Ben’s Smoothie Recipe, A Look Into Life Wave, & More

Resources mentioned:

• Creatine: A Conditionally Essential Nutrient
• Podcast with Carly Kramer:
•  Sodium bicarbonate and its effects on exercise performance
  • Arm & Hammer Baking Soda
  • pH is a scale used to grade how acidic or alkaline a solution is
    • 7.0 – neutral
    • lower – acidic
    • higher – alkaline
  • Body pH varies
    • Blood is slightly alkaline at pH 7.4
    • Stomach is highly acidic at pH 1-3
  • The body’s pH is tightly regulated
    • The acid-base balance is controlled mainly by the kidneys and lungs
  • The long term exposure to metals from alkaline water generators
  • During anaerobic exercise, the body’s demand for oxygen exceeds the available supply of oxygen
    • Muscles cannot rely on oxygen to produce ATP
    • Muscles switch to a different pathway – from aerobic to anaerobic pathway
    • The major byproduct of the anaerobic pathway is hydrogen
    • The pH of the muscles becomes lower
    • What about lactic acid 
  • How can sodium bicarbonate help?
    • pH of 8.4
    • Buffering excess hydrogen during anaerobic exercise
  • The kidneys produce their own bicarbonate
  • Bicarbonate can accept a hydrogen ion and increase it’s pH to make it less acidic
  • During exercise, bicarbonate and other buffering agents can work to pull hydrogen out of working muscle and into the bloodstream
    • Muscle returns to a less acidic state – less burn
  • Scientists have been looking into this for decades
    • Study shows supplementing with sodium bicarbonate significantly increases muscular endurance and performance
    • During interval training, significant improvements in workload and a significantly greater time to exhaustion
    • For strength performance, mixed research results
  • 0.3 grams per kilogram
    • Taken in the one to two hours leading up to exercise
    • Small sips to prevent stomach distress
  • If you have a cramp, you just have to taste something very bitter or super salty
  • Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker
• The concept of Zeitgeber and using food to shift circadian rhythm
  • Zeitgeber is an environmental or external cue that can influence your circadian rhythm
  • Early time-restricted eating can help in getting up earlier
  • Body clock can sync up with external cues – sunlight
  • These circadian rhythms and processes that go on in your body operate on internal clocks
    • Hormones, the immune system, digestion, and every organ run on some sort of timing system
  • The master clock of the body – SCN (SupraChiasmatic Nucleus)
  • Ben has a blue light box – similar to sunlight, keeping Ben awake and alert
  • Awake & Alert by Lighting Science LED bulbs
  • At night, red incandescent light and blue light blocking glasses
  • Melatonin suppositories (use code BEN to save 5%)
  • Exercise is another way to cue your body’s sleep cycles
    • Micro workouts can help with sleep deprivation
    • Creatine 
    • NAD 
  • Eight Sleep Mattress
  • SleepMe (use code BEN to save 25%)
  • BedJet

• Should you ice your muscles?
• RICE treatment – Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation
  • A hypothesis that by icing or getting a muscle cold, you are shortening or restricting the body’s natural inflammatory processes, not allowing the body to mount its own natural response to this hormetic stress
  • Thus you are going to recover more slowly if you get cold after a workout or if you ice an injury
• An experiment with rodents
  • Induced injuries that would occur after sports exercise in people an average tough human workout
  • They then did icing and looked at muscle regeneration
  • Skeletal muscle regeneration was actually promoted by icing
• Macrophages are immune cells that orchestrate the repairing process of injured muscle
• Icing reduces the accumulation of these pro-inflammatory macrophages and prevents the expansion of the muscle
• Japanese scientists explained why icing actually works to help an injury heal faster