Biohacks are all the rage right now. Oh my gosh. Biohacking, everything is the rage in health, at least alternative health right now. Look, I want to talk about the dangers of some of the biohacks. I want to talk about the good, what's good, what's bad, what you should be cautious for, how to do it correctly. Um, because a lot of people, uh, it could be good, but oftentimes do too much, too fast, too hot, too cold, whatever it is, and they actually cause themselves more damage.
So uh I'm gonna break it down. What about peptides right now, right? Are they hot or what? Man, everyone's doing peptides. Are there dangers? Oh man, I think there are. Um, but could there be good? I think so. I'll talk about it. Uh what about cold baths? Everyone's doing cold baths right now. Must be good for everybody, is it? I don't know. Ladies, is it good for you? Well, maybe sometimes I'm gonna tell you how to know uh what to do and how to do it and what I've learned over the years.
Uh even red lights. So let's dig in to some of these biohacks and uh let's start right there with cold baths. I think that right now it's all
¶ Hormesis: The Key Principle of Adaptation
the rage. Uh let me start right at the top. I'm not against cold baths, okay? So you know, don't you know type in like, oh my gosh, Pompa hates cold baths, uh, because that's typically what happens when I do these types of shows. But I want to start with a principle. And if you understand, I don't, I hope I didn't lose you right there because I said I want to start with a principle.
Okay, if you understand the big premise, which is called the major premise of something, typically you can deduce uh truth down and keep uh the truth going to further truth, all right? But if you start with a false premise, a false major premise, typically you end up getting more and more um off the track, uh, so to speak. So uh let's look at this major premise that all of these biohacks, at least most, function from.
And if you understand the premise, then I think you'll be able to think through this yourself and even apply these correctly yourself, because it really boils down to the premise of hormesis. What is that? It's a simple premise that is basically a biological system. That's us, right? Living things, if you will, all apply to this. Like gravity, right? The the major premise there is, you know, there's a force. If something's not underneath us, yeah, we will fall, right? At a certain speed, 9.6.
Um, but whatever, it's irrelevant. But the point is this um that the premise of hormesis is if we stress a biological system, if that's key, if we adapt, we actually get stronger, faster, smarter, healthier, and you can keep going down. And that is the premise of hermesis. But if you don't adapt, you become weaker, slower, more unhealthy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the key there is of the premise of hormesis is adaptation is key. Now, I
¶ Exercise Stress and Adaptation Dynamics
know I said we're gonna talk about cold baths, but I want to back up a little bit of something I feel you can understand, and that's exercise. See, exercise is a stress. I know we don't think of it that way because we feel that we should be exercising more. We're told we should exercise for our health. We're told that exercise makes us healthier, this and that. But see, good trainers understand that it's not the exercise as much as the adaptation to the stress of exercise. That's why it works.
If you don't stress your body, then you don't become stronger, faster, et cetera, et cetera, and get all of the benefits of the cellular level. You don't get all the anti-aging effects and mitochondrial effects if you don't adapt. If you do adapt to the stress of exercise, whatever that is, lifting weights, running, jogging, walking, whatever it is, if you do adapt, then you receive a certain amount of benefits. But here's the point.
If you don't stress the body enough, then you don't cause this adaptation to occur, and therefore you don't get a benefit. And let me give you an example of that. When you first start exercising, whatever it is, it's a stress because you haven't been exercising. So it could be uh as simple as doing one set of a machine in the gym of each body part and you go, oh, yeah, wow, I was sore.
You actually do that for a few weeks in a row, and every time you go in, you feel a little stronger and you feel some improvement. But if you keep doing that level of exercise, then you really stop improving. As a matter of fact, according to studies, you actually start going the other direction where you could be wasting your time and causing more problems than not. So the point is this is the premise of hormesis, you have to stress.
And if you're not stressing enough, you're not gonna get a benefit. By the way, that's why athletes hire trainers that they modulate, meaning change the stress level as they're adapting, they keep raising the stress level. Why do they keep raising the stress level? Because they're raising that hormitic ceiling, meaning their body's ability to adapt and they're getting more and more result. They're getting faster, faster, faster.
And you're not gonna get faster unless you raise the stress level, right? I was a cyclist uh for many years, and that's what we did, right? We had to keep increasing that intensity to get faster and faster in better shape, et cetera. However, you learn very quickly. You can't just go like this on uh an uphill uh graph because the fact is that you can't keep stressing the body like that, otherwise you will stop adapting. It becomes too stressful.
