Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Test Your Body Pt. 2

So a chest c r p is the next one hsc aarp is probably the most valuable measurement when it comes to seeing how you're doing from an inflammatory standpoint, cardiac physicians will use it to even see about your risk level for something like a heart attack, but c r p is something that will show up in the bloodstream as cellular damage occurs, it's basically mobilized to assist with shutting down cell damage or assist with inflammation to help to repair a certain body part so he really damaged muscles or your muscles are constantly damage state syrupy will be up ideal. Syrupy levels are under one. I try to keep mine below zero point five between ten and forty can indicate systemic inflammation. I've tested myself the day after a half iron man triathlon and been at five, so understand that ten to forty is pretty high, but if you're consistently testing hs therapy on bits even above one, I think that that's cause for concern, especially from an anti aging perspective just living in a chro...

nic state of inflammation. So hsc, aarp is a blood test now, as I'm going through some of these next tests, what you should know is that if you live in the u s, there are a variety of ways to test most of the folks who I work with. And I put all of my preferred testing sources over at ben greenfield fitness dot com slash creative live but most of the time all work with wellness fx, which is a company based right here out of san francisco. If someone needs a consultant or physician toe, walk them through their test. If someone just wants an independent test mailed to them with the pdf results via email, and they want to do their own self interpretation, I use a company called direct labs, usually for that if you live in the uk or australia or your international viewer, sometimes it can be a little bit diff, but more difficult to find some of these tests, but there are there places popping up now that offer these type of tests internationally as well. For example, we were just in thailand, and there was there was a resort there that we stayed at for people living like hong kong and singapore that could go to to get their tests done there. So there are ways to test most of these, and just about any any dot can find most of them. So says a chest c r a p is good there's, another marker of inflammation called interleukin six, and if you test that you're above one, then you're in a constant state of hyperactive immune response. A lot of times, people who um, are eating foods that they're allergic to, like gluten or soy or dairy, or something like that? Even if they don't go out and do a food allergy tests because you could get a food allergy test? But if you just want to see if your immune system is constantly just like hyper alert, you can get interleukin testa's. Well, now the thing is hsc. Our values tend to correlate very well with interleukin six values. I personally don't test interleukin just because the panel that I use this is through wellness. Fx usually and that's not part of their inflammation panel. But I know if my hsc therapy is high, my interleukin is probably high as well. And if my hsc europeans low my inter lukens probably low so you could do one or the other when it comes to hse european inner lukens, your body send off some kind of response that you're allergic to something having have a test like this in many cases? No, it depends. So gluten. For example, you have an enzyme, I believe it's number two trans glue, tammi names to that lives in your stomach. And if you are actually producing a gut auto immune reaction to gluten and trans glue tamponnaise, too, is activated. You get tummy upset and gas and bloating and some of those issues that come when you eat gluten. But you've also got trans glue tammi nation, I believe it's number three, as well as a number six, and these are found in, for example, like your brain and your nervous system and your joints. And sometimes you go for years eating gluten, getting that immune response and not knowing that you've got nervous system degradation going on until you actually start to experience like I q deficits and alzheimer's and things of that nature, I guess I'm talking more about like skin exuma and yes, julie sends you signs exactly exuma acne readiness swelling like your body, khun sends you signs and signals of an auto immune reaction, certainly, but you can also test to see, because sometimes excellent could be something topical you put on your skin and it could also be, you know, an inflammatory response is something that you're eating when it comes to exercise. Interleukin or a chest c r p are are both good corollaries for inflammation now omega three fatty acids are your body's primary anti inflammatory fatty acid and examples of omega three fatty acids would be like your traditional mediterranean diet stuff, right? Like paul of oil and walnuts and cold water fish, you know sardines and mackerel things of that nature, you can take fish oil like if you take a good, cold, cold processed what's called a triglyceride based fish oil that's a really good source of omega threes as well, but you can also test omega three's v n omega three index and you want to look for omega three tissue concentrations of around sixty percent that would show on omega three index of anything below eight percent or anything above eight percent. Now sixty percent omega three tissue content would basically be it means that you've got enough omega three fatty acids and