Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

I think we're just about ready to get started. I know we're all very excited to introduce our instructor ben greenfield he's, a ten time iron man finisher he's, a certified sports nutrition, a list with a master's degree in physiology and an expertise and helping people really achieve super feats in human performance. And this is really what he specializes, then he's great his main his enthusiasm is health from inside and from the out he's written a book beyond fitness I believe it's beyond training dot com you can find that it beyond training book dot com and he's got a lot of information to share with us over the next couple days. Thank you so much for joining us. We're all as you can see, we're all very excited to have you here, so I know there's a lot of information to get to something just let you take it away. Well, I am super excited to be here contrary to what you may have been led to believe during that introduction, I will not be teaching you had to do the splits that's not g...

oing to be part of part of this learning, but we are going to be covering a lot of really cutting edge concepts when it comes to achieving ultimate human performance and also kind of defining what that is because there's a big misconception out there about really what the status quo is for fitness and for performance so we're going to defy that paradigm over the next three days and learn what it truly means to be healthy on the outside look good on the outside feel good on the outside but also be healthy on the inside and ensure that we're not destroying ourselves with all these cool things that we're trying to achieve for our bodies they're worth with this fitness that we're trying to maintain so that's really the goal over the next few days ultimately is too teach you how to achieve amazing feats of physical performance without destroying your body and I'm going to share with you every tip and trick that I know uh and we're going to get into nitty gritty detail on everything from testing your body and figure out what's going on inside and outside to using all the cool little bio hacking tools that will demonstrate for you guys to hacking you nutrition's using supplements to pretty much everything that you need to know my wife just a here is even going to show us how to do things like use personal care products that are actually healthy for you and that you can feel good about putting on your skin or putting in your body so we're going to be going over a ton of stuff and I'm incredibly stoked to be ableto to share all this with you guys and of course, questions are welcome. I want this to be a discussion with you, the online audience asked as many questions as you want, I definitely don't want to just be appear talking at you guys, I want to hear what you have questions about and for you in the audience same thing shoot those hands up, come out, tackle me, you know, whatever you need to do to get my attention if you have a question, feel free to just interrupt me and shoot those hands up and ask away and that's really a big, big part of what this is about is making it really a discussion between you and I see that I'm not just up here kind of talking at you, so that being said, we're going to go ahead and jump right in two kind of defining what ultimate human performance actually is, and I just hinted at this that there's kind of some misconceptions out there about what it means to be to be fit to be healthy, and what I want to start with today and kind of this this first hour or so is to really lay down a paradigm, a lens through which we can see a lot of the other stuff that we talk about when it comes to achieving performance, but I actually want to ask this question to you guys and to the internet audience what you feel ultimate human performances did any of you have any any definitions of what you would say that that human performance or ultimate human performance would actually be well I'm sure the first thing that cause most people's meyer and they think ultimate they think and saying achieving some grave no feed something super awesome park or flipping but for me the ultimate performance is to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it um this group are here's no pretty young and healthy so but when you get older you take it for granted and just be able to bend over walk around no play with the kids and all that stuff so using your day to day movements uh I think that is when you're like this fine and all settlers when you're able to do that without anything encumbrance yeah yeah yeah I love it jeff I think it would be you know, any number of different things including health, energy vitality, cardiovascular fitness, muscular fitness and you know just also you know, your world view or your outlook I think that a lot of that is manifested through whether you're healthy or not right? So that's one of the reasons that I think that we're all excited to be here to learn from you yeah, how about anybody on from the internet audience anybody else pipin with with what they feel human performances or but they were still working on the coffee this morning out there I think they're still working on the coffee and their their performance this morning but I mean I know for us personally for me when you talk about you know, your athletic goals it's kind of hitting your limit because I feel like everyone out there is capable of different things so when