I am excited to have the opportunity to reconnect with Robb Wolf today! Rob is a delightful and pragmatic research biochemist and two-times New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. One of his books, Wired to Eat, is my favorite, and I often recommend it!
Robb used to be a research scientist, and he also has a background in Jiu-Jitsu. In this episode, he and I dive into everything related to electrolytes. We discuss what piqued his interest in his training journey, the problems with traditional oral rehydration therapies (Gatorade), and what happens with electrolyte loss. We get into some common conditions that can make us lose more electrolytes. We talk about the role of specific electrolytes, including magnesium, calcium, potassium, and sodium, and explain how to determine if you are creating too much hormetic stress in the body related to overtraining and over-fasting. We also look at lifestyle balance, Zone-2 cardio, and the value of strength training.
I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation as much as I did recording it! Stay tuned for more!
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Robb talks about his journey and explains how he became interested in electrolytes.
The American Council of Sports Medicine’s guidelines for athletes in hot and humid environments is 7-10 grams of sodium per day.
Are premade conventionally-available oral rehydration options beneficial or not?
Robb explains how his product differs from Gatorade.
HRV improves dramatically when people are on point with their electrolyte intake.
If you are feeling off, you might need some sodium.
Some factors, other than exercising, could increase people’s need for electrolytes.
Why do breastfeeding moms need sodium to increase their milk production?
What are the roles of magnesium, sodium, calcium, and potassium?
Are you creating too much hormetic stress in your body from over-restricting macros, over-fasting, and over-exercising?
Maintaining a balance in your lifestyle is vital!
What makes Zone-2 cardio so unique and beneficial?
How much training is ideal?
“Even a small female might need ten or twelve grams of sodium per day to be able to function athletically, especially if it is hot.”
-Robb Wolf
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Connect with Robb Wolf
Transcript:
Cynthia: Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent are to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Today, I’d the opportunity to reconnect with Robb Wolf, who is an absolutely delightful pragmatic research biochemist and two times New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, one of which is one of my favorite books that I recommend on the regular, Wired to Eat. Today, we dove into everything related to electrolytes, what got his interest piqued in terms of his own training journey. We spoke about what is wrong with traditional oral rehydration therapies aka Gatorade, what happens with electrolyte loss as some of the common diagnoses and conditions that can make us lose more electrolytes, the role of specific electrolytes including magnesium, calcium, potassium, and sodium, how to determine if you are creating too much hormetic stress in the body, and by this I'm specifically speaking to overtraining, over fasting, and then looking at lifestyle balance. We spoke a quite a great deal about Zone 2 cardio as well as the value of strength training. I hope you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it.
Talk a little bit about your journey. What got you so passionate, interested, vested in electrolyte repletion and I'm presuming it has a lot to do with a lot of the intense training you were doing?
Robb: Yeah, both humbling, it's a fairly interesting story, but it's also one of important to remain humble and continue to look for people smarter than yourself. But I've been eating a low-carb diet for at least 23 years now. Largely settled on that due to, I guess, this intersection of just poor blood glucose regulation. Reasonably lean, I donate blood, I'm not iron overloaded, I lift weights, I do cold exposure, I do everything I can to try to improve insulin sensitivity. On my LPIR score, I'm very insulin sensitive. When I do fasting insulin, I'm insulin sensitive on all that stuff. But I just feel like garbage. I can do one reasonably carby meal here and there. But if I do it serially, if I have breakfast, and then lunch, and then dinner, by the second or third meal, I'm just starting to get into this carb roller coaster and it's off to the races. So, 23 years ago I figured out that a lower carb diet was good for my blood sugar regulation and then this interrelated gut autoimmune issue like it definitely seemed to benefit with even reduced fiber intake on that. I'm not 100% carnivore, but it took me forever to figure out that this giant raw green salad is crushing me. Just for me personally, it was a terrible idea. And so, there's been all this evolution with things, but I do Brazilian jujitsu, have done it for years and it's a very glycolytic sport, which is at odds with a low-carb diet, that glucose glycogen driven activity, boxing, kickboxing, CrossFit, 800-meter runs that's right in that wheelhouse and that's what I'm not fueling.
Low-carb diets can top off glycogen, but it takes some time. Although, there's some research that suggests over time people will adapt into that, it's just always been a challenge. I tinkered with pre-workout carbs and post-workout carbs and it helped, but if I ate enough carbs to really move the needle on my physical performance, then I started feeling like garbage because of the blood sugar dysregulation and everything and I just, what's the line from C-3PO with Star Wars, “It's our lot in life to suffer.” I was like, “Okay, I just suck” and this is just what it is.
Cynthia: [laughs]
Robb: But I always kept poking around looking for stuff. Something that I would search was Brazilian jujitsu ketogenic diet. I just see if people were out there doing it. What was interesting about that is there were people not a time, there was a lot of complaining similar to mine. It's like, “Oh, I feel really good keto, but it's hard to run that with jujitsu practice.” But I started finding some people that were succeeding. The funny thing is, it was mainly women, which there's all this hubbub around like, “Oh, women on low-carb diets, it's going to destroy their adrenals, and their thyroid, and they're going to become amenorrheic and all this stuff.” In fact, I don't doubt that that happens, but I think that there's a lot of other stuff going on. Primary is inadequate electrolytes, and then also I think they are protein deficient, a bunch of other stuff that you're running across some folks that we're competing at a super high level in jujitsu were ketogenic female, I'm like, “Well, what the heck are they doing?” Almost to a person, they were in this group called Ketogains and I started poking around the Ketogains group, and these two guys that found at Ketogains, Tyler Cartwright and Luis Villasenor, really sharp guys. Very prickly at times, too. They're very direct with people and I oftentimes think that I have the bedside manner of a porcupine, but they put me to shame in various points, but they are really smart, and I would argue that they have probably worked with more people, both body recomposition and also high-level athletics doing a low carb or ketogenic diet and possibly anybody in the world. There's maybe three to five people that are similar to them and the volume of people that they've moved through all this stuff.