enough omega three receptors to where you actually have that ability to fight off inflammation with fatty acids. If you're doing a lot of nut butters seeds, nuts, I don't care how healthy they are, especially roasted and heated seeds and nuts vegetable oils which a lot of healthy foods at restaurants or cooked in he did oils that are fragile like you keep extra virgin olive oil around you saute foods in it that's not healthy that creates a free radical and omega six fatty acids from from vegetable oils and from those seed s and nuts and things of that nature as well as like cows that have been fed grain fish that have been farmed these air all sources of omega six fatty acids not omega three fatty acids now one of the best ways to reduce inflammation from omega six fatty acids is not necessarily as most people believe to completely stop eating seeds and nuts and some of these omega six vegetable oils but soon to instead ensure that you are eating enough omega three fatty acids toe block a lot of those receptors that the omega six fatty acids tend to take up so more often it's omega three fatty acid deficiencies that are an inflammatory risk mohr than it is that extra spoonful of almond butter that you had so it's okay to you know make a six fatty acids but you can get in omega three index test it's kind of a weird website name for this test I don't know why it is, but the website I believe is genetic tests dot com even though it's not really a genetic test they do in omega three index and I'll be one way that you could get your omega three's tested t s h k this one is huge on dh it kind of hits a personal issue with me because I've had some serious thyroid issues from hyper cortisol ism and uh excessive carbohydrate restriction from not eating enough carbohydrates and t s h values can definitely be reflected by this a lot of times if you go to the doctor and you tell them you want to get your thyroid looked at, they'll do a t s h tests and as long as it's like below for they'll tell you you're ok but the fact is what happens is, say just thyroid stimulating hormone oku turnout thyroid stimulating hormone when you need to produce more thyroid hormones and so what happens in response to an increase in thyroid stimulating hormone is your body produces t three and in your liver and your gut and other tissues that gets converted into an active form called eighty four and what happens is that if you test and your t s h values are constantly high that indicates that for some reason your body is sending out this message over and over again that you need mohr and mohr thyroid hormone because you're not you're either not getting that thyroid hormone conversion or your thyroid is low so you'll tend to c t s h b pretty elevated in levels of high, high cortisol like adrenal stress where you become insensitive to thyroid hormone the thyroid receptor on your cell becomes insensitive to thyroid hormone you can also see really, really high levels in a case of inadequate carbohydrate intake, which reduces the ability of inactive thyroid hormone to get converted into active thyroid hormone but testing t s h is really important, and you want to look for values between zero point six and two point. Oh, and if I see values that are way, way higher than that which a lot of times can happen again with hyper cortisol is, um um, I mentioned gluten that's. Another issue with thyroid bacterial infections in the gut can cause such issues, but there are a lot of people who test high on t s h and that's it's, a really common variable that I highly recommend you get measured at least once. Check and see where you're at. So, um, lipid panel. So a lipid panel is like all your cholesterol's. Now, this is, um, my lipid panel. So this this basically is a screen shot of wellness. Fx when you test through them, you get this dashboard that basically shows you running value of of your lipids. Now, total cholesterol is up here. I try to keep my total cholesterol above two hundred cholesterol levels below two hundred are associated with lower I q and neural deficits, so you want to make sure that you have enough fat in your blood stream to support a healthy digestive system. However, if you've got high cholesterol and a lot of that cholesterol is getting oxidized, or a lot of it is basically small full of tryg lyssarides very very prone to dig its way into your end of filial cell walls and calls plaque buildup or afro sclerosis then you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot by having high cholesterol so if you're shooting for very good levels of cholesterol you want to look for a few things low to moderate levels of ldl cholesterol you could see the miner at ninety one high levels of good cholesterol or hdl and you could see that miner at one forty five low levels of triglycerides it's really important to look for so if I see high total cholesterol I don't I don't give somebody high five and say hey good job you're supporting your nervous system if tryg lyssarides air high and corollary with that it's a bad sign because it means you've got a lot of small cholesterol particles jam packed full of trackless rides when I say small cholesterol particles I refer to this v l d l c very low density lipoprotein cholesterol ok you can see that mine a rock bottom even though my total cholesterol is high and that's a good thing it's also why just testing ldl and hdl doesn't tell you very much at a minimum you should have your doc test ldl hdl and try glitz a rides so you can at least make sure that