Robb Wolf - Cold Exposure, Electrolytes, and The Coach's Journey

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. This show is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors, guiding entrepreneurs to achieve the highest levels of freedom in five critical areas: time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. So here's the deal. If you go to level5mentors.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's level5mentors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's TrainwithMorpheus M-O-R-P-H-E-U-S.com. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. Rob Wolf, welcome to the future of fitness.

Hey, huge honor. I am always stoked to bring down property values anywhere I can land. So thanks for having me on.

So uh backstory on that is I live in the Flathead Valley. I've been here for about four years, and you have made the incredibly smart decision to move to the Kalispell area, which is 20 minutes from here. Man, in uh in advance, welcome to the hood, Rob.

Thank you. We will have you out when we make landfall. We'll share some food. That'll be amazing.

Yeah, that would be amazing. That'd be a ton of fun, man. I said to have you on this podcast, I've honestly been meaning to reach out for years. I don't know why I didn't. And all it took was a simple email. And here we are. So it's great to have you on. You've been influential in my coaching career for the paleo solution. I think I gifted to so many clients and family when it came out. It it's just great to have a conversation with you here. So thanks for making the time. I think maybe I was telling you, I love to open up with a story because so right around 20 uh 10, 11, we'll say, when a Traver, Bohm, and I had crossed the Pacific Coast, we ran a uh paleo challenge, right? Now we always said, hey, listen, we're not nutritionists, so this isn't our field. We just want to get people eating cleaner, and we're gonna play this game for 30 days. And of course, the opening night of the paleo challenge, everyone comes in to the gym at night, we're going over the rules and what it is, asked answering questions, and there's this one guy. This one guy who sits right in front of us and starts peppering us with questions. And of course, he's vegan. And he's why can't we eat grains? I'm like, listen, man, hey, we're not like I said, I'm not a nutritionist, we're just gonna try these guidelines. It's for 30 days, nothing here is gonna hurt you. You know, let's but he just kept tagging us with questions. So I was frustrated. And I'm like, God, why is this guy being such an asshole? And uh so I reached out to you back when you probably uh were on Facebook Messenger and I asked you some questions about he asked me this and this. And what do you what what do I how do I answer this, Rob? And you got back to me really quickly and you said, first of all, don't feel bad. Vegans are the jihadists of the nutrition world. And that immediately made sense. You did answer the questions, and I went back to the crew and we did it. But that was uh I've told that story so many times because I think it's so funny and it stuck with me for so long. And you were so accessible during that time. I'm sure you are now too. But so in advance, thanks for all everything you did for the CrossFit community, especially early on. It was it was a lot of fun to have you there.

It was a huge honor, like a really cool experience to be able to interact with so many people and to learn so much. I I think what's funny you said that I got back to you quickly, like I've never looked at this whole process as some sort of like a popularity game. Like I actually block off time to interact with people, and that's part of my job. I have this crazy notion that if I can be of service to enough people, I'll probably make a decent living in this space. And so far, so good. So I'm really honored to have played a part in that.

Yeah. So give us an update since that point, since the Paleo Solution, you've published many books. You've got podcasts, like, what have you done over the last 10 years, man? What are some of the highlights of that?

Man, so gosh, over the last 10 years, we sold our gym, which was uh CrossFit Norcal strength and conditioning to my brother and sister-in-law. And they ran the gym for about seven years, which I find to be it takes a burly person to even run a gym that long. And and usually by that point, you're ready to hand it off to somebody else. We moved up to Reno and we did that originally, just we with uh my wife's father lives there, and we we thought that we'd be there for a year or two until we figured out where we really wanted to be, but we actually really enjoyed that area a ton, had our two daughters there and and really enjoyed it, but it grew remarkably. I think that Reno, outside of Boise, Idaho, has been the fastest growing kind of metropolitan area over the last 10 years. And it reached a point where we were like, do we want to stay here long term? Is this where we want to raise our kids? And we decided to do a little bit of an adventure. And I've always been curious about the hill country of Texas. And so we moved to a place that's halfway between San Antonio and Austin called New Bronfels. And it's really cool, it's really beautiful, but we couldn't rope any of the rest of our family into moving here. I did uh convince a friend of mine, Michael Hines, to move here. And he actually moved here with his family from South Korea. Both of us are brownbelts and Brazilian jujitsu, and he opened up Straight Blast Gym, Texas, and so that's been cool. But like you said at the opening, we are getting ready to move to Montana. So we we've just continued to spin the wheels on this kind of health and and fitness scene. I wrote a follow-up book called Wired to Eat in 2016, and then we released mid-part of 2020 a book called Sacred Cow, which also has a film with it, where my co-author and I dig into the environmental, ethical, and health considerations of a meat-inclusive food system. And so for the folks that are concerned about our cows going to destroy the environment or destroy the world from methane release from their cellulosic fermentation and all that, like we really try to get in and cover all of those really complex topics, which are generally handled in a super simplistic soundbite format because it's really amenable to social media and memes and has almost nothing to do with the true reality that we all live in. So those are been the big projects that we've done in the the past several years.