I started hanging out with them, and chatting with them, and became friends with all those folks, and I asked then I'm like, “Hey, so I'm struggling with jujitsu in this low-carb diet. What do you think I have going on?” They looked at my protein, carbs, fat and they're like, “I think that you need more electrolytes, specifically sodium.” For ages, I've been in this camp that sodium is not the driver of cardiovascular disease on that hypertension side. I think it was 2000-2001 that I really became aware of insulin resistance causing a change in aldosterone production, and aldosterone causing this retention of sodium, and hypertension mainly being a metabolic disease and not too much sodium issue. All of my life, all of my career, I have been in this like, “Oh, sodium is not the problem.” You need a lower carb diet and then all this stuff will resolve. I was not afraid of sodium, but I really wasn't actively adding sodium in my diet. Any good person who's written his own New York Times bestselling books and has a science background, I ignored their advice and went for another year of just struggling, and flailing, and everything, and then they did something crazy. They said, “Hey, why don't you weigh and measure all of the food you're eating and all the electrolytes you're consuming or you think you're consuming especially sodium?” Okay, that's very reasonable. They wanted me to add at least five grams of sodium per day. When I did all my horse and pony show, I was getting fewer than two grams of sodium per day and which is why I felt like, “Shit all the time.” Blood sugar was good. I struggled with blood sugar for so much that I think I had assigned all of existence to blood sugar control. Okay, I've got my blood sugar control, but there's going from seated to standing and almost blacking out. There's having that low gear while grinding out of workout and all this stuff. They looked at where I was at and they're like, “Are you going to train today? Are you doing jujitsu or anything else?” I'm like, “Yeah, I'm doing some jujitsu later.” They are like, “Okay, do you have any pickle juice?” “Yes, I have some pickle juice” “Okay. Get an eight-ounce cup, get about six to seven ounces of pickle juice. Do about half of that, 20 minutes before you go to jujitsu, and then the last half right before you get on the mat.” I did it and I was turbocharged. I just had energy for miles, it felt my heart rate at any given work output was 10 or 15 beats less per minute. I was like, “What is going on?” I went back to them like, “Hey, guys, I think sodium is really important for physical performance.” They are like, “Yeah, you're an idiot. [chuckles] We know.”
Cynthia: [laughs]
Robb: I started really with a fresh set of eyes digging into all this stuff and I'm like, “Oh, we're an electrochemical battery, everything in our body is driven by sodium-potassium pumps, every nerve impulse, every thought, every muscle contraction is only a consequence of sodium-potassium gradients.” If the sodium-potassium ratio in your body is off, things start to go sideways. There's nothing more tightly regulated in the body than sodium-potassium levels other than maybe pH like you could, ah, but we can exist and function with an order of magnitude change in blood glucose levels. But if our electrolytes get off by just a little bit, if our pH gets off by just a little bit, we're dead. We're nonfunctional first and then we're dead. And so, I was just like, “Oh, my goodness, this is just crazy.” Then I had been a fan of low-carb diets for 23 years. I've written two New York Times bestselling books with low carb as a central feature and not a word about sodium in it, because it just wasn't on my radar.
If one goes to a well-trained dietician, who prescribes ketogenic diets for say like epilepsy that person will make damn sure that the person receiving that prescription will get at least five grams of sodium per day as part of their regimen because these people understand the naturesis of fasting, which is low-carb diet or fasting, we drop insulin levels, insulin levels drop aldosterone and other hormones that cause sodium retention drop, and we just burn through sodium, we dump a lot of water, then we start dumping potassium to try to reestablish the sodium-potassium ratio, and this is where people can just go down the drain in absolute shocking rapid fashion when they're on a low-carb diet and exercising. I discovered that, “Wow, even a small female might need 10 or 12 grams of sodium per day to be able to function athletically, especially if it's hot, especially if it's humid, and high motor output, and all this stuff.” And so, Tyler and Luis just deserve massive props for their understanding of this stuff. They really had this buttoned up and they had understood it for a long time. My God, the slings and arrows they took over just trying to get people to drink some pickle juice, or try this, or try that, it was crazy.
But when I had this awakening, I talked to them, I'm like, “Hey, clearly, this is potentially 99% of the problems that people report on low carb, sleep disturbances, elevated heart rate, HRV changes, thyroid dysregulation, all of this could arguably be driven by inadequate sodium intake” and they're like, “Yes.” “Okay, so, how do we get this out to the masses and convince people to fix it?” “Well, let's do a downloadable PDF that just tells people eat olives, eat pickles, drink pickle juice, mix up this keto weight is what we call it initially, which is we would mix it in half gallon containers and it was this much sodium from table salt, some NoSalt, some magnesium citrate, and then we would do lemon juice and stevia water, shake it up, and we put this up on the interwebs, and within six months, we had a half million downloads of it. It was jaw dropping.” We weren't collecting emails, there was no marketing around it, we just wanted people to know, “Hey, y’all, electrolytes are important, especially if you're on some sort of a low-carb diet.” We just were inundated on social media like people tagging us. They're like, “Oh, the keto weight is amazing.” This is so awesome. But I've got to say it sucks when I'm traveling, and I go through TSA, and I've got three bags of white powder with me.”
Cynthia: [laughs]
Robb: They've got all their stuff with them. And so, folks were like, “Hey, could you do some convenience thing?” I was like, “What, like a scooper or a stick back?” They're like, “Yeah.” We started looking into it. The more I looked into it, the better the idea seemed. The first flavor we came out with was citrus and we formulated it such that if it failed as an electrolyte product, we could pivot and sell it as like a margarita drink base, and fortunately the company has done well, and now we market it as both. But that's where all of this came from. I had no designs on having an electrolyte company, or selling people salt or anything, but it was first figuring out what I was doing wrong in this whole thing. Oh, man, it's so sad because I was a decent athlete even on the low-carb thing, but I'm looking back into all these problems I had, adrenal burnout and different things. It was totally because I didn't have enough sodium. I needed so much more. I could have probably done a little bit more carb cycling and stuff like that too, but with adequate sodium, my sleep is better, my recovery is better, I don't feel totally sympathetic nervous system blown out. I would say 20 of the 23 years, I was ignorant as to the need for additional sodium.
The fortunate thing is, this topic seems to have really-- we're at a point where this is topically relevant for some other smart people in the health and fitness space. There's a power bodybuilder guy, Stan Efferding, who very much advocates for better sodium intake. James DiNicolantonio of Pharm.D. who wrote The Salt Fix and whatnot. There's definitely this watershed moments. The USDA Food guidelines, they really came back around and they're like, “Sodium isn't quite the horrible thing that we thought it was,” but they still said, “You need to limit the amount of sodium that you eat.” But it got a little bit of a reprieve stay of execution and the last go around with stuff. But that's my long wandering story on, where this critical need for better electrolyte management, specifically, sodium came from. It was first my issues and then when I realized where I was failing, I looked at the folks that I'm trying to serve, and I was like, “Oh my God, 95% of the people I'm working with, their first three, first five issues that they contend with on lower carb, paleo, keto, carnivore, it's sodium inadequacy for the most part.” It's cool that we started the company with this freemium thing with this free downloadable guide, which we still have. If people go to drinklmnt.com/homebrew, they can still get it.