your hdl to try glitz ride ratio is good that you have high hdl and low triglycerides if you really want to delve into things you can actually measure your particle size that the l d l c and there are a few other little measurements that you know we don't really have a ton of time to spend on a ce faras like lp little and applebee but basically they're proteins that are part of the cholesterol surface and in some cases when those air elevated and individuals that can be a cardiovascular risk factor but it kind of depends appleby is almost always high in every single athlete that I ever see tested even if the rest of their cholesterol panel is pristine and I suspect that the reason for that is because appleby is one of the ways that cholesterol talks to cell receptors for cholesterol and because cholesterol is used to shut down inflammation I think that because athletes are just shuttling mohr cholesterol around their bodies and because they're experiencing higher levels of inflammation that cholesterol needs to respond to that's why almost every athlete I test tends to have high appleby levels so I don't necessarily flag that is being a big big issue and athletes so let's go over some more values I g f g f his insulin like growth factor and in some life growth factor it's aurora good corner with growth hormone which is very anabolic which helps you to recover anything below about one hundred fifteen is usually result of not enough calories exercise stress um I tend to see really, really low I jeff a lot of times and like females who are eating enough calories and who are doing too much endurance training and you tend to see that loss of fertility that I talked about earlier a memory, a lot of things like that go hand in hand with low I g f if you are trying to put on muscle look at naked, that kind of thing low idea values are also not all that great how through the roof constantly elevated idea values can be a risk for cancer because it is a growth factor, but you don't want your I g f levels to be rock bottom and anything below about one fifteen is not ideal. We also can look at kidneys, blood, urea, nitrogen and creatinine, so if you test your blood urea, nitrogen, creatinine, which is going to be a really common value to see on just about any standard blood tests that looks at your kidneys, you're going to see it tend to be a little bit more elevated and athletes because we always ten have some markers of muscle damage and nitrogen breakdown in our bloodstream as well as creatinine, which is a breakdown by product of creating and indicates that we've beat up our muscles that's fine, but if it's consistently elevated especially creatinine above one point two okay, and blood urea nitrogen above twenty one that's a sign that you're putting a lot of undue stress on your kidneys. So remember you guys, it's all returns the lens through which we see the world when we're trying to improve performance at the same time, stringer organs along for us long as possible and wind up with really high quality of life later on in life. These are the type of things that we measure to make sure that our organs are really being taken care of. Okay? Testosterone big one um now in females, testosterone tends to get kind of variable. Eso you really kind of got a look at the at the time of month that you test this charge a little bit complex, but all it's showing is that on day four, day fourteen and day twenty one of the females cycle, testosterone tends to fluctuate quite a bit, so I can't I can't really test testosterone quite is accurately on females as on males unless I know the time of month for them, but you can see that even though free testosterone levels decrease with age as you go down, you want to try and keep testosterone elevated and what I generally look for war in guys who I test, especially for which andropause or low testosterone tends to be a big issue. Is that free testosterone levels tend to be close to what you'd expect for someone in like the twenty one to thirty year old age group when we're looking for that concept of achieving ultimate human performance and in the supplement section in the food section will talk about ways that you can naturally increase testosterone. But if you have low testosterone combined with either high levels or low levels of cortisol, it could be a real world indicator that you are not recovering properly or overtrained or overreached. See here's why just testing cortisol wants is an issue, though, and here's why I had kind of an issue with just doing like a blood test. Of course, all this is going to return to that question that bionic a asked about cortisol measurement so here's your normal quarter cell range throughout the day, you can see that it fluctuates all over the place during the day, so there's a test that you can get that allows you to measure court assault throughout the day. That's really good for athletes to do if they ever suspect that they're overreached or their overtrained not just athletes, but anybody who's experiencing emotional stress for lifestyle stress, but this is one of the reasons that you need tio make sure that you test multiple times throughout the day. So testosterone and court assault is what we want to measure but what you're looking for is if you're keeping track of testosterone accord assault anything above a thirty percent drop in the ratio of testosterone to court asal is considered too extreme for effective recovery of performance after training okay now there is an actual test that allows you to