So you can't just keep increasing intensity, increase, and all of a sudden, boom, you're not adapting. And you're trying to go harder and harder, and you're getting worse and worse and slower and slower. Oh, it's happened to me, cycling, or all of a sudden my times are getting worse. Everything's getting worse. Now it's just going out for even easy rides that were easy, seem like they're exhausting. See, you now have hit the point of overstress, over-training, not listening to the body.
So, what I'm trying to say is this stress is key. If we don't stress our bodies, we don't get stronger. However, overstressing is a problem because then everything goes in the opposite direction. So a good trainer will raise the hormitic ceiling by doing periods and times of stress and then easy times where they're not stressing, allowing recovery, stress and then recovery.
So in the cyclist world, we would have times where we're going super intense weeks where we're doing high intensity, but then maybe followed then, not maybe always followed by less intense times, where we're allowing our body just riding very slowly. Now that applies to weightlifting, it applies to running, it applies to any sport. Uh the key is stressing and then not stressing. Does that make sense? And by the way, think about how you adapt to exercise.
You adapt exercise by hormone optimization, meaning we know the benefits of exercise, your testosterone, you get more sensitive to testosterone, your anabolic uh natural steroids, men and women, uh start to rise up. You feel better because your body's creating this hormone optimization, uh, growth hormone rises up. Anytime you stress the body, something called neuropernephrine rises. And neuropinephrine has a um a trigger for growth hormone to rise.
And then growth hormone helps the body recovery. And then you become more sensitive to most of your other anabolic hormones, uh, and you feel better and you get faster, stronger. But what if that neuropinephrine goes up?
You see, because that's a stress response, and now your body is saying, well, it can't adapt because maybe you're too tired, maybe you didn't sleep well, maybe you weren't eating as good, and now all of a sudden you start not adapting to that same level of stress that you were adapting to. Oh, and meanwhile, so you know what most people do? They push harder. And guess what? They actually end up in adrenal fatigue, straining their thyroid.
Now they end up just slow, they end up just fatigued, and they end up with other symptoms, they end up not sleeping as well, all because they exercise too much. Cold baths. You get the principle?
¶ Cold Plunges: Less is More, Track Recovery
Okay, I think you understand it. And that's why we hire trainers, right? So they take us through times of intensity. And by the way, a good trainer is always asking, How are you sleeping? How's your energy levels? You look a little hollow. They start assessing their athlete as they walk in the door to see if there's signs of overtraining.
If there's not, they keep raising the stress level because, see, they're trying to get as much uh stress as they can to you get you to adapt to keep raising to you to get you faster, uh more strong, whatever it is. Okay, so that's why we have good trainers. But we don't have trainers when we do cold baths. We hear that three minutes in cold is the best thing we can do because uh my friend Ben Greenfield's doing it, Joe Rogan's doing it, whoever's doing it, we hear these numbers, so guess what?
We want to do that. And of course, when we come out of that cold bath, we feel amazing. All that neuropinephrine, all that rise up in growth hormone, and all the adrenaline is going and the endorphins are surging, all of it. Dopamine rises, man, we feel good. And what we're not realizing is maybe we stressed the body too much, it didn't adapt like the exercise, and now you didn't sleep good that night, but you don't think of it as the cold bath because that was so positive.
Or the next day you're tired and you don't think about it's the cold bath, see, but it's the same premise. When you get into a cold bath, your body literally thinks it's going to die. That's how much of a stress it is. It raises up neuropinephrine, same as exercise. And then the neuropinephrine raises growth hormone, and then you get all hormonally optimized, all your testosterone, all that happens, see, only if you adapt.
But if you don't, if it was too cold, because maybe you're already hormonally stressed. Ladies, maybe you're perimenopause and you're hormonally already stressed, so your body's not adapting as good. Maybe you just traveled and your body was dealing with that stress of the travel. Maybe you didn't sleep well the night before. Maybe, maybe you just got into a fight with your spouse, loved one. You get the point.
That extra stress now, now you didn't adapt to the two minutes that you seemed to adapt to the first two times you did it. But this time you didn't. And then you end up sick. Happened to me, right? I went to Nashville, and uh my son belongs to one of these places that have the hot saunas, and we're gonna talk about that too. And the cold baths. And of course, he was like, Oh yeah, I I do five minutes, okay, and my my son's a lot younger than me.
And so I'm like, Yeah, I I think I can do five minutes, but you know, normally I do two or three, right? So, and actually I do typically even less. I I uh listen to my body, and typically for my age, um, one minute is actually plenty and sometimes too much. But this day I was like, I sat in there three minutes because I don't want my son to uh outdo me, right? And then I was like, I'm numb in three minutes, I might as well go five. So I did five. I felt great.