Even if people are like, “Oh, we think your electrolytes are expensive.” It's like, “Here's the free version. Go make it yourself.” It's cool that clearly identified a massive need in this scene, which I would have never dreamt that there was a hole in the electrolyte world. When you think about Gatorade and Powerade, and this and that and the other, I would have never dreamt that there was, but when I sat down to formulate this thing with Tyler and Luis, I was unencumbered with—I was not in the sodium is dangerous camp. Coming from the paleo background like Loren Cordain was very much anti-sodium intake, which I get why, but I think it was also super misguided, particularly within athletic populations, but I just dug into the literature and found things like the American Council of Sports Medicine, their guidelines for athletes in hot, humid environment is seven to 10 grams of sodium per day. Seven to 10 grams, not milligram. Seven to 10,000 milligrams of sodium per day, high temperature, high humidity, high motor output, and then if you-- Those are in people who are eating 50% to 60% of their calories from carbs and so they actually have enough insulin elevation to probably cause some better sodium retention under those circumstances. What does a low-carb person need? Well, they might be double that. Again, that's a long meandering story. But I think that we've had the success that we've experienced because we didn't launch with the product first. It was really just, we found a problem, we really tried to fix the problem, and then the people who were fixing the problem told us, “Hey, this is great. We're solving this, but we’d really like a convenient way to deal with this.” And then we ended up creating a stick pack product around addressing that need.
Cynthia: Well, and I'm so glad that you did, and I love the journey of the N of one, then expands into diving down this rabbit hole helping to dispel a lot of incorrect dogma. As a Western medicine trained Nurse Practitioner, ER medicine, cardiology better believe I knew all about electrolyte repletion, which really evolved into my business because I would talk about the fact that, yes if you defecate, if you urinate, if you sweat, if you breathe, you are losing electrolytes just by that virtue. You add in physical activity, humidity. I live in a super humid part of the country and thinking about my athletic boys, really, really important. I now have my 14-year-old on board, my 16-year-old thinks I'm crazy and that he doesn't need electrolytes, but he plays lacrosse and football and the summer he's going to get it-- I was explaining to him, “We're going to find a workable solution. We're going to find something that appeals to you and you're going to use it.” So, when we're talking about-- [crosstalk]
Robb: Just let it give one calf cramp that nearly shears his tib-fib in half, and then it's like, “Okay, you'll try this now. That'll probably be the quickest thing to solve that.” [laughs]
Cynthia: Well, and it's interesting. I encouraged my 14-year-old, I kept explaining to him about sodium, potassium, magnesium, and chloride, and I said not to mention other electrolytes. I kept explaining, I said, “If you swim hard for three hours, what do you think happens?” I encouraged him, I said, “You've got all these different flavors. Find a flavor that you like.” Of course, I don't antagonize my husband. He picks the one that my husband likes best, but that's a whole separate story.
Robb: Right.
Cynthia: I said to him, “Tell me how your practice goes when you're well hydrated versus not?” He actually came home and said, “I drink four of these a day now.” He drinks four packets on days he trains, he sleeps better, he has better performance, and he's a butterflier. He needs a lot of power to get through those workouts, which are pretty brutal. For him, he was humbly surprised and for me I feel it's a mom win, because what happens in most sports practices, they have Gatorade, they have Powerade, and maybe the thing to touch on next is, what is it about sugar and the oral rehydration therapies that are conventionally available? What actually happens? Because we know that sugar can actually facilitate the uptake of sodium. I understand that [crosstalk] why it's probably added. But I think for a lot of people, they don't recognize that the high fructose corn syrup, and artificial colors, and all these other components of these premade oral rehydration therapy or maybe I'll put an air quote as a therapy, because it may not actually be particularly helpful when you look at the macros, how this can be beneficial or nonbeneficial and how your product which I fervently stand behind and love, how your product is very different than should I even say that Gatorade? I can say Gatorade. It’s my podcast.
Robb: Yeah.
Cynthia: [crosstalk] more conventional options that are out there.
Robb: Yeah. Here's an interesting aside. We had a good friend who went to the Gatorade Museum, University of Florida and everything. I think their daughter was starting school there and they're like, “Oh, we'll go buy this Gatorade Museum.” And they had one of the first containers of Gatorade ever, they’d hit commercial production and it had one gram of sodium per serving, just like LMNT does. It had to sugar also but in the beginning in the paleolithic of oral rehydration products, Gatorade was pretty damn good. When you think about for the time, it was very well thought out. Right prior to Gatorade itself, the thought around hydration was generally a chew on salt tablets and then sip water per your thirst. We never had people who like it, military bootcamps, and football double days, and whatnot. We shifted into this thing where people should drink eight-ounce glasses of water a day, and pee clear, and all this type of stuff. We started having people get sick and die from hyponatremia from so diluting their sodium. You're an ER practitioner. You know how dire that situation is. That never happened. 1940s, 1950s, they would tell people to chew on salt tablets, and then sip on water up to their thirst satiety mechanisms. That is so much better informed than where we are really now.
I know the question was specifically around the glucose and all that, but we went from salt tablets, drink to satiety, the Gatorade was this game changer where they had a significant amount of sodium, they had some glucose. Glucose does facilitate the uptake of sodium, but you could almost look at it the opposite way. These transporters, the SGLT transporters or sodium glucose transporters, you could almost make the case that the sodium facilitates the uptake of glucose, not the other way around. Really, at the end of the day the mechanistically like the biophysics, this is actually the way that this stuff works. In a situation like cholera or somebody's going to die because they're just blowing through both body water, and electrolytes, and somebody's vomiting, potentially blowing off massive amounts of acids, so that they're becoming alkalotic and whatnot, that can be a lifesaver. You need something where you can stomp on the gas pedal with it and really get this rapid response. But there's a couple of different problems with that. One is that there's a claim that you can't absorb electrolytes without glucose which is patently true or untrue. We can actively transport that stuff and it costs us a little bit of energy to do that. We can use amino acids, charged amino acids in the same way that the glucose can actively transport that stuff. We can use ketone bodies or butyrate. If you're eating some fiber or you're in a ketogenic state, those things can help absorb that. So, there's a couple of different mechanisms whereby we can bring these items into the body.