Wow. Yeah, always keeping your toes tapping, Rob. That's for sure. And yeah, and you got a podcast too, Healthy Rebellion.

Yeah, it's funny. So we did 10 years of the Paleo Solution podcast and really enjoyed it. But we I am and always will be a big fan of the paleo ancestral health template. Like I have this sneaky idea that evolutionary biology applied to our lives is actually a big deal and very insightful. But we had this sense there was probably kind of a stigma around the paleo term. Folks were, oh, I know what that is. And they they were either in or out. And I was also looking at just wanting to take a very different angle on this whole thing. And I guess as a little bit of backstory to this, when we moved to Reno, I was there maybe three weeks and I got a phone call and uh didn't recognize the number, so didn't answer it, but I got a voice message. When I listened to the voice message, this guy identified himself as Greeney, and he said that he was part of a medical clinic and they were using my work and he wanted me to come down and meet them. Greene ended up being this guy, Dr. Jim Greenwald, who's a famous orthopedic surgeon, now retired, but like really pretty darn famous in his heyday. And he's part of a clinic called Specialty Health in Reno, and they had just wrapped up a two-year pilot study with the Reno Police and Fire Department. And what they had done is use some advanced lipidology testing to identify folks that are at high risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Uh the first responder populations are absolutely crushed with metabolic disease and they tend to die young as a consequence. And so they wanted to figure out if they could identify these problems early and then do something about it. And so they were able to very pinpoint accurately identify this kind of early uh shift uh towards the metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance, and they implemented below carb paleotype diet based around my paleo solution book, modified sleep and exercise as best they could in these folks. And based off the results of the pilot study alone, that program saved the city of Reno about $22 million with a 33 to 1 return on investment. And I've spent the last almost 10 years trying to scale that process and take it out to the masses. We've had varying degrees of success, like we've had some pretty good buy-in from self-insured captives, medium-sized businesses that are paying the real costs with their health care. We've had some buy-in from different municipalities, but it when I do I'm on the board of directors of this clinic now and have been for almost eight years. But when I initially linked wagons with these folks, I very huboristically said, oh, within five years, we will have transformed healthcare in the United States. And uh it has proven to be a much more challenging task than what I thought, the way that the incentives of our systems are lined up. It's a an absolute quagmire and mess. But we launched an online community called the Healthy Rebellion right at the end of 2019, right at the beginning of 2020. And this is a place where we help people to affect these diet and lifestyle transformations and to provide a kind of a safe haven for people to hang out and spend time together, albeit virtually. And it's interesting because it when we've witnessed kind of the censorship and the shenanigans that have happened in social media writ large, I feel pretty good about making that decision because although I historically have spent a lot of time on social media and have curated a lot of QA on there, I've really stepped back from that because the scene has become really toxic. I I don't feel comfortable discussing things in an honest way because I'm just waiting for the the other shoe to fall on to get banned or deplatformed or what have you. We did spin up the Healthy Rebellion a year and a half ago, and that's been going really well. And and that is the type the name of the new podcast that we have is the Healthy Rebellion Radio.

So, where do you house that community? Is it is it on Facebook or are you guys doing something more independent?

Uh of it's on a platform called Mighty Networks.

Oh, yeah.