Well, guess what happened the next day? I got sick. Yeah, because I was already traveling. I did way too much, my body didn't adapt. I didn't even sleep well that night, and I was definitely fatigued and ended up sick. See, my body was that virus or whatever I was dealing with was in me for a while because some of my family had already been sick two weeks before. It was just lingering in me, waiting for my immune system to drop. Well, that cold bath dropped my immune system. I ended up sick.
So that's the point. But again, maybe you don't get sick, but maybe you're fatigued. But you know what a lot of people do. So then they push harder. They do another cold bath, and now they're tapping into their adrenals, their stress actually increasing, their adaptation to it is decreasing, and now they're leading to even more thyroid and adrenal strain and never associating it with the cold baths.
Look, the the bottom line, I believe, and this was a story, I'm not going to use names, but this was somebody that I had dinner with who was literally doing cold plunges in a lake, very cold, iced over. I mean, every morning in swimming. And at least 20 minutes of this tells me how great they feel. And I'm thinking, matter of fact, I'm sitting at dinner, I'm pulling up studies showing this person, look, this can be really damaging. And the irony was, I even said, look at this study.
This can even lead to cancer because of what it can do to your immune system. This person, unfortunately, wasn't, I don't know, maybe it was a year. I it was somewhere between a year or two, ended up with a diagnosis of cancer. And this person was very healthy.
I'm putting quotes around it, and I believe this person was, except I really truly believe in my heart, and of course, there's no proof of this, but I really do believe amongst other stressors in this person's life that this particular stress was sending them over the edge, stressing their immunity beyond recovery. And I I know there were signs. I could see the kind of gaunt look that many of these people get.
And you can tell these people by over-exercising, and now we have to look at people who are doing uh too many cold baths. Don't compare yourself to Gary Brecker, great guy, love Gary, uh Ben Greenfield, love him too, a good friend of mine. Um, but these guys, these they they've worked up their hormitic ceiling, meaning they do so much of this that they get their body to adapt.
And by the way, they're eating perfect, they're modulating, they're doing a lot of amazing things in their life to be able to do a three-minute cold bath, if you will, or whatever time it is, extreme cold levels. My point is this here's the take-home for this particular topic: do less. There was a study and it showed that a 10-second morning cold bath was better than the two, three minutes ice bath that people do. Why did it work better? Because they studied average people.
They weren't studying Ben Greenfield's, right, and and Gary Breckis. No, they were studying average people who couldn't adapt to that level of stress. So the less actually worked better for them and they got better results. Less is best when you're dealing with the premise of hormesis. So it may be better to go less cold, maybe 50, 55 degrees. You don't have to go down to 35 degrees, right? That could be too much stress, or the obvious less time, right? You don't have to do three minutes.
It may be 10 seconds. For a woman, perimenopause, thyroid issues, you know, you might not do well with cold at all. And you know, you might want to get yourself an aura ring or some type of way of tracking your heart rate and heart rate variability, which athletes use to see if they're adapting to the stress, right? So if the fact is if the heart rate variability is going up and your heart rate um is going down, then great. It looks like you're adapting.
And if your deep sleep is good, but if your deep sleep starts suffering, your heart rate variability drops, and your heart rate rises, then the opposite, right? Then you know um that's not good. You don't want heart rate variability to go down, you don't want heart rate to go up, right? So that's a sign that you're not recovering. If you don't have a device, you just have to learn to listen to that innate intelligence that's telling you what to do. You just have to listen.
How did you sleep that night? How did you feel the next day? How did you feel later in the day? Start there and start to assess that. If you had good lasting energy through the day, if you slept amazing that night, and the next day you absolutely were a powerhouse, you're probably adapting to the stress. If not, decrease your time.
And again, I said that you know, uh a woman with thyroid issues, maybe hormone issues in perimenopause, either maybe it's not a good idea at all, or maybe 10 seconds, like the study, is all that you need to just add a little bit of shock, and then the body adapts and you raise that neuroponephrine growth hormone, anti-inflammation, all that good stuff happens. I don't know the time, and I'm not making suggestions. What I am suggesting
¶ Heat, Oxygen, and Ozone Therapies
is that you learn to listen to that innate intelligence. That's the key. What about heat? Okay, is it the same? It is. There's the benefits of saunas, heat shock proteins, all these amazing things. You're opening up your lymph, you're sweating, you're, you know, you're getting some detox pathways opened up. I mean, a lot of benefits, but the same principle. I don't have to get into it.