I'm trying to achieve my ultimate performance it's knowing my limit it's kind of improving upon what I'd done prior to that and just feeling like I've given it my all and kind of got in the maximum out of my body I have to agree with what you're saying and for me it's that additionally knowing that limit and not not taking it too far where you take it to a point of injury or overdoing it you know knowing how far you can push yourself yeah I thought about this a lot over the past ten years as a personal trainer having worked with lots of people to achieve lots of different goals you know I kept running into over and over again these these bleeds in different areas where people would be for example strong but they wouldn't have endurance or they would have ultimate fitness but they'd have horrible digestion and so when I sat down and really started to think about what ultimate human performance is what it would mean if you were able to have your body and your mind do exactly what you want them to do at the drop of a hat. Any time during the day, I came up with this concept that that I initially called becoming superhuman. And so the way that I define that is that you have the ultimate combination of a few different parameters. Performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain sleep and hormone optimization. Those seven different parameters. And two days from now, you're going to be walking out of here, knowing exactly how to now all of those one hundred percent in terms of dialing in each of those parameters. And in our next session, you're gonna learn howto test and find out exactly whether or not you are optimized in each of those areas. But if you can get to where you need to be in each of those areas, you will be in that state where you can achieve ultimate human performance. So that's, how I would define it and that's kind of kind of the lens through which we're going toe attack ultimate human performance over the next few days, so for some people, you know, we've got different goals for example, this is one thing I really want to get into this year for me is I've been an iron man triathlon for a while and I want to move on and try some obstacle racing and do things like spartan races and things of that nature, so I know we've got some people who want to do things of that later I'm curious as I'm going through some of these slides what some of the goals are of people who are out there if you're signed a foreign events, people on the internet, if you're signed up for an event, I'd like to hear some things you know, iron man's marathons five k's losing twenty pounds being around to see your grandkids hit a home run, you know, I want to hear some goals so that I can kind of kind of tweak this and make sure that I really customize what I'm saying to you. So as I'm going through some of these, start thinking about that and let me know some for some people. It's ah it's achieving a traffic on for some people it's looking good naked or looking good with your shirt off it's fine to have that as your goal for achieving ultimate human performance and you don't have to have an athletic goal you can have an aesthetic goal and using the concepts that will go over, you'll be able to achieve that as well. Um, you know, of course optimizing fat loss, optimizing, fertility, libido, all of those type of things will go into a cz well, but for for you guys, what exactly is that goal? What? What is that event that you're looking to achieve? Do any of you have something specifically in mind that you want to go after in a broader for eternity in a less broad sense than just being generally healthier, just generally achieving ultimate human performance and justice hands gone up? So please don't say so have a third kid, my goal would be to be the cool mom, the mom that my kids want me to be on the team, you know, like, I don't want to be a sideline mom, I want to be a mom who can actually participate, um, and drive my kids to try new things and do new things. Um, so that's it, I love it. Cool to be a super mom that's, right? You guys, aesthetically, I'd like tio improve my shoulder to waist ratio, and then in terms of, uh, kind of my health and vitality, I'd like to improve my energy, and then I'd like to reduce back pain which is kind of the impetus for me having being able teo you know, become able to do the side splits in the front splits I did that through yoga and roll thing and I'm three quarters the way there, but I just want to push it so that I don't have to deal with that anymore yeah, you're going to love the mobility section that we get into in session three today we're going to cover a lot of stuff relevant toe back pain, shoulder pain, hip pain kind of moving through the ranges of emotion that you want to move through and doing it in a in a way that goes way above and beyond yoga for example, so did you have your I didn't but I would like to look right on these two coattails it's pretty much the same thing I have two children also and I'm no getting up there and age so I would still want to be able to form like I was in my thirties on twenties and I don't see any reason why I shouldn't be able to do that. So this being able is like an anti aging type of approach correct and of course, who doesn't want to look better naked? Yeah yeah of course so live forever and look good naked doesn't wonderful goals there were more resilient athlete as a football player here we're getting hit and yeah, you