A piece of the story is that I think by and large people are just consuming too much sugar, particularly when we look at youth sports. We've got these six-year-old kids that are playing soccer and they're barely doing much of anything. They spin their arms, and do a little bit of warm up, and then they chase a ball that's nearly as tall as them, and they do 20 minutes of it, and it's like, “Okay, kids, here's some cupcakes, here's some cookies, and then here's a big bottle of Gatorade.” They may be burned 15 grams of glucose during that whole thing and now we're sticking 100 grams of glucose back into the body to top them off. So, that's kind of a problem. Really specifically the reason why we didn't use glucose for LMNT is that are you a large male, a small female, are you doing a super hard physical activity, are you doing a Zone 2 cardio session where you're only trying to mobilize fat? Most of the products that, I mean, all of the products effectively exist. They just have this one size fits all glucose dose. What I find is that it fits almost nobody's needs perfectly and it imperfectly matches 99% of folks needs. What we recommend to people is—
An example for myself. I might have a container. This a larger container. I might do to stick packs of LMNT in this, and I'll take that to jujitsu with me, and I'll just sip on maybe half of this, which would be about a half a liter through my technique portion, which is a little demanding, but it's not super demanding. Then when we get ready to do open [unintelligible [00:26:15], basically, sparring with each other really hard grappling, a look around the room and if it's a bunch of beat-up old has-beens like me, I may not even add any glucose to the mix. But if it's a bunch of 20-year-old, no-necked wrestlers, I will take glucose tablets and throw those down. I don't even add glucose to my drink, because I want to control how much glucose I get separate from my electrolytes. If I throw the glucose in here, then I'm stuck with whatever is in there. I actually dose the glucose separate from my electrolytes, so, I can really control that stuff. Not everybody needs to do that, not everybody does do that, but what I find is, folks need for electrolytes are more consistent than their needs for glucose happened to be. I toggle the glucose switch separate from the electrolyte switch and then that way people can really fine tune that stuff.
Again, if we just had this one size fits all product, there are a lot of people doing intermittent fasting, and they'll do some sauna, and if you do intermittent fasting and sauna, and you're not doing electrolyte repletion, then you're writing yourself a prescription for, “I desperately want head trauma.” Peter Attia posted, where he was fasting, and he did a sauna, and he split his head open, and he's like, “This decorated surgeon, and physician, and one of the smartest people on the planet.” I pinned him a text. I'm like, “Peter, really? You are fasted low carb and you're in a sauna? You didn't think you might fucking pass out?” He's like, “Yeah, I know. It's an idiot.” In this way that when we separate the glucose from the electrolytes, then people can really easily customize all that stuff.
Again, I know that that was a super long rambling answer, but that's the background on all that stuff. There are absolutely reasons to add glucose or other things to facilitate that oral rehydration therapy. But funny enough, liquid IV, which is one of the more, the other popular brands, they're coming out with a sugar free version, even though they've hung their whole business on like, “You don't absorb electrolytes without glucose.” That's a lie and we've been mentioning you that is not true. There may absolutely be reasons why you want glucose, but we've been arguing to maybe decouple those two things and be able to toggle them separately. So, their next product that they're coming out with is a sugar free version, which I think is validating what we've been up to for a long time.
Cynthia: Well, and I think it's really interesting how personalized. For everyone that's listening, obviously, I use electrolytes all day long. I'm a huge proponent of them. I'll share something personal. I had surgery a couple weeks ago, orthopedic surgery, and I knew that all the things I track, my Oura Ring, my HRV, all these things, I knew these metrics would be off. I took my CGM off because I knew for the first week after surgery, I was sleeping well. What's been interesting and I was saying to my husband is that my HRV has been so off, even though my metrics for deep and REM sleep are actually not all that bad. I'm getting plenty of sleep and I actually said to my husband the other night, “I wonder if I need more salt.” I was doing my LMNT, I was using a product that I have, I was adding Quinton ampoules. I was increasing sodium and I found three ampoules of Quinton on top of my normal dose, then my HRV came back down, then my deep sleep started to increase. And so, that personalization, this is where I think these metrics of having bio tracking devices is really helpful. I just find that having a CGM or even a glucometer, and I know you're a proponent of those, and then having an Oura allows me to really fine tune what I need to the point sometimes that I was like, “I have to back off,” because you can get obsessive. But I think it also speaks to what you were saying that there are times when you need that glucose when you're grappling with these young gentlemen, but if you're with a group of your peers, you feel you can just drink your LMNT and that meets your needs. So, let's talk a little bit about what are some of the common ways that people will lose electrolytes other than just exercise? Because I really lean back on my cardiology background, and I think about one disorder in particular POTS or dysautonomia, it was such a problem when we had patients that came in and got diagnosis, we would refer them to the POTS experts because we were essentially left to just give them drugs that would keep their blood pressure up. Because one of the things they dealt with was a significant degree of orthostasis and orthostatic hypotension, which means when they would go from a seated or standing position, they would have significant fluctuations in their blood pressure. But what are some of the other things, I think about medications, I think about POTS or dysautonomia, which is unfortunately becoming much more common, think about breastfeeding women, what are some of the other things that you have found that electrolytes have been super helpful for?
Robb: Just as a broad background, I'm glad that you mentioned that HRV and I too get a little, almost prickly about devices because it feels there's about a two-or-three-month period of insight that we get from something like an Oura Ring and Oura people are going to hate me now, but I feel it hits a brick wall at some point. I was finding that I would go to bed, and I’d read a book, and I had my blue blockers on, and I fall asleep, and everything, but the Oura Ring would deem me and it would say that I had sleep latency issues. Because it was interpreting my reading as this inability to fall asleep. Then I would take the ring off, and until I was done reading the book, and then I put it on, and then I was getting my good sleep score. I'm like, “Oh, screw this. I'm [crosstalk] over it.”
Cynthia: [laughs]
Robb: Because you start doing all kinds of weird stuff just for the [unintelligible [00:32:08] better score. But all that said, man, it's been such an eye opener how dramatically improved HRV is when people are on point with electrolytes. It's this thing that just happens immediately. A cool LMNT of fixing electrolyte status is, if you're feeling off, you just feeling for so long, I can't tell you how many afternoon espressos I drank, and what I needed was to eat a pickle. I needed to eat a pickle, drink pickle juice, or to eat 15 olives. I didn't need an espresso boost. I needed some sodium. It was really the big deal. The things that definitely affect it. Heat and humidity are huge factors and just ambiently being in a warmer environment really changes things. We spent two years living in Texas and now, we live in Montana, and my electrolyte consumption dropped by a third, just out of the gate just arriving here, because it's much cooler, it's much less humid, I don't sweat as much, and I'm still doing jujitsu, I'm still working out. But it was just survival in Texas. You'd go outside and get hit with that wall of Southern [crosstalk] humidity and you're like--
Cynthia: In oven.