Okay. And they're pretty solid. When you're used to the cool user interface of Facebook, it's still a little clunky, but it's like WordPress, Facebook, and an old style forum software had a baby. And it it has some of all of the good parts, none of all of the good parts of all of those things, but they're growing pretty rapidly and they're really updating the user interface. So it's cool. And it at a minimum, I had really fought the notion of having kind of a paywall interface with folks. I had fought that for a long time. And the way that you should do these things is there should be like a super cheap way to buy in what's four bucks a month, five bucks a month, and people get a very paltry degree of access to you. And then there's a middle tier, and then there's this super expensive inner circle secret handshake deal. And that stuff definitely works. It definitely makes good money. And I didn't want to do any of that bullshit at all. I I just wanted a paywall to keep the riffraff out, and then I just wanted to help as many people as I could. And so we went with that model, and it's actually gone really well. Like I I had grown to absolutely detest what I was doing because of all of the just bullshit with social media and how nasty people are. And you need to experience early on, three years ago, some shadow banning and and censorship on the Facebook and Instagram and different platforms. And so for now, Mighty Networks, Gina Biancini, who's the founder of Mighty Networks, has, I think, largely been of the opinion that folks should steward their communities the way that they want to. And so long as you're not like inciting violence and being a complete dick, then then uh leave that alone. And so we're able to talk about things like COVID and metabolic health and and stuff like that. And I don't think it's an echo chamber. There's some good spirited discussions, and not everybody is in a hundred percent agreement. But the the one thing that fortunately has been very uniform is people are pretty damn respectful. Like out of two years, I've only had to ban one person in the two-year period. So it's a really legit group of people, and I learned so much from interacting with them. And I actually really enjoy my work again. Like I love getting on there and interacting with people and doing the the resets that we do three times a year, where we move people through my wired-to-eat curriculum and we do strength and mobility resets. And I I know you wanted to talk about cold showers, like we just did a cold shower challenge and stuff like that. And uh man, it's really cool.

Yeah, that is great, man. It's it's the landscape's changed so much. You look at, let's see, today's recording date is the January 21st, 2021, and inauguration day yesterday. Trump banned from Twitter 10 days ago. It whatever you say about Trump doesn't matter to me. Don't want to talk about on this podcast. But the fact that they were able to censor him, and maybe it was, yes, did he ins did he incite violence? I'm not even gonna get into that. That could be a good reason if somebody did, but it's just the power to censor and just shut people down. It's scary, really. I don't necessarily like where it's going.

Folks should be a little bit concerned because even though your team or maybe one's particular perspective, du jour is in the winner's seat today, this stuff always circles back around. And I don't care where an individual is, you will eventually find yourself in a spot where you will be at odds with some cross-section of kind of the woke mob. And it's gonna suck when it comes for you. And I'm stunned by how blasé folks are about the potential of this being really misused. And again, it's because there's one kind of worldview or ideology that that seems to be winning the day, but regenerative agriculture, like we are finding it very difficult to talk about the potential that you could use regenerative grazing animals to fight climate change. And that's because the narrative around climate change is that 100% grazing animals are the worst element of climate change. It's it's unethical to eat animals, there it's terrible for your health, that is an open and shut case, the science is settled, and we are going to ban you or censor you if you make statements to the contrary of that. And I really think that all those suppositions are wrong. There's degrees of nuance, there's degrees of both truth and falsehood the way that it's being discussed, but we are rapidly approaching a world where folks like me, I did my first public debate about animal husbandry and climate change in 2006. I'm not some fucking Johnny Cum lately to this thing. Like I could have made a lot more money just focusing on abs and skinny jeans, but I really think that this topic is important. Our global food system and sustainability is I have two kids. Like I actually do care about this stuff. Doesn't mean I'm right. I may be wrong about this stuff, but man, I would at least have an opportunity to discuss this and have some dialogue around it. And that is rapidly being removed. And it's really scary. And I I don't want to devote undue amounts of bandwidth to this, but I I appreciate you bringing that up. Like I think it's really concerning and it it's honestly very disheartening for me.

It it is concerning, and this may put me on some kind of FBI watch list, but I I I started reading the Unibomber Manifesto because I watched a documentary on it. And okay, I don't agree in bombing and killing people, that's terrible. Shouldn't happen hands down, that should be clear cut. But if you actually take the time to read what he wrote 20 years ago, reflecting on what's going on now, you're like, wow, he actually had some really good points. And I think there's a lot of things and trends that people don't see. I like to say that we're a boiling frog, but it seems like since really 2007, which was a huge technological year as far as advancement goes, for numerous reasons, we've been boiling really fast. Like it's just happening so fast we can't adjust right to everything that's happening and the the technology and the and it's scary. One of the reasons that we're in Montana really is just I I find it easier to disconnect and get time where I can just have some Eric time and think completely disconnected and actually feel like wow, if uh I'm completely disconnected right now, if something happened, I'm in trouble. No one will find me here. That's refreshing in some weird way. And that's off topic, but I I think it's something that people should seek out is we're just we're too on the grid. We're things are too easy at times, yet we make things difficult because of some internal struggle that we're not having enough struggle. Anyway, it's a big topic, man.

