Podcast Episode #13: Nutrition, Lateral Strength Building & Chiropractic

Ben Greenfield (0:02)

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield fitness.com podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, diet, and wellness news. Hey, whether you're an Ironman triathlete, or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist, and exercise, diet, and wellness guru. And each week, I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this week's podcast from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Hey, podcast listeners, we've got a great episode coming to you today from bengreenfieldfitness.com. Gonna be introducing all sorts of new content that's appeared on the website this week in a new article series called The Healthy Traveler. I've got a fantastic interview with chiropractor Brian Mathers, who really gives some very eye-opening advice on chiropractic and what it's all about. We've got a bunch of listener Q&As from the mailbox, and just a host of really good information in this podcast episode number 13 So stay tuned to bengreenfieldfitness.com.

New content at bengreenfieldfitness.com. As many of you know, I have been traveling the past couple of weeks, and so a lot of the blog postings and last week's podcast focus on exercise and nutritional concepts that relate to more of the situations that we find ourselves in when we're traveling when we don't have access to the exercise or the nutritional environments that we're accustomed to. So one of the series that I did is called the Healthy Traveler. Part one of the Healthy Traveler, which is completely based on airline travel, is entitled What's in Your Carry-On? And in that article, I literally go through my carry-on bag and describe to you what is in there from a nutritional and an exercise standpoint and why it's in there. In part two of the Healthy Traveler, I introduced the carbohydrate timing method as a system that you can use to limit the amount of weight that you gain, in particular the amount of fat that you gain, when you're traveling in your sedentary for a long period of time.

There is also a new post that answers the question whether you should exercise in the morning or the evening and as you may remember from last week's podcast episode, I introduced a brand new fitness device that I'm very excited about. If you didn't happen to listen to that episode, this is called the GymStick. And the GymStick is basically an elastic band exercise device that allows you to do just hundreds of different exercises from sports performance to toning to weight loss to stability to rehabilitation. It's a fantastic device. I've been given the opportunity to offer this with free shipping from bengreenfieldfitness.com. So if you visit the website and go down the right-hand side of the page where there's all sorts of fantastic sponsors that sponsor this show and the podcast, you'll see a picture of the exercise device, the GymStick. Click on that picture, and you'll be brought to a page that will allow you to learn a lot more about what the GymStick is all about, what you can do with it, and how you can get your hands on one. And by the way, if you want to find more discount codes at bengreenfieldfitness.com from our sponsors, just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/discount. Visit that page for a bunch of great deals from our show's sponsors. So that's the new content for this week from Ben Greenfield Fitness.

Listener Q&A. Quite a bit of questions this week. The first is from Nate. And Nate says, I was wondering if you could help me out with two questions I just can't seem to find a solid answer for. Is doing a light workout, for example, a 15 to 20 minute abs workout, good to do right before bed? My second question is, is it good to take a low carb, sugar, slow release protein shake before bed? So these are both sleep, bedtime related questions, and when you're asking whether something is good or whether something is better, I'm assuming you mean from either a fitness perspective, a recovery perspective, or a weight loss perspective.

Let's cover the first part of that question. Is doing a light workout, like a 15 to 20 minute abs workout, good to do right before bed?

There is research that suggests that heavy exercise prior to sleep can interrupt the quality of your sleep, specifically the degree to which you enter into your deep, rapid eye movement sleep, which is where the majority of recovery and rest actually occurs during sleep.

That being said, what we're talking about is exercise that takes you up into a fairly high range of your VO2 max and leaves you with quite a bit of an oxygen deficit after the workout, or quite a bit of muscular damage after the workout. You know, for example, an hour long run or 60 to 75 minutes of heavy weight lifting. A 15 to 20 minute abs workout is not going to increase your post-exercise metabolic rate or your post-exercise oxygen deficit high enough to where you would lose much sleep.