Robb: Yeah, it's just like an oven and it never really ends. That's a big deal. But ironically, also cold and elevation are really big factors that can sneak up on people. When it's cold we tend to get a dysregulation in our thirst mechanism. We tend to not be as thirsty. I think that that's probably because our body doesn't want us to consume liquids which are themselves cold. There's a feed forward mechanism there, but both cold weather and elevation can dramatically increase our electrolyte needs, exercise can double or triple. If I need four to five grams of sodium, if I'm relatively sedentary say, I'm writing a bunch of papers and stuff like that. If I'm active, and it's a little warm, and I'm doing some jujitsu, some [unintelligible [00:34:22], I may need 10 or 12 grams of sodium. I've got a doubling, nearly a tripling of sodium need. Kind of controversial, but there are some good papers that support this, but both the severe elements of COVID and long COVID, you see a chronically decreased sodium levels in people and just very anecdotally, we've had folks.
Again, it doesn't have to be LMNT. There's nothing magical about that other than it tastes good and it's convenient, but if we just get people to address sodium needs, I feel way better. A bunch of that long COVID issue goes away. Even in the acute phase, where people are maybe teetering on the brink of things getting more severe, adequate sodium intake seem to be a real game changer for people. Those are definitely big ones. Really early on, we started getting tagged by the folks in the POTS community, because one person did LMNT and they're very aware of the need for higher sodium intake, it's hard to find a product like, all of them have sugar and none of them really have adequate levels of sodium and whatnot. We started getting tagged on this stuff and then we did a whole month last year of POTS awareness. And so, we've had a really awesome synergistic relationship there.
And then another one is breastfeeding, ironically. Breastfeeding in general, but also within this exclusive pumping communities, everybody gets fractionated into their different camps, but for variety of reasons there are moms that want to make sure that their kids get the breastmilk, but either they have latching issues or work, whatever. The exclusively pumping moms are in this pressure cooker because they have to perform. There's all this stress, all this scrutiny and everything. My wife, she exclusively pumped on our oldest daughter for 13 months before we started incorporating some other stuff. She was just at her wits end by then. The electrolyte story was not on our radar at all, but we started getting tagged again on social media where these exclusively breast pumping moms, which show the little clear volumetric cylinders and it's like, “Yesterday, I pumped this much” and it was just a paltry little amount. It's like I took this and they would show a picture of an LMNT stick. It's like, “I took two of these,” and then they would have six full bottles of breastmilk the next day, and I was like, “Wow, okay.”
Then I dug into the physiology of breastmilk production. It's not just fluid volume. If you just drink water, it doesn't necessarily mean that you increase breastmilk production, because it's an osmotic gradient. You need sodium as a driver of that osmotic gradient to pull the casein, the proteins, the lipids, the whole ball of wax is driven in an osmotic gradient that it is driven by sodium. Then you look at cortisol release, which is antagonized by sodium intake. We tend to suppress cortisol release with adequate sodium. Cortisol is one of these major antagonists of breastmilk production, improving sleep, enhances-- There was five or six different mechanisms where I was like, “Oh, this makes sense that adequate electrolytes are really going to benefit there.” The breastfeeding mom is a biggie, the POTS, athletic activities, heat, humidity, elevation, different temperature scenarios, those are all really big situations where we see increased electrolyte need for sure.
Cynthia: Well, it's really interesting, because I was one of those moms. I worked part time as an NP, but I rounded in the hospital and so, more often than not, I would pump when I could have eaten. I remember, if you were a mom who breastfed, and worked, and had to pump in between all the things, I always remember that days I rounded in the hospital, I could never get the same volume of breastmilk production. On the days I was off, because on the days I was off, I could drink water or whatever I was drinking, and I could urinate at will. When you're in the hospital, you want to be a camel. You don't want to have to go to the bathroom, especially when you're rounding on patients. So, that makes complete sense. I think that's really interesting.
One thing that I wanted to touch on is, when we're talking about electrolytes, we’ve talked a little bit about sodium and I think people recognize these names, but at least cohesively talking about what are some of the major roles of magnesium. Because magnesium is the one that in cardiology, everyone always thought about potassium, but never magnesium. Especially, with my electrophysiology background, all the arrhythmia patients I took care of, I just always say, “Is anyone checked in magnesium? It can't just be any old magnesium. It needs to be serum, RBC mag.” Because then we could properly replete and that oftentimes would fix just about any problem we were experiencing. For the benefits of listeners who may not be as familiarized with what some of these particular electrolytes do in the body highbrow, just because I think it's important they hear me harp about magnesium not as much about potassium, but certainly about sodium.
Robb: Yeah, so, broadly, we have, I guess, the main electrolytes that are going to be active in the human body, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium in the positive charged metal ion world and in the anion world, we have chloride, what, phosphates and bicarbonate, which I guess technically plug into that. I'm probably forgetting one or two somewhere in there, but those are the biggies and they cover most of what we have going on. Calcium is a player in this, but it's a player in muscle contraction, but it's secondary or tertiary in the dynamic flux happens on a much slower timeline. It's again the thing that really changes most dynamically. I would argue it is probably sodium is probably the biggest dynamic element, and then potassium secondary to that, and then magnesium tertiary to that. Sodium and potassium ended up getting partitioned in our cells and extracellular fluid spaces in such a way that it's almost like water behind the dam. If you think about water behind the dam, when we open up a gate, and we've got a turbine as the water goes through that, potential energy, the gradient of high water here going to low water there, there's the ability to attach that to doing work. We do similar things with gradients of ions in our body. So, we'll have a lot relatively of sodium outside of cells, a lot relatively a potassium inside cells.
When those two equilibrate, we're able to attach energy production out of that. Everything we do, all the ATP synthesis, nerve contractions, everything is driven by that. Those are also why if we get a little bit off on sodium or potassium levels, we start feeling like garbage rather quickly, because fine motor skills, eyesight acuity, hearing, all those things start going sideways pretty quickly. I had not really thought about this. But even scenarios like when we start having hearing difficulty and vision loss at very altered sodium-potassium levels, it's literally because the nerves aren't functioning properly anymore. It's not just fine motor skills and whatnot. It's actually other sensory input. Then we have magnesium, which plays so many different roles in the body and it is technically an electrolyte, but it ends up being involved in ATP synthesis, and it plays a role of catalyzing the conversion of ATP into energy. It's involved again in muscle contraction, relaxation, and it's more synergistic with calcium in that regard.
