot of these people have written, you'd generally be advised to eat like 30 to 50 grams of carbohydrates per day, which is fine if you have thyroid disease or you have some other issue, you know, pre-diabetes, whatever, and you're trying to control it with a ketogenic diet.
But then once you throw copious amounts of physical activity into the mix, right, you're a CrossFitter, you're an Ironman triathlete, and you go read one of these books and you read the supposed to be 50 grams of carbohydrates.
Well, you know, the authors of those books, to my knowledge, are not out racing Ironman triathlons and, you know, doing marathons and copious amounts of physical activity.
So you have to up the carbohydrate intake.
So it's all about, you know, so for me personally, like 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrate.
So, if you have like a thyroid issue and you're highly active and you want to follow a ketogenic diet, then you need to include more carbohydrate than would be recommended in, let's say, like a more sedentary type of ketogenic diet.
And you want to include a lot of the things that you tend to build up deficits in, like potassium and magnesium are two biggies.
And you dump a lot of glycogen, and glycogen stores a bunch of water, and it stores a bunch of electrolytes, so you have to figure out how to replace that.
And now people are using these exogenous ketones, like the ketone salts or the ketone esters.
And the danger with those is now you can get into ketosis, but still also have high blood glucose.
And that's something that we haven't really studied.
That's not like our ancestors out hunting.
It's not like they were in ketosis because they were burning a lot of their own body fat and generating ketones as a byproduct.
And they were in just like a natural state because they weren't eating a lot of food, sometimes just not stuffing their face with carbohydrates and glucose.
But now people are able to eat a normal Western diet.
Like it was like rocket fuel because my blood glucose was jacked through the roof.
So I did a bunch of like fructose maltodextrin energy-based gels.
And then I drank a bottle of these ketone esters, which basically, I mean, they have, if you measure your ketones, you'll know that this is high.
But within 10 minutes, my values were above 7 millimolar, which is just off the charts for ketones.
But my blood glucose was also off the charts.
And I felt like my cells had, like, both forms of fuel they'd ever need, both ketones and glucose.
And I felt amazing.
But I'll bet, I mean, that's similar to, like, diabetic ketoacidosis.
Like, if you're in that state all the time and you're using all these ketone supplements and just eating your diet and using these because you're, quote, in ketosis, unquote, I don't think it's healthy.
Because it does, like, you can feel and it can give you, especially if you're not fat adapted, I mean, carbohydrates give you a pretty big boost in performance and energy versus not having them on board when you're exercising and especially when you're exercising hard.
And this would be like that, right?
If you were to use that as a sometimes drug and be careful with it, I could see that being a huge, huge performance boost.
I didn't quantify it, but it was a Tough Mudder in Vegas.
And all I know is I felt way, way more doubt.
I had the cognitive high that you get from ketones, which was the original reason that I started doing this ketosis thing seven years ago when I was getting ready to race Ironman Canada.
And I wanted to see what it would feel like to have those readily available fuel sources for the liver and the diaphragm and the heart and kind of the focus that comes with high levels of ketones when you're on a bike for five hours.
And I had that when I took these exogenous ketones, but then I also had all the energy that you get after you've had like a candy bar, right?
So yeah, you're high blood sugar and high blood ketones.
So you just feel focused, but you also have high levels of energy.
Your sensory perception improves, especially in nature settings.
Right, like there's this, there's like the synthetic chemical LSD, or PLSD is like the one a lot of people are using now because you get it for a lot less expensive, and it has the same effect as LSD. It's just, it's a lot cheaper.
You get both on like these websites where you use cryptocurrency to purchase the compound, but...
You, it's very synthetic and there's like a merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain and you get very creative and focused simultaneously.
For LSD, you want to volumetrically dose, which means if you get a blotter of LSD, it's like 100 micrograms on a square, and a lot of people cut that into 10 pieces.
So that one piece would be 10 micrograms, but you don't know if that piece has 20 or 5 on it.