keep your finger on the polls of testosterone in court assault or or dea and cortisol which is very close to this testosterone of course all ratio and this is the test that I was going to tell bionic about the adrenal stress index or in a s I okay that company I mentioned called direct labs they'll order this for you there are other places you could get it if you google a lot of places it's four salivary measurements of korda saul I believe there's six of dea throughout the day if you get kind of like the cadillac version of an adrenal stress index it also test you for glee adan gluten sensitivities secret torrey idea which can indicate auto immune issues and progesterone levels which for females especially is really important because that's kind of similar to testosterone in males and lo progesterone and females is something that I tend to see quite a bit so this is an awesome test it's the number one test I recommend if you suspect that you might be overtrained or in any state of adrenal fatigue so it's called a sigh or an adrenal stress index super easy to get it's all salivary you just basically celebrate into two sniff a jar of peanut butter if you have a hard time celebrating it's what I do so now speaking of number one tests, I've talked about heart rate variability a lot and now I'm going to show you guys what I'm talking about when I talk about heart rate variability so your heart has tickle rhythm and there is what's called a vagus nerve that feeds into your heart. There is a connection between your heart and your brain and feedback from your what's called your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight and flight nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system which is your rest and digest nervous system both feed into the heart and if the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are in good balance, then what happens is that every time your heart beats there's just a slight variation in the amount of time between heartbeats. It's what I like to call a well tuned heart meaning that it's just a little bit of a change just in milliseconds and that's called a variability it's a heart rate variability so a change in the amount of time a slight change the amount of time spent between heartbeats is very good and a high heart rate variability is one of the best cheap instant ways to know whether or not your body is truly recovered and ready to train. Okay, so some of the ways that you contest heart rate variability, this device is called a tinky. It plugs into the bottom of the iphone, you put your thumb on it, and it not only measures h r v, but it also measures poll ts and breath rate, and it also does pulse ox symmetry, which I mentioned earlier, so it will give you a pretty good score. This is a cool devices is one way that you could measure heart rate variability. Uh, there is a company called a zoo meal that makes an app that you can download that uses the camera lens on your phone to test your heart rate variability. The method that I use is a company called sweetmeat and sweet beats for that measurement, you need to download the sweet beat app, put it on your phone and have a wireless heart rate monitor like this that you wear that you can use to measure your heart rate variability throughout the day or in the morning when you get up now. Sweet beat has also just developed a wearable patch that looks like this that you place that about a forty five degree angle. Uh like so here, okay? And this has a wireless receiver and that will transmit data to your phone throughout the day, so this would be another way that you can monitor stress throughout the day. This one is not available commercially yet, but sweet beach should release it commercially pretty soon all of these air excellent ways to track heart rate variability and track the health of your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system. If the adrenal stress index were the number one salivary index had recommend, then the heart rate variability tests is the number one kind of like tech tests that I'd recommend to find out whether or not your body is stressed or overtrained. So these are examples you know this is a just from my sweet beat online data you can see huge fluctuations in my heart rate variability data based off of things that I've done one thing I want to plant to here's a here's a huge dip right and heart rate variability I did a half iron man triathlon on this day so the next day you can see both my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system were incredibly beat up. Okay, now let's say you don't want to use blood, you don't want to use fancy test tools things of that nature there are other ways that you can do adrenal fatigue measurements if you google dr wilson's adrenal fatigue quiz that one's really, really good at measuring whether or not you are under reached or whether you're under recovered or overtrained okay it's a quiz that you take online blood pressure when you are over trained or you are overreached or your body isn't recovered you produce lower levels of el das theron which regulates your blood pressure so if you get a blood pressure cuff and you monitor your blood pressure, what you do is you sit down for about five minutes stand up if your blood pressure drops when you stand up, then that could be an indication that you are in a stage of adrenal fatigue because you're not producing adequate l'd ostro same thing for a pupil test meld austrian regulates potassium and sodium levels in your body if you shine