What's interesting to me in this whole big story is, we definitely want adequate levels of magnesium. We tend not to get what adequate levels of potassium, we tend not to get them. Most people overconsume sodium relative to potassium and magnesium, but it's because they eat a ton of processed food. Whenever somebody shifts from a processed food diet to a minimally processed diet, they automatically increase their potassium, magnesium and decrease their sodium, which ironically, also tends to increase their sodium needs in that whole story. But if we get adequate sodium, our kidneys do a pretty good job of, “Okay, we'll keep this much potassium, get rid of that much, we'll keep this much magnesium, get rid of that much.” But if we are underpowered in our sodium intake, it's actually difficult for the kidneys to sort all of that out and keep us at a stable state. I do put the sodium intake as primary in this story because if we get that appropriate, then everything else has a tendency to sort itself out rather well. But if we are inadequate in sodium, the kidneys are stuck with, “Okay, well, do I jettison a bunch of potassium to try to re-equilibrate the sodium-potassium ratio? Do I jettison a bunch of potassium and magnesium to try to re-equilibrate these things?” Ideally, we eat a minimally processed Whole Food diet that we supplement adequate sodium. And by supplement, I mean, salt shaker, eating salty foods like sardines, and olives, and anchovies, and all that type of stuff. And then things really click. We're getting into a slipstream there where our physiology is working really well and we're doing it in a way that's pretty easy to implement on a lifestyle fun.
Cynthia: Well, I think it's just important for people to understand that there is more to electrolytes than-- I think a lot of the women that I work with think about electrolytes purely from the perspective of, “I know when I take certain forms of magnesium, it helps me sleep. I know when I take certain forms of magnesium, it helps me go to the bathroom.” That's one of the reasons why I definitely wanted to connect with you, so that we could provide a broader context. Now, one thing that you alluded to towards the beginning of our conversation with this overtraining syndrome, over fasting, over restricting macros, and I would imagine in your community and probably over the past 23 years, you've seen this happen both in men and women. And so, where do you think that stems from? Because I'm starting to see some of this because of the environment that I'm in. Working with a lot of women that if a little bit of hormesis is good, more has to be better is the methodology they'll go through like, “Restrict more carbs, eat less food, overfast.” What are some of the ways when you're working with people or you're lecturing on these topics, you try to bolster greater awareness of some of the strategies that we’re going a little bit overboard, we’re overtraining, we’re over restricting in a way that's not beneficial? I would say that a little bit of hormesis is good, too much is not good.
Robb: Yeah, I did my first article that was published on intermittent fasting in 2005 and it went out mainly to a CrossFit-related scene, CrossFit-related community. By 2006, I desperately regretted releasing because these CrossFitters, God bless him, but yes, from an ancestral health perspective, we are an active species. Yes, we should be outdoing things and moving, but if somebody is doing CrossFit on anything like a consistent basis, your allostatic load, your total stress load, you are right at the max. You have stomped the accelerator through the bottom of the car and you're just hammering it. That's okay. If you're really into CrossFit or whatever that's fine. But then people will see things like, “Oh, I did keto and I lost 100 pounds.” They're like, “Well, shoot, I just want to lose five pounds.” Clearly, losing five pounds is easy compared to 100, which isn't necessarily true as you and I both know. [laughs] Once you get lean, it may actually be harder to lose that last spot, but I'll go keto. “Oh, and this intermittent fasting thing is great and I need autophagy because if we have autophagy, then I won't get cancer and I'll never get neurodegenerative disease.”
You end up with folks who do CrossFit twice a day, six days a week on their day off, they do hot yoga with a 20-mile ruck march with a 40-pound vest, and they eat five grams of carbs a month, they intermittent fast 22 hours a day, and they're like, “I don't know what happened, but my hair all fell out and I haven't had a libido in 18 months, and my performance has been completely retrograde.” It's like, “Well, you took all of these different things, all of them that can be good at one level, and you just layer them on top, and they're not additive or multiplicative.” Right at the beginning of COVID, I did a talk that unfortunately, didn't get the circulation I would have hoped it would, but it's called Longevity: Are We Trying Too Hard. You can link to it if you want. One of the topics I'm most proud of because I am as big a fan of fasting and ketogenic diets and whatnot as anybody in the world, but you don't-- This thing will come up around LMNT. People will say, “Does LMNT break a fast?” I'm like, “Well, what are you doing?” “Well, I'm fasting for autophagy” and I'm like, “Well, you get autophagy drinking coffee, you get autophagy lifting weights, you should get autophagy going out and getting a tan. You'll get enhanced autophagy doing a fasting mimicking diet, which is only doing 500 to 700 calories a day.”
Doing this thing that is sugar and calorie free is absolutely not going to break your fast and does that even matter in the big scheme of things and is all of this work with autophagy really at the end of the day all that good for you? Because we have things like the Hayflick Limit and the number of cell replication cycles we could have, and just jamming the accelerate on autophagy means that we may be burning through all of our stem cells. Something that nobody in this like pro-autophagy scene talks about is that animals that are really aggressively fasted, die extremely young, and they die from total systemic organ failure that happens all at once because they ran out of stem cells. I haven't seen one goddamn person talking about this stuff. And so, you have people that are really conscientiously trying to do things to better themselves, and to be in a good situation to age well and whatnot, and I think they've just lost their minds like do some exercising, maybe once a month do that 48-hour fast if you want to. But my perspective, once people are lean and pretty metabolically healthy, if your question is, “Should I fast an extra day a week or should you add an extra day a week of resistance training?” Lift the weights, get the tan, do the meditation retreat. Go join a poker group or something. So, you've got better interactions, better human contact like this work around fasting is, in my opinion, so speculative because what all of it compares is sick animals overfed in a lab environment versus animals underfed in a lab environment. It is not comparing a phenotypic, super healthy, super athletic individual with the fasting.
The question shouldn't be, “Will fasting improve your life versus overeating and being sedentary?” Yeah, absolutely. If you eat less of terrible food, then it's probably going to be a benefit. The real question in my mind, the comparison needs to be, “Are you eating a species appropriate diet?” Going to sleeping, and living species appropriate way, doing some cardio, doing some strength training, that is our control group. Now, let's compare that to the intermittent fasting group and tell me that that is going to double the lifespan of that group. I think it's garbage. I think that you're going to see things go completely the opposite direction. I think intermittent fasting can be an amazing adjunctive tool for just basic calorie restriction, such a powerful tool. Some people that is the thing that they finally get control of their calorie intake and they find that it's easier to do that. But man, when you've got people that are burning the candle at both ends, and run in a gun in real hard with their physical activity, and then they throw carb restriction, calorie restriction, timing restriction on top of all that stuff, too, I think that they're really asking for a lot of problems. I think that the long term, we're going to see not awesome consequences come out of all that stuff.