can improve your performance of your on the sideline injured, so improving my resiliency is a definite goal, right? Right. Tomorrow will be going through a ton of bio hacks, and in this room there is a a table full of bio hacks. I actually paid a hefty fee to the airlines to bring many, many pounds of bio hacks down here to show to you guys and lots of them are right there in that in that recovery room to help your body doubts back faster from everything that you're throwing at it. So pay attention during that session because a lot of this stuff is not expensive. If you just have to know, you know what it is and where to find it, and when you start bio hacking your way to better recovery, it makes a really profound difference. How about in the chat rooms where some goals that are out there we've got so many people from just people wanting to run their first race? D'oh boy tie fighters? Yes, summer says that they want to run a fifty k without my guts falling out this spring on air in a spartan trifecta this summer and returned from a trip to uganda without my gut being from all the new foods and haringey says, my goal is to climb a rope but the so called spartan race in january that is awesome I actually don't know what a spartan trifecta is that that sounds very so if she wants to expand on that, let us know that he would be very interesting to hear about so of course the question that that we have to ask ourselves as we go after these amazing performance goals from, you know, recovering faster to being a supermom tio doing the mysterious spartan trifecta is are we healthy on the outside and healthy on the inside too? And this is where it gets kind of scary and for me personally it was really kind of almost like a come to jesus moment when I realized that for me ten years almost of doing iron man triathlon and I you know, I played collegiate tennis and did bodybuilding and I've always been into these extreme sports, but I realized about two years ago that despite how low your body fat levels are despite how cool of ah oven event you've achieved that it's actually possible to be dying on the inside and to have very, very poor help while you're doing these type of things. For me there was an event called that ancestral health symposium and it's it's a symposium that I really like to attend it it's it's a great one I believe ancestry foundation dot or ge is the is the website for that event, but there was a talk they're given by a physician named dr james o'keefe and he's researched specifically people who do extreme endurance events, marathons, ultramarathons, iron man, triathlons, things of that nature and in his research he began to find some very concerning things about what was happening in the hearts of these folks. If you look at some of the more famous athletes in something like endurance sports, you know, we've got a list here of primarily professional athletes, and if you go down through this list on dh, these include world champions olympians micah true, the first name listed there is famous for his role as the white horse, kabbalah blanco and in the book born to run and you know, he was found dead from from being out on a trail run, and most of these folks have either died or suffered serious cardiac events, and they would be considered if you looked at them to be like greek gods and goddesses like literally like a tw, the pinnacle of their sport. And yet on the inside, they're all suffering some pretty serious issues. If you take a look at this slide, I'll go over some of these issues, but when these were first brought to my attention a couple of years ago and I really saw this research that was suggesting that there really is a a point of diminishing returns with exercise and with training I began to make it my goal to figure out how we can do these type of things, how we can achieve amazing feats of physical performance and not have these type of things happen it's possible to do it, it delves into this concept called beyond training that that all beginning into here in a little bit, but it's possible to avoid some of these issues. So some of the things that you see, a disruption of electrical rhythms of the heart. So I I personally went in a couple of months ago to my local heart clinic, and I actually asked for what's called a stress electrocardiogram, and this is where they hook you up to a bunch of electrical leads, and they put you on a treadmill and you run, and you see what's going on with your heart, and specifically, they look for what are called pvcs or pair of ventricular contractions, and this indicates abnormal electrical activity of the heart, and in many athletes, what they find is that once you reach a certain level of intensity, you start to experience pvcs that go way above and beyond what, like a normal, healthy person should be achieving. And so that's one thing that you have that you'll that you'll tend to find on, and I'll tell you, in a second what they found on me when I was when it ended that test in large heart and a thickening and scarring of the heart's connective tissue this is this is also known as athletes heart maybe you've heard of this as a medical student before calvin because I know that you were kind of interested in sports medicine but it's you know you've got your your a tree in your ventricles in your heart you can actually get on enlargement of those but also a thickening of the walls in your heart and that can put undue stress on your heart during