a light like a flashlight it your eyes, you'll notice that your pupil constricts just a little bit and if you aren't in a state of adrenal fatigue, you'll usually stay relatively constricted but if you look at it and you can look at this in the mirror after about thirty seconds or so, you'll notice it dialect and start to fluctuate a little bit and that could be a sign that you're old austrian is really low and you're in a state of overreaching or overtraining just from a simple flashlight on the eyes pupil tests that's another good one that you can do and then finally a temperature graph you could just keep one of these next year. Bedside and rapid fluctuations in temperature or fluctuations in temperature throughout the day can indicate or throughout the throughout the week, like a morning resting temperature can indicate adrenal fatigue if your temperature is normal like close to ninety eight point six, but it's jumping all over the place by more than about point three. So ninety six point nine ninety six point three, jumping around like that. That could be a sign that your adrenal fatigue but your thyroid is ok now if you're taking your measurement and it's not only jumping around but it's. Also consistently low like in the ninety six is ninety seven, etcetera. That could be a sign that you not only have adrenal fatigue, but you've also got some thyroid issues going hand in hand with that which is very common. So these are all simple home tests that you can do to kind of find out where your body's at and how healthy it actually is, how well recovered it actually is so simple test that can point in the right direction. Okay, I mentioned the micro nutrient analysis. Um this one is known as spectra sell a company called direct labs which I mentioned earlier they also do a micronutrient alice iss itt's very very similar to this specter cell it's called an ion panel on dh again I have a link tio that one at benry pole fitness dot com slash creative live micronutrient analysis tests for all these things we're talking about like food cravings could be amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals all that stuff basically micronutrient alice is expensive this is like a thousand dollars test. Okay, so it's not cheap, but if you were to do something like this just is like a one off if you've been living with this diet that you think is going to be your diet for life and you think you've got everything dialed in and you just want to check and see if everything really truly is dialed in for a micronutrient standpoint, this is like the test to do ok it's going to give you a lot of good value when it comes to actually finding out what's going on inside your body from like a micronutrient standpoint. So, um there's even this company in arizona that if you send them your analysis results they will do like custom ivs for you with that will like replete the vitamins and minerals that you're deficient in and you can actually replete them intravenously which is kind of out there in terms of achieving ultimate human performance, but I know some people are just in that kind of stuff, so when you're trying to determine the tiny or gaping holes that need to be addressed from a nutritional supplementation standpoint, that kind of information is really valuable. So those you guys are all of the different ways that you can test your body, those are all the different methods that I've used on myself that it will pull out news with an athlete, those air, the biggest winds when it comes to things you could do qualitatively and quantitatively so I know that was also a lot of material, but do we have questions about this stuff now? The question does that comment? I probably should just cut you off earlier, but I didn't want tio on the side test bio health labs has one that also what they're two o five adrenal stress ah index, it also measures the testosterone and the different estrogen's in there as well as the other tests, right? So in addition to getting dna and progesterone in court, it's all you get those others and what was the name of that town that's bio health said there two o five bio health two o five they're two of five adrenal stress, okay, gotta and by the way, folks, many of these tests you just order to your home and again you're like dripping saliva into a tube in your kitchen and you put it into a prepaid label and send it off and get your lab results. Sometimes the updf sometimes if it's like wellness effects it's, an online dashboard, some tests you have to drive to lab that's close to your house, the lab I go to his five minutes from my house, and I go in there and they take a few blood measurements, and within about four days, my results are e mailed to me and I and I log in. So, um, now I know there are probably a lot of other questions out there about this stuff, but I really hope that you guys are equips now with the knowledge of where to start when it comes to testing and tracking. And man, if I had to tell you just one place to start resting heart rate super easy to track heart rate variability, I mean that you're going to you're going to find that that will be the number one test that you'll see coaches, athletes, people going to more and more even in corporate environments, the track stress get on that bandwagon early, there are so many, so many ways you contest heart rate variability that's a really good value as well so I would at least start with those. And then you can dig into these other values as as you decide to geek out even more and more.