Cynthia: Well, I think you bring up some really good points because what it ultimately comes down to is we have to have some degree of balance. I always say balance is elusive, but when you're going to extremes whether it's dietary extremes, exercise extremes, fasting extremes, overload of these stressors on the body, which we know can weaken us, they're not contributing to making us stronger as individuals. Now, you alluded to some of the things that you think are especially important in terms of species specific nutrition, species specific strength training, what are some of the other things that you think are really important? Are you a fan of Zone 2 cardio, is that something that you talk much about? I know the answer is yes, but maybe for the benefit of listeners explaining what makes Zone 2 cardio actually unique and purposeful.
Robb: Yeah. Here's the thing. I do think it's super important and it's something that I had underappreciated for a good chunk of my career. What's interesting to me is just stomping around the world. It's hard to stay specifically in that Zone 2 level. If you're hiking, it's very challenging. If there's much of an uphill gradient, you're going too hard, if it's flat or downhill thing, then your heart rate isn't actually high enough. It's actually this is something that I'm intrigued about. If it's so damn important and we get so much benefit from it. It's like, “What the hell were we doing that we could stay consistently in there?” Maybe there's a little bit more to the story that we could be intermittently in and out of that. But it really enhances mitochondrial biogenesis because we tend to be primarily burning fat is the preferred fuel source in that scenario. Some very smart athletes like the famous Kenyan runners will do-- I'm just beating up on fasting.
Now, here's an example we're all singing its praises. These folks will do fasted Zone 2 cardio, but their diet overall is about 70% carbohydrate. High carbohydrate diet to accommodate the high intensity activity that they do. But they will do a morning low-- for them, relatively low intensity. Like I would die trying to run as fast as they do with Zone 2. I would literally keel over and die almost immediately. But that training is almost, it's basically a fat adapted training block that they do because they're fasted, so their liver glycogen is comparatively low, and the intensity is low enough that they're primarily using fat as a fuel source. You get mitochondrial biogenesis, you get angiogenesis, so you get the growth of blood vessels, you get that in the heart, in the lungs, in the muscles, in the brain. We get BDNF release, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is huge for brain health, memory, neurological health. Just as an aside with that, too, for BDNF to be functional in our brain, we have to have ketone bodies present for it to function. It doesn't mean that you have to be specifically on a ketogenic diet, but you can't be so metabolically broken that you're incapable of producing ketone bodies, in which case you don't get that effect.
Stress relief, the literature on strength training, and longevity is not nearly as good or as compelling as cardio and longevity. Cardio really does seem to confer some legit longevity benefits. But I would say also that cardio has been more the darling of exercise physiologists, a little easier to quantify and look at. I do think that a modicum of strength training just really enhances the quality of life that people can have. Primary determinant of staying out of a restroom is just being able to go from seated to standing, and have the strength and power to prevent yourself from tripping and falling, or if you do trip and fall, to not suffer a catastrophic injury like a hip fracture or major fractures. I do think that's important. But the Zone 2 stuff is fascinating to me and it's accessible and it's pretty pleasant. If you can just get people doing it, they can watch a TV show while they're walking on the treadmill or listen to a podcast, you can do it indoors, although I think doing it outdoors, and getting light on your person and everything is all really valuable. But people will immediately feel better and not super sore from doing it. They tend to bump their cognition and their affect and everything. So, it seems to lend itself well to people habituating to it and continuing to do it.
Cynthia: I have to agree. It's funny. My integrative medicine doc is always on my case about Zone 2 training. I figured out exactly how fast I have to walk. If it's raining, I walk on my treadmill, but otherwise, I'm outside. I know exactly how fast I have to walk at what pace to get in that sweet spot where I'm not over pushing myself, but I'm not taking a leisurely walk. I can usually get that end.
Robb: Right.
Cynthia: One thing that I think is important and this will be our last topic is, we're talking about strength training. I think because of where I am life stage wise, I think a lot about sarcopenia, I think a lot about how insulin resistance actually starts in our muscles. When I'm talking to individuals and especially on the podcast, I always like to have this reiteration of how critically important strength training is. For people out there whether they're women that are doing chronic cardio or they're people that are just overtraining, really understanding that muscles are super important in terms of longevity. You mentioned being in the hospital or being in a position where you can go from getting off the commode or getting out of bed, how many 50-year-olds I saw over the years when I was doing rounds, who couldn't get out of bed on by themselves.
Robb: Yeah.
Cynthia: Because their muscles had atrophied so much in their legs that they had lost the ability or the strength to be able to do that. Just want to dovetail this last comment is, in your estimation, what is the minimum amount of strength training that you'd like to see or do you advocate for to be able to maintain and continue to build muscle as opposed to lose it? Because I think for a lot of women when they get into middle age and they're getting closer to menopause, the hormones, sex hormones are working against us unless it's being replaced. And so that in the loss of some insulin sensitivity can make it a little bit more challenging, but certainly something I think everyone needs to be working towards.
Robb: It seems at least two days per week is a program minimum. If folks can only fit in one day a week, this is almost a more is better thing, but I'm not also saying that people need to spend two hours a day, six days a week in the gym. A real inspiration of mine is this guy, Arthur De Vany. He's a retired economics professor and just a hell of a physical specimen. He's been in and around this ancestral health scene before the 90s. He had a manifesto that he wrote called Evolutionary Fitness back in the mid-90s and that's when I first found him and followed his work ever since then, and he would do these really brief, but fairly intense workouts where say the lat pulldown machine. He would go over to the lat pulldown machine, and he would put a light weight on there, and do it slow and controlled for about 15 reps. Just get a little bit of heat, a little bit of burning going, and then he would pop the weight up, and he would do it a little bit faster for about eight reps, a little bit more explosive, and then he's getting a sense of where he's at, he's warmed up, and then we'll put a pretty heavy load on there for him, and he might get four to six reps. The last one is that was it like he's done. Then he might back it off a little bit, and do one more set of maybe six or 10 reps really get a little bit of lactic acid going, get a little bit of a burn, and then he's done on that. Then he might do exactly the same thing with a press maybe averted.