physical activity so at the same time that we're making our hearts stronger it is possible through excessive physical activity and I'll explain you in a second what access I mean give you guys an actual number of minutes because this has actually been looked into but excessive physical activity can actually cause your athletes hard to kind of be a catch twenty two and start to work against you um we tend to see some things that are associated with the repetitive cardiac injury that can occur when we're when we're training for events when we're attempting to achieve ultimate human performance that go above and beyond things that we would think would be associated with our hearts such a sleep disruption digestive issues what I call a broken gut or a leaky gut sore joints brain fog you're going to learn about the gut brain connection and also about the heart brain connection over the next few days and how issues with your gut or issues with your heart can actually affect your thought patterns and your brain low testosterone and also in female specifically low progesterone, which is a little bit similar in females to what testosterone is two males we also tend to see this not only can that cause heart issues, but it can also be associated with these same type of repetitive cardiac injuries that tend to occur during endurance events holes in the heart which sounds really nasty and it actually is you can get holes leakage, abnormal heart rhythms which are very similar to the disruption of electrical rhythms. There are some people that I'll be in the middle of like a race like a marathon a triathlon some of those professional athletes, silas said earlier have all of a sudden have their heart rates go to two hundred two twenty two fifty right through the roof during an event and that's that's basically a fib relation of the heart and it's it's your heart just basically getting wacky to the point where you might even need a pacemaker and these are issues that can arise just in the general population he's training increased body fat which is really ironic and really frustrating for a lot of people tend to see this in aa lot of females especially who are training for endurance sports in particular they tends to start to work for for iron man, triathlon and marathon on things like that, and they tend to toe basically gain weight, which could be really frustrating and seem ironic. But it happens on dh, then calcium buildup in the arteries that's, another big one and will be hitting on how you can avoid calcium buildup in the arteries were all taught that we're supposed to get calcium for bone density. Andi can actually be an issue if it's not balanced properly with some of the other fat soluble vitamins, and if it's not balanced with magnesium, and if it's not balanced with proper training, we'll get into how avoid that issue as well. But these air some of the things that can occur, and when I talk about achieving ultimate human performance, achieving amazing feats of physical portman for perform performance so many times I can say that word over the next couple of days. Uh, what we'll find is that when I talk about doing those things without destroying your body when I say destroying your body, these are the type of things that I'm referring to, and I tend to see these over and over and over again in the folks who I work with, who are out there getting the kind of tests that you're going to learn about how to do on yourself. And getting the type of blood tests and biomarker evaluations that you're going to learn, how to do and how to interpret. I see this all the time and it's scary. I mean, there's, there's people all over the place who look really good, but who are dying on the inside from these type of events. So I mentioned that I was going to talk about the actual number of minutes that we tend to see this law of diminishing returns occur with when it comes to physical activity and this kind of interesting charge. This is based off of some of the research that was done by this doctor o'keeffe guy, that it was just talking about whose presentation that I listened to a couple of years ago that kind of got me thinking about looking into these type of things a little bit more. So here's, how we can we can interpret this. My cool laser is is not showing on the tv, but I think you guys can follow along. As I point if you look at moderate physical activity, you can see that when it comes to reducing what's called all cause mortality reduction. Or your chances of dying you know when you're exercising for the purpose of anti aging or living longer a aa lot of times this all cause mortality is based off of risk of chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease things of that nature and also just when you actually drop that so if we look at moderate physical activity you could see that it tapers off it's about ninety to one hundred ten right around in that range when you look at a lot of professional athletes who are out there training three, four hours a day that's kind of scary to know that you reached that law of diminishing returns at about ninety to one hundred ten minutes when we start to exercise adam or intense right at a very vigorous rate, you can see that if you're doing say like all this stuff that has gotten really popular these days cross fit high intensity interval training p ninety x I mean you know high right training programs that are super intense once you reach fifty to sixty minutes