So you take a 100 microgram tab, and you put that in a glass dropper bottle.
And then you would add like 10 milliliters of Everclear or vodka or some kind of alcohol to it.
And then you know that for every one milliliter of alcohol in that little dropper bottle that you consume, you're getting exactly 10 micrograms of LSD and about 10 to 20 micrograms, like one to two dropper bottles full, that would be considered a microdose for most people.
But you don't, like, returning to psilocybin, psilocybin produces, like, this sensory perception, very natural feeling improvement in your cognition, in your senses.
It just feels more natural, right?
It's like you would take it before you go on a hike, or you would take it when you're in, like, a very natural, like a nature setting.
Like, you know, for something like...
Day at the office.
It seems like LSD is a more natural choice.
But psilocybin is really interesting for nature-based setting, hiking.
She's like, you know, why do you got to take psilocybin before you got to go on a hike?
Like, why don't you just go on a hike?
Sometimes it's more interesting.
Sometimes you see things you wouldn't normally otherwise see.
I go to bed and I've got my binaural beats and my sleep mask and I've got that little grounding earthing device under my body and my chili pad and blue light blocking glasses and I get in bed with all these wires sticking up out of my head and my wife just gets in bed and just like...
Like when I walk into my office, it's not like I'm spending 20 minutes like...
Turning on the Juve light and putting on the essential oil diffuser and, you know, I've got like this device that creates like special water that you breathe.
Well, you know, humidifies the water that you breathe while you're working.
And I've got like, you know, blue light generating devices on the ceiling and all this stuff in my office.
But when I walk in, there's just like click, click, click, and I go to work.
Right?
With the thing on my head or whatever.
So once you systematize it, it's not exhausting.
It's not like you're doing a lot to actually improve your body or, you know, let's say biohack your body while you're at work.
Like he was like the original cyborg guy who got like a chip implanted underneath his skin or the people who will inject like magnets in their fingertips to be able to interact with devices.
So they would use the human body as what they call wetware and then install hardware.
And like to me, that's a true biohacker for me to blend like curcumin with olive oil and bone broth and vitamin C in my smoothie.
My buddy, Kenton Claremont, up in Washington State, he was running these train-to-hunt competitions, which are really bad.
It's like obstacle course racing with a weapon.
And you could do it out here, because you could carry sandbags and do cones and suicide sprints and all sorts of stuff with this techno-hunt setup that you have.
But the train-to-hunt...
The first competition that I did, you show up and it starts off with like a four or five hour traditional 3D shoot.
And for people who don't know what a 3D shoot is, it's a bunch of targets, you know, like Reinhardt targets or whatever that are set up in different locations.
They're going to be a fox or an elk or, you know, whatever, you know, a bedded animal or a standing animal.
And they're spread throughout this course that you're walking.
You can think of it almost like golfing, you know, for people who don't bow hunt.
And you'll, you know, one shot might just be like a simple 25-yard shot at a fox where if you get vitals, you'll get five points.
And if you hit a body shot, then it might be three points.
And if you miss, it's zero.
And if you get like a wound, it's actually a negative score, right?
Which it should be.
Like, it's like a...
Because if you wound an animal, that's really much, much worse than missing an animal.
So some of the shots are pretty complex.
It might be you got to get off two shots in 10 seconds, which is actually kind of hard to do.
You know, two shots in 10 seconds and one animal's at 20 and one animal's at 40. Right, which is why I use like a three pin side on my bow because you don't even have time to adjust the dial after you've taken one shot to the yardage for the second shot.
You might have a shot that's like run up this hill.
There is a target up there.
We won't tell you the distance, but you have 30 seconds to make it the 25 yards up that goalie and then you're going to have a shot at the top and you got to run up the goalie site and get your shot off in those 30 seconds.
So it's not like a traditional 3D shoot.
It's very active.