We've got vertical pull, vertical press, horizontal pull, push, horizontal press. Then with our legs, we've got lunging, squatting, and hinging or deadlifting. He would do a vertical pull, and then a vertical press, and then he would do a leg movement, and then he was out. He would do that same thing. About 15 reps slow, 15, 20 reps, and then about eight to 10 reps heavy, and then maybe between three and five reps really getting after it, and then he was done with that movement. That whole thing, he do a little bit of balance to warm up, and some mobility work, and everything, but his whole workout was less than 15 minutes.
Cynthia: Wow.
Robb: It will leave his heart elevated. He's in his mid-80s now and he's still just a hell of a physical specimen. But I remember the stats on him when he was in his early 70s, 6’2”, 210 pounds, 8% body fat, and just jacked, and this was his workout. Every once while, he would do a little bit of heavier stuff. But it was never an hour. It was just super abbreviated workout and that's all you need. People need to train a muscle about to failure. You can't really get another rep, and it's pretty hard, and you need to hit that maybe once a week in the primary lifts and everything, and then to be generally physically active beyond that. What we're talking about there and I know that it can take time to get to the gym and get home from the gym. Like your 15- or 20-minute workout, and then there's maybe some warm up on and cool down on the backside of that. Your 15-minute workout really ends up maybe being an hour and a half, because you got to go to the gym, come home, and all that. That's why I think people should park their cars outside and have a home gym. Even if it's something where you and your neighbors get together and you buy—
What a cheap gym membership is maybe 50 bucks a month. What if you and your neighbor pool six months’ worth of 50 bucks a month, you get $1,000 and you buy $1,000 worth of dumbbells and some exercise bands, and a pull up bar or something. You just work out at home, then you don't even have to travel or whatever. But I think two maybe three days a week of a full body-- When again, horizontal pull, horizontal press, and then some sort of squatting, leg pressing, lunging, deadlifting type movement. If you don't know how to do those, there's innumerable how to videos online, you can get coaching that ranges from super inexpensive to ridiculously expensive either live or virtual. There are people all around the world that will just shoot video of you and you can put it on your FaceTime or Zoom like what we're doing, and they can say, “No, but back, just forward.” You can get outstanding remote coaching. I think two or three days a week a minimum is—God, the return on investment with that is just staggering. Here's a cool stat. A strength trained 90-year-old can have better physical capacity than a sedentary 50-year-old. [crosstalk] That’s like it's literally getting double your life. Everybody is all focused-on like, “Oh, I'm going to live to be 150 years old, double my lifetime, and all that stuff.”
I don't think any of that's going to happen anytime soon. They might crack some code somewhere. I don't think intermittent fasting is going to do that, I don't think any of this stuff that we have before us it's going to do that. But you know what will effectively double your life is having a Zone 2 cardio base, and two or three days a week of strength training with a little bit of mobility work, because you will go into old age, an absolute ass kicker. You won't be crippled by a foul-- If you get a pulmonary virus, when your immune system ramps itself up, where it gets protein from to build antibodies is from our muscle mass. When you've got that muscle mass repository, that is where your immune system pulls all this stuff together to say, nothing of your better cardiovascular fitness and you got better circulation, and your immune system is better tuned, and all the right things are happening. It is such a nominal investment.
Again, if y’all like being in the gym, go for it. Go hang out in the gym a bunch. That's awesome. But if you don't really like it, oftentimes here people say, “Well, I do yoga or I do gardening and that's my thing.” I'm like, “I get it, and that's great, and it's awesome.” But the thing is that our body gets really good at adapting to what we're doing. If we were to graph physical decline, once your body gets used to that yoga program, unless you are really, craftily figuring out ways of additionally loading your body, your body is declining. It is adapted to that and now, it's declining. This is the amazing thing of progressive physical overload that can be afforded by barbells, and dumbbells, and machines is that we can keep pushing that. Again, the sedentary curve of decline is very, very rapid, whereas if we're strength training, our health span and our lifespan end up matching up together, and it goes out, and then we've got two weeks where we usually get sick, and we die, and that's it, and I’m not excited about that. But it sounds a lot better than a 30-year decline.
And also, again, gosh, I was just listening to a Huberman Lab Podcast and they were talking about adequate strength training and a little bit of Zone 2 cardio. If you are genetically prone to cognitive decline and again, this is not even factoring in diet. Diet wasn't remotely a factor in this, which I think can play a massive role in cognitive decline, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's dementia, and all that. But just simply being physically active, the most active people had it forestalled the development, the beginning of dementia-type symptoms by more than 10 years. It didn't even start to happen until 10 years later and the rate of acceleration was much, much flatter. Again, that's just looking at exercise. These may be exercisers who still eat, maybe not as good as what we would like if they were eating the way that you and I have recommended that folks eat and maybe we get a totally different thing out of that. But gosh, you're less likely to lose your marbles, you've got better quality of life, your sex life is going to be better, your outlook is better. The cost is that you've just got to get going and habituate, and do it, and find something that you like. Again, I love gardening and love yoga, I think all those things are good, but man, a little bit of progressive overload that you can get out of a gym-type setting, you can't beat that. It's just magic for what it can do for people. It's pretty simple. When people do physical therapy, even when they're at very low capacity, they're progressively overloading that stuff. It looks more like a bodybuilding gym session than it does a yoga session. Yeah.
Cynthia: I think that's such a good point and certainly, one that people can really take a lot away from. Now, I want to be respectful of your time, because I know that you have a super busy business. Let listeners know how they can connect with you. You have an amazing podcast. I swear I keep telling myself, I'm going to join one of your book talks that you do within your group, I just keep trying to find the time to make for it. How can people connect with you on social media, how can they connect with you on your podcast, which I highly recommend?
Robb: Well, thank you. Yeah, so, my wife and I do The Healthy Rebellion Radio Podcast. You can find all of that stuff at robbwolf.com. I have social media accounts, but I'm not on there. I have a Substack now, where I post some stuff on the Substack. I just find the interaction to be a much higher quality and the folks are invested in that. I basically just redirect all of my social accounts back to the Substack, because I was ready to burn down all of social media, but this was my compromise. But for now, that's where folks can find me.
Cynthia: Wonderful. Well, obviously, we'll have links to all your books, and your podcast, and of course, LMNT, which I highly recommend and probably by the time this comes out great food will be sold out. But I would say my next favorite flavor is citrus. The Orange Salt is my favorite of all.
Robb: Yeah, me, too. Orange is out there. Aside from Grapefruit, it's just a whole other order of magnitude better that I absolutely love. Yeah.
Cynthia: Awesome. Thank you again for coming on.
Robb: Thank you.
Cynthia: If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating, and review, subscribe, and tell a friend.
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