Now you can understand because you understand the principle of hormesis, hopefully, is that too hot too long could leave you flat on your butt later. When you come out, typically, once again, you feel good, but how did you sleep? How was your energy the next day or later in the day? Same premise. If you have an aura ring, then you can monitor your heart rate variability in your heart rate and see if you adapted to the heat. Listen, when I was sick, I couldn't go outside in the cold.
I would get headaches and it would wipe me out. I wasn't adapting to walking out in the cold. Now, again, that's when I was very sick, and my adaptation ability was nil. Okay, I couldn't use a sauna. Matter of fact, most of the neurotoxic people that I helped help through the years, they couldn't never sauna. They couldn't deal with the heat. And if they did, they would be left wiped out. So again, be careful.
Now, there was a time where they uh could actually take the heat, but maybe a better heat is just sitting in the sun for 10 minutes. And by the way, I couldn't even do too much of that when I was sick. So really have to monitor your levels of these stressors, especially when you're already challenged. So if you're somebody who's challenged already, then you absolutely, whatever you're doing,
I would argue you need to be doing less. So what about peptides? I mentioned peptides, and this is kind of a different principle. I I just wanted to throw this in here because there's they're so in vogue right now. Are all peptides good? The answer is no. Um, as a matter of fact, I would say many are not good. I'm not a fan of GLP1s, right? Those are peptides.
And I believe long-term lose for a short-term gain, and that's the case with many peptides, is that short-term you feel a benefit and long term it's not so good. I don't like peptides or SARMs. Uh, SARMS is uh another thing that more of the exercise world knows about um that tap on your hormones, meaning they actually cause a shift in your hormones. I would stay away from those.
But peptides typically are taking something that the body naturally produces and then putting a strand of amino acids together in a peptide. And it seems innocent enough, but once again, a lot of these peptides really aren't studied for long-term use, and oftentimes there can be a negative. I said I would share the ones I like that I do think are safe, BPC157, and um it is the body protecting compound, and I think that it's safe. I have used it a lot in my life.
Do I believe you could use too much of it uh and not get a result, waste your money, and maybe even cause an inflammatory reaction? Of course, just like any other principle here that I'm teaching. I like TB500. That's an overall recovery peptide that seems to be very good. And BPC157 in TB, very good for the gut. Uh, I would throw KPV in there. That's another peptide. You stack those three together, amazing for gut healing and amazing for recovery.
KPV is also good to modulate immunity a bit, so people that have a lot of mast cell activation, food allergies. KPV, I think, is a healthy peptide that can be beneficial. And there's other ones, epithalin, which helps your telomeres and you know, some anti-aging. So, I mean, some peptides absolutely can be beneficial. More is not better. And again, there's some that I think for the money are a waste of money and can even be harmful. So I don't have enough time to get into all the whole peptide.
I'm gonna do a whole separate show on peptides, and I'll kind of, you know, go through many of the peptides because there's a growing number of these things. But for this show, I just want you to understand the premise of some of these things
¶ Red Light Therapy: Cautionary Insights
that right now are very popular. What about red light? This is even more popular, and I wanted to get to it because there was just another study out, and I did a social media piece on red light some time ago. I got a lot of criticized criticism for it, but it talked about how it can be too much for the mitochondria. And without checks of other wavelengths of light, et cetera, it can almost drive the mitochondria uh into too much energy production and be a negative.
And in the study, it said it creates a lot of reactive oxygen species, which is kind of how it works. But again, if someone's overstressed, then it could actually create too many of these and become a negative. And I think in that particular study, they talked about how it could be a negative to your long-term energy, your brain health, et cetera, et cetera. And again, you know, you have to take these things with a grain of salt because how much and who are they actually testing?
So I'm a fan of red light. I'm gonna say that because that's what I had to go around saying to everybody after I did the video is no, I like red light. You just have to be a little careful. I interviewed Mark Sesson. He's not a fan of red light. He thinks it stresses the mitochondria too much, and he thinks it's unnatural. I understand that argument. I do.
But in the world of biohacking, that puts it into a category of hey, if you want to kind of come in to the mitochondria utilizing red light in different frequencies, then I do believe there could be a benefit. But I think his point and many other people's point is it's unnatural away from other spectrums of light, like when you're getting sun. Red light and sun, no doubt. Safer. Of course, you can do too much sun too, right? You can bet a burn from the UVB. But again, even UVB is needed, right?
UVA is needed. All the things that people try to run from with sunscreen, you know, we need UVB, and there's all kinds of benefits even for our eyes. But the point is this is that if you're just coming at your cells, ladies, even your skin with red light constantly doing too much, I believe it could age your skin prematurely. I believe it could cause more inflammation in the long run. So once again, less is best. And I think more balanced frequency could be even better.