And some shots are you draw lunging, and then you stand, and then you've got to walk around the tree, and then take your shot.
So it's actually pretty fun.
It's way different than just standing out of the range shooting at targets.
score coming out of that, right?
Like you might have amassed X number of points or lost X number of points.
And then you go into, um, they actually, they, they, this year they've kind of like changed it because a lot of people are like getting hurt and blown up their knees with this next part.
But you do, it's called like a meat pack, which is a hundred pounds in your pack.
And it's a two to four mile course that you got to boogie across as fast as possible.
Not only do you got to spend, like, I would spend copious amounts of time just, like, making sure the pack was adjusted properly, and I'll put, like, the bubble wrap in the bottom of the pack so it moves the weight that you're using, which are typically sandbags, up to the center of the pack.
And I worked with this company called Kefaru that makes, like, these...
Your rubber plate that you bought that you painted a 45-pound logo on.
Anyways, so you do the meat pack, and you get a certain amount of time for that, and then you do the obstacle course, which is the real hoot, and which they still do, which is because they got rid of the meat pack.
They got rid of the meat pack.
Well, it doesn't make sense, right?
They designed this whole competition to simulate hunting, to prepare a hunter to hunt, and to train a hunter to hunt properly, and it just flew in the face of everything that is hunting, which is, you know, jacked-up nervous system, you know, rushing through the woods with a giant pack, and you just, you don't.
But people were getting hurt and it just didn't make sense.
I'm jacked at my back.
It's cool.
I get it.
I kind of wish they still had it because I was good at that part.
Because I'm an endurance athlete and I'm kind of strong.
So for me it worked out pretty well.
And then they have the obstacle course, which is like crawling under barbed wire, stand, shoot.
And then you're doing like, you know, like sandbag over the shoulder, 20 reps, shoot, 30 burpees.
And for the obstacle course, you have a 50 pound pack or a 40 pound pack on your back.
They kind of adjust the pack weight based off which division that you're in.
But so you're using a smaller pack.
So I use the Kefaru pack.
Again, they just had like a smaller pack.
Same thing, you got a sandbag, but it's a lighter sandbag.
So you're carrying that through the whole course, but you're stopping and shooting along the way.
So it's like you're learning how to, just imagine if you're like rushing up a hill and you got to the top of the hill and you got to calm your heart rate, calm your nervous system very quickly and get your shot off.
And granted, you're not necessarily going to be hauling a sandbag up That hill and doing a bunch of burpees, but it's kind of simulating that idea of shooting with your heart rate elevated.
And it's a hard course.
I mean, like, there are, like, legitimate, you know, hardcore crossfitters and athletes that do this, but it's a combination of being able to shoot well and being able to fitness.
Yeah, I was wearing this ring we were talking about when I did that hunt in Hawaii.
And I did like 46 miles over the course of five days, just like crawling and walking and hiking and sprinting.
I mean, that's why I like bow hunting.
It's a challenge.
And the Train to Hunt guy, Kenton, he told me about these competitions and I was watching them and I'm like, I really want to try this.
Because at that point I'd firearm hunted for two years.
I didn't grow up hunting.
I grew up, you know, homeschooled, playing chess and playing the violin, reading books, and playing World of Warcraft.
Like, I was not, like, a hunter kid growing up.
And neither were my parents, right?
Like, we'd occasionally go fishing for trout.
That was about it, in the stocked pond.
So hunting was new for me.
I'd been hunting for two years.
It's totally self-taught.
Like I failed to dress my first animal with the little YouTube video on the iPhone where I'm following along and I've got my knife and I'm watching the video because that's the way I'm being homeschooled.
You're not doing any of the social things that they're doing.
But then you might show up at tennis practice or whatever.
And same thing when you get to college.
You're just not used to it.
Dude, I went off the deep end of college because I graduated when I was 15, and I didn't do a gap year or anything.