that's the point where that stuff actually can cause a reduction and health and no longer offers you benefits when it comes to reducing mortality so there are people out there who are going out and doing crossfit a couple of times a day there are folks who are out there practicing for sports who are doing high intensity interval training their people training I personally know many ironman triathletes, people working towards marathons for definitely exceeding sixty minutes a day of what would be considered vigorous physical activity now, for people who have been athletes for a long time, your definition of vigorous physical activity may not be quite a cz vigorous as or maybe much more vigorous than that would be considered to be on a chart like this. But we're looking at around seventy to eighty percent of the vote to max, which is about a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten and there's people working out on it on a ten on a scale one to ten in many cases doing this high intensity interval training. And once again we see that fifty to sixty minutes is about the drop off when it comes to doing these type of things. Question where some of the signs like within your body to tell you this is vigorous for you personally, right? That's when it comes down to testing your body. So there are certain tests that you can do to find out what your personal maximums are if you were to wander into your local university like the exercise physiology laboratory or local university, which you can call on the phone and arrange a test with in many cases. For you to go and look to your local sports medicine facility or sports medicine physician there's a test that they can do that's called a vo two max test it's also known as an indirect calorie entry test and I mentioned that stress e c g test on the treadmill where you can get on a treadmill and see if you have a lead double abnormalities this is kind of similar to that in that you get on a treadmill and you start to exercise at greater and greater intensities you can also do it on a bicycle and you are a mask and the mask measures the amount of oxygen that you consume and the amount of carbon dioxide that you produce and what happens is you reach certain points along that that exercise range where for example you'll reach your ventilatory threshold where you start to produce a bunch of carbon dioxide and that's an indication that your body is producing lots of lactic acid and you've reached that point that would definitely be considered vigorous and then you can keep going past that point and achieve what's called your vo two max which is your maximum oxygen utilization aa lot of people think that that occurs when you're at your maximum heart rate it actually occurs a little bit before your maximum heart rate you actually top off in terms of her auctions and utilization before you even reach your maximum heart rate that's a really good test to get like your custom numbers because as you're doing that test, you're measuring your heart rate so you can know hey, a heart rate of one hundred sixty five I am at my threshold, I met what's called my lactic acid threshold or my ventilatory threshold, and that would be considered to be in that vigorous range. You wouldn't want to spend more than fifty to sixty minutes in that range on a daily basis if you were serious about exercise, not potentially causing some of those problems that I talked about earlier, when we're talking about like a moderate range that's, usually more along the lines of about forty to sixty percent intensity there's another threshold that you reached during this test during that indirect kalorama tree test called on aerobic threshold that's the point at which you reach your maximum fat burning zone. So it's actually really cool number to know, because if you know your maximum fat burning zone, this is a strategy I'll use with clients who who I'm trying to get to lose fat faster. We'll do like fasted morning exercise sessions in that fat burning zone, but that would be considered to be more along the lines of this intensity of that moderate intensity, I couldn't find out what your fat burning zone is, and if you're at that, we're exceeding that for more than ninety minutes a day, that's once again, the point of diminishing returns when it comes to not only you're not getting any additional benefits, but you also increasing the risk for for some of these repetitive cardiac injury issues. So that kind of makes sense. Yes, thank you, yes, that's how often should you have that testing? Because I'm assuming if you're pushing your threshold, you're going tio become more efficient changes changes exactly. These numbers change, but they're going toe when I say change, we're talking about five beats here, a maximum of around, like ten beats there, so you've always got kind of that range when I'm writing out a program for an athlete let's say somebody wants to train for a ten k, and so we're riding out a series of workouts over thirty two weeks to get ready for a ten k about every four weeks or so, I include a test where they'll get on a bike and they'll exercise that what's called their maximum sustainable pace, and that means that you are, for example, peddling a bike at as fast the pace is you're able to maintain without your legs getting rubbery or without your form suffering, and if you take your average heart rate over twenty minutes of doing that, it correlates pretty well. With that lab