And arguably, it may not be for everyone. So, like anything, how do you feel after you did the 10 minutes in front of the red light? Did you feel energized later in the day, the next day? Because typically you're going to feel better right after. Same principle applies. What about oxygen therapies? Ozone therapies, hyperbarics, a little different. Hyperbaric pressurizes oxygen into places you can't get it. Well, guess what? We learned that hormesis applies there too.
And matter of fact, some of the newer studies are showing that's why it works, is the premise of hormesis. And they actually increase the pressure to force adaptation of oxygen, pressurizing the oxygen, and back off the pressure, up and down. And they learned it worked better than just keeping the pressure on. Why? Because it forced the body to adapt when you went up and down in pressure. Go figure. You know, again, it's the premise of hormesis.
Forcing the body to adapt to the pressure differences could be the best benefit of hyperbaric. But also, I do believe pressurizing oxygen into places where there's low circulation and you have trouble getting oxygen there. Oxygen does in fact heal. But how does oxygen heal? Hormitically. Oxygen can be a stress. It's oxidative, meaning too much is bad. Ozone, right? It's O3. It leaves an extra oxygen, but it's very oxidative. But that's how it works.
So if you inject ozone into a joint, why does it heal? It literally gets the uh the tissues irritated to the point where the body starts sending stem cells to the area and all of the signals for healing into the area because ozone literally created an oxidative reaction, triggered the body healing. See, it is hormesis once again. So therefore, too much ozone could be bad.
Therefore, too many ozone treatments could be a negative, not a positive, because remember, you have to adapt to the stress of the oxidation of ozones,
¶ Hot Yoga, CrossFit: The Over-Stressing Trap
of ozone, or any oxygen therapy. So someone wanted me to cover hot yoga because that's very popular. Well, I I think the same premise applies, right? Meaning that you're going into a very, very hot room. Exercising, that sounds like two stressors in one. How about throwing a cold bath in there while we're at it and some red light? Imagine that. You think your body's gonna adapt to that. Only the most uh trained athletes are gonna adapt to that stress.
But the point is, is adding the hot to the yoga, uh, be careful. It may not be what is good for you because of the amount of stress that could be. Oh, and by the way, you know what they found out with hot yoga? Yeah, you're able to stretch a little too much, and people are getting joint injuries, not knowing, right? Again, too much stressing is not necessarily good. So must must apply to the premise of hormesis as well.
Um, but the heat uh allows people to go too far and end up with joint problems, not even that they feel it in the room, some do, but they feel it later. And yes, it could even cause some ligament instability and tendon instability. Now, again, I know you hot yoga people out there are going to give me hate mail. I'm not saying that you don't feel amazing and that it's helped some people. See, it's the premise. So I'm warning people to not, I'm not saying don't do hot yoga.
I'm warning people that it could be too much for you. If you're a thyroid, adrenal, peramenopause, uh, someone prone to more injuries because you have a lot of other stress in your life, it may not be great for you. Think about the CrossFit days, right? What did CrossFit bring? A lot of injuries because it was severe, it was taking exercise to a whole nother level of stress. And most people living a stressed-out life, not eating a great diet.
That's why they like CrossFit, because they could eat their regular diet, not sleeping great, all those things help raise your hormitic ceiling, meaning your ability to adapt. And they're not doing those things. And they go in to do CrossFit and they wonder why they're injured in a month, right? Because obviously they stop adapting. And by the way, that's another sign that you're not adapting, uh, is that you start getting micro injuries.
You start getting, uh, I did this to my elbow, or now it's the shoulder, now it's the knee. Now maybe you're stressed somewhere else in your life, and that's keeping you from not adapting to what the exercise you used to adapt to, but now you're not. So in your mind, you're saying, I can adapt to this because I've done this for that. I got stronger, I got fat, I got better. But see, now you're not adapting.
I go back to the trainer who watches the athlete and watches how they walk in the room, how much energy, how'd you sleep? They monitor all these things, really good trainers, because they know then, because are they adapting to the stress that we're applying now that they may have adapted to in the past, but aren't now? So do
¶ Personalized Biohacking: Listen to Your Body
you get the point? I hope so. But using all of these examples, now you can look at all these biohacks and say, maybe they're good. Maybe I need to tone it back. Maybe they're not even good for me because I'm under so much stress, I don't adapt. So that's the truth about biohacking. Hey, share this podcast because let me tell you something. People need to know and hear this message right now. Science based, whether you like me or not, I'm just telling you the truth.
This is the premise, this is the science, and I hope you share the video.