I just started college when I was 16, and I did not have good self-control around sex and alcohol and drugs and all these things that all of a sudden I was immersed in in college.
But they also have been educated about what that might do to their liver or to the gray matter in their brain.
Or we don't say no gluten.
I tell them, you know, gluten is going to affect your test scores, creates neural inflammation, can create some gastric inflammation.
You get to choose when you go to the birthday party whether you're going to have the gluten.
And sometimes it comes back to bite me because we'll go out to a restaurant and they'll bring the bread out to the restaurant and my boys will be like, no, no, we don't want the bread.
And I'm like, but I kind of wanted a little piece of bread here.
So I think that's a better way to raise a child.
You educate them about the consequences of their decision and then you let them make the decision themselves.
You equip them rather than creating a bunch of forbidden fruit, which is the way that I was kind of raised.
My wife bought us a sausage maker, and me and my boys made Axe's deer sausage and the backstrap, and it was amazing.
And now they're little chefs, dude.
That's cool.
They made like bone broth, like made baked donuts out of breadfruit flour, and they used bone broth and colostrum, and they made like a cream cheese ginger frosting and a dark chocolate cacao frosting, and it actually tastes like real donuts.
I think I've been using them because my kids camp outside sometimes, you know, in the forest, and I set one of those little thermocel things in front of their...
Apparently the only one that's better is camel milk.
There was a company out of California that was sending me camel's milk to my house for a while.
And apparently it's super duper healthy for you and the protein is smaller, more absorbable, and it's less hypoallergenic and friendly to your immune system.
The thing about archery is it's like martial arts in that if you learn the wrong way, it's very difficult to unlearn.
When I was teaching martial arts, it was way better to get someone who was open-minded, who had never had any martial arts experience, versus someone who had many, many years in a shitty martial art.
Because those people had these deeply ingrained pathways that were...
Whenever the shit would get weird or they would get uncomfortable or they'd get nervous, they would go back to their old technique.
There's also a series of instructionals that can show you about surprise releases that John Dudley's done and put online.
And there's a guy named Joel Turner that has this whole dedicated thing to...
Avoiding target panic in high-pressure situations.
He's got a website.
It used to be called Iron Mind Hunting, but now he calls it Shot IQ. I think it's Shot IQ. Isn't Iron Mind the people that sell the Captains of Crush hand grip strengtheners?
I think that's another company, but I love those guys.
I think mine might be like 150 years old, but I have two things.
I travel with one of those power lungs that you breathe in and out of to strengthen the expiratory and inspiratory muscles and the diaphragm, and then the captains of crush.
And so if I'm on a long road trip and I've got to drive a long time, I go back and forth between the hand grip strengthener and then the lung strengthener.
I'll just work out for two hours while you're driving.
They fill you full of high-dose curcumin before you go in, so your muscles just melt.
And then they have four massage therapists working on you at the same time.
And they taught me this, how if one's rubbing your head in a clockwise direction, but the other guy's mashing on your adductor with their elbow, you don't feel the mashing on the adductor as much because the movement on your head is distracting you from that.
And then somebody else is working on your leg.
And they have, like, all these essential oils that they fill the air with.
They're, like, special oils that cause you to relax and be a little bit more open to the deep tissue work.
And everybody there, like, goes through a special...
I mean, I liked it so much.
I actually...
I flew one of their guys up to my house to work on me at my house.
Most of the time, I do my own, and I just started...
To begin to have a massage therapist come to my house once a week.
Because I think like there's a certain amount of relaxation that you get when somebody else is working on you and you're laying down on a table and I have like this.
You ever used like a bio mat?
Yes.
A bio mat like produces a bunch of heat.
So I lay down on the bio mat and I put on my Michael Tyrell.
Beats.
And diffuse essential oil and have her work on me for a couple of hours.
Usually I'll have her come over after dinner, like around 7.30, 8 o'clock, and after the family's kind of wrapped up, and she'll just work on me at night and then go to bed.