No, I agree. And that is honestly a big reason. There's a lot of reasons why we're heading to Montana. We'll be closer to family. Our uh Street Blast Gym organization has three phenomenal gyms up in that area, but we're landing really far out in the bonies. Like we don't even have garbage service where we're gonna live. Like we're gonna be bagging this stuff up and and taking it into town and by choice. Like I right New Bromfels is a beautiful city. It's really cool. It feels very rural, but we're 35 minutes from Austin and we're 30, 45 minutes from San Antonio. And if things got squirrely, that's that's being wedged between two really large population centers. And I, for a variety of reasons, uh in addition to being closer to family and whatnot, I don't really feel comfortable being in a spot like that.

Yeah. You're making a good move. We we actually didn't have garbage service on the place we're renting now until the home is built is and we won't have garbage service there. But there is something really interesting about not having that and having to bring up.

You make some way different decisions, man.

You do. Yeah, you do, and you have to lug that that. Stuff, put it in your car, smell it, right? Like all those things, it really makes you think twice about how much you're actually putting into a landfill. Right. And yeah, it's it's interesting, man. I so can I ask? Because I do take cold showers every morning. I have been for almost two years, or at least five days a week. I got into it because of a friend. I like the way it makes me feel. I like doing something uncomfortable in the mornings, but I'd really and I've looked at, of course, what's the health benefits. I do believe that my my immune system's stronger, but what are some of the benefits to doing that? Because it's pretty popular right now.

Yeah, I think Wimhof has it's always been a part of holistic health. Like the naturopathy circles have had hydrotherapy of both hot and cold water exposure for 100, 150 years. It's been in the in the scene, but I think Wimhof really put a lot of this stuff on the map. And there's been much more exploration into both the heat shock proteins that we get from exercise and heat exposure, like sauna, and then the cold shock proteins from you know, primarily cold water exposure, although just sufficiently cold air will do largely the same thing. It doesn't happen as rapidly. Like water, I believe, has 30 times the thermal capacity of air to cool you off or heat you up 30 times faster than the same amount of air exposure. And the benefit, so these heat shock and cold shock proteins are interesting. They are part of what's called a hormetic stress response. And so hormesis was, I believe, discovered mainly at the early kind of edge of the atomic era, where animal, it was understood that if you exposed organisms to some amount of radiation, that it could kill them. But what was found was that if you gave them a little dose on one day and then what would potentially be a lethal dose later, they oftentimes survived and did pretty well. And so there was, it was almost like a stress inoculation process. And so hormesis seems to be this really critical feature of life in general. And an organism that experiences no stress one way or the other, it actually becomes sick rather easy. This hormetic stress process, you could almost think about it like being like defragmenting your hard drive or like a hard system shutdown and reboot. It modifies the immune response, modifies the hormonal response. Cold exposure specifically really modifies the activity of the vagal nerve, which is so important in our sympathetic, parasympathetic tone. So, like digestion, stress, all these different things. And when you think about it a little bit, like really good insulation, heat, clothing, these are pretty recent developments. Humans have had clothing and houses and whatnot. But if you spend any time in a hundred-year-old house, you're like, holy smokes, like this thing, you know, it's it's like I've been in tents that are more thermally efficient than this thing. And so I don't think it was too long in the past that people just had more exposure to the elements. And I do think that there is a health benefit to all of that. And even if it doesn't increase our lifespan in total, I don't think stuff like that is going to make you live to be 120 years. But as a smart diet and lifestyle, it might make you still an ass kicker in your 80s, maybe even into your 90s. And then when you do die, it's a two-week decline and then you're done versus a 30-year decline, which is like the standard operating procedures now. So the heat shock and cold shock expression from heat exposure, cold exposure, I think it's got huge benefit. I have to admit, I'm a wimp on the cold exposure. I really prefer heat exposure better, but I too, we just did a cold shower challenge as part of the Healthier Rebellion, and I had to sack up and do it with the community. And what I do is I do a very hot shower and I get quite hot initially, and then I switch it over to cold. And I don't do like mind-numbing cold. I'm probably about 70 degrees. And so again, I'm a little bit of a wimp, but I've been ratcheting it down. And what I do in that case is try to do it in such a way that it's challenging, but it's not like mentally exhausting. I have cooked myself in the past from things like CrossFit and intermittent fasting and whatnot. And so I take my my hormetic stresses in very measured doses. I'm gonna be 49 in uh a couple of days, and I've just reached a point where I don't really I will make myself uncomfortable, but I won't make myself miserable anymore, put it that way.