value that's called your ventilatory threshold so you can actually do this without going into a laboratory and looking yourself up to all this expensive equipment and get a pretty good approximation and so when I'm testing people frequently if they're like training for an event or something like that we'll just do that test and it's called a lactate threshold test if you were to google that you know how to do your own lacked a threshold test I've got articles that ben greenfield fitness dot com about how to hop on the bike and do that yourself but that's a pretty pretty decent test that you could do yourself the other cool part about that test is if you find out your heart rate during those twenty minutes and you subtract twenty beats that number that you get when you subtract twenty beats is actually almost exactly your fat burning zone so it's kind of a cool way to figure out what your lacked a threshold is and what the fat burning zone is without having to go to a lab to do expensive testing so yeah great question yes sir um where does your daily kind of stress way into this you know like no do how you do your little right in way breathing and you can kind of see where your adrenals are on that day so you know even though you might have a high vo two max but you're kind of beat down quickly how how that glad you've asked this question because this is kind of the blue sky this is the this is the part that we haven't researched really is your body can be working on a laptop, responding to an email and from a hormonal standpoint from an adrenal gland standpoint, not know whether you are running from a lion or responding to an email that's the way that stress works as far as how your body can churn out adrenaline and a lot of these stress hormone type of responses, whether it's, physical stress or mental stress or emotional stress. And so I think that's a big issue here in one of the missing components is maybe somebody is keeping themselves underneath that ninety minutes of exercise per day, but they're living a really stressed out lifestyle and maybe that's accounting for two hours of exercise per day that's just stress based exercise that's why it's going to be really important? I believe it's arf first session on day three, where we're going to be going over seven of the best ways that I found to reduce stress to pay attention to that stuff you mentioned like the m wave that's, one of the bio hacks that will demonstrate that there are ways that you can throughout the day actually monitor your stress using something called heart rate variability one of the best ways that I found to really truly find out whether or not your body thinks it's running from a lion and you can feel fine and I've tested myself and the body's heart rate variability is super duper low and then you start to realize yeah, I actually am shallow chest breathing and my shoulders tents and you don't really know until that little app on the phone starts to vibrate until you know it shows you a little breath pacer and tells you to slow down but I'll demonstrate that stuff later on today in the in the bio hacking section but yeah, I mean it's a really, really good point that this is not just exercise dress it's also physical and emotional stress so I mentioned that I personally did this test to find out what had happened to my own body and whether or not I'd harm to myself. It turns out that when when I went in and did what's called a stress s e g and these air to tests that won't that wouldn't cost you a lot of money if you wanted to go into your your local heart clinic and get these done, you could get them built the insurance you could pay out of pocket these air the type of test it'll give you a lot of value without you actually paying a bunch of money if you're concerned about this and you want to test your heart once called a stress electrocardiogram so I did that one and there's also one called it's a basically an ultrasound of your heart it's it's an echocardiogram and what that looks at just like an ultrasound and you're looking at a baby in a mommy's tummy you're getting a look at your heart and any thickening in the heart any significant scarring of the heart those type of things those two tests put together an echocardiogram and a stress electrocardiogram those were the two tests that I did and those were the two that I recommend if you want to see if what you've done to your body so far has resulted in repetitive cardiac injury and in my case I have abnormal lower electrical rhythms once I get to it to a high enough rate ah high enough exercise intensity it turns out that I start to just like throw out tv sees all over the place on the other thing is that I have athlete's heart I have the thickened heart adrian thickened heart ventricles on dh so for me, I was able to you know, I'm I'm thirty one years old, you know, I was able to do that over ten years and it scares me to think about, you know, some of the folks who are out there doing some of these things you know, in their fifty six c seventy years old. Who may not have taken into consideration some of the things that you guys are going to learn over the next few days. So, you know, just using myself as an example. You know, I'm personally a little bit scared about some of the things that I've done to my body. And so now I'm using a lot of the techniques that I'm going to teach you guys to make sure that I mitigate the damage for the rest of my life going forward.