Yeah, makes total sense. It's in in in full disclosure, one of the reasons I really got a lot of I get a lot of value out of the cold showers in the morning is that I had some traumatic events 2016, 2017. And then I got into this. My first the moment I woke up every morning was anxiety. I don't know why. It was just something that went through it. And I found that cold shower, I didn't want to get on any kind of medications or anything like that, but cold showers in the morning just seemed to snap me out. I don't know if it was the adrenal release or something or just a pattern interruption, but it really worked for me. And I urge people who maybe are very anxious by default, give it a try. At least it's magic.

It is magic for that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's interesting. And and also I want to make sure that I want to thank you for sending me some of the element electrolytes. Right now, I drink one every day, one of the little packets. Right now I'm doing 11 habanero, which I was a little unsure about, but now that I've had it two or three times, I really dig it. What made you start the electrolyte brand?

Man, it's a funny story. So I've eaten more or less a ketogenic diet for 22 years now. Like I've tinkered and tried to introduce more carbs into my diet. And like in the summer, I feel like I can handle a little bit more. If I'm very active, I can handle a little bit more. But I just very quickly get into the carb roller coaster where I get like foggy headed and I just don't feel all that well. So cognitively, I've felt pretty good. And generally at lower intensity activities, I've I've done okay, but things like jujitsu, a higher intensity workout, I really just drug ass always. And some good friends of mine, Tyler Cartwright and Luis Philosenior, they're the founders of this program called Keto Gains. And they just have worked with so many people at a very high level with this smartly formulated, appropriate protein, ketogenic diet. And I had those guys look at what I was doing, and they were basically like, man, you need a lot more sodium. And anyone who gets a coach, these guys were basically my coaches. You ignore their good advice at first. I'm like, oh, I salt my food, I'm good. And they were patient. It took about a year before I listened to them and they were like, no, man, really, just get more electrolytes in general, but sodium in particular. So I did exactly what they told me to do. And man, it was literally like a light switch was flipped. Like I couldn't believe it. And then when I started digging into it, I'm like, oh man, low-carb diets, low insulin, you don't hold on to sodium the same way. The naturesis of fasting, where you have a tendency to lose sodium, and then you end up in with these weird sodium potassium imbalances, and you have brain fog and lethargy and cramping and ironically, like anxiety and rapid heart rate, particularly in the evening and everything. I really doubled down on making sure that I got at least five grams of sodium a day and then supplemented a little bit of potassium and magnesium, but I really wasn't deficient in those. So this, these guys had known that folks eating at the lower carb side of things really needed uh significant amounts of sodium. Here's just an interesting aside. I remember talking with Greg Glassman in 2003, and he was a big advocate of the high-fat version of the zone diet, which was really not far off of a ketogenic diet, like when you really get down to brass tacks. And I remember him saying, he's like, Robbie, these folks just really have to supplement salt a lot, or they they will end up with hypovolemic problems. They'll go from seated to standing and they'll almost pass out and whatnot. And he's been eating five to 10 grams of sodium a day, and it's hard to get it in them. Like salted nuts and and olives are really key. I remember him telling me that, and it made a lot of sense, and then I promptly forgot it. But when I when I dug into all this stuff, I was like, oh shit, man, like Glassman was totally uh ahead of the curve on all that stuff, and was probably a big reason why folks immediately under his stewardship did really well. And then so many other people doing this kind of high fat version of the zone didn't do as well because that salts piece just got lost in translation. It is as important as the macronutrients. Everybody gets all geeked out on protein, carbs, fat, and then this sodium piece, it should be the other macronutrient in this thing, specifically sodium. So we knew that this was really important, and we put together a uh homebrew keto-aid thing where it's take this much table salt, this much no salt, which is potassium chloride, this much magnesium citrate, put it in 64 ounces of water, do some lemon juice, do some stevia, shake it up, and there you go. And we ended up getting a half million downloads of this keto aid thing. Like it just went crazy. And it was really cool because people were like, man, like all of these problems I have, this kind of adrenal fatigue type stuff, thyroid type stuff, I would say 95%, 98% of the problems that folks report with low-carb diets are completely addressed with adequate sodium. Low-carb diets are not the right tool for all people under all circumstances. But if you're eating on the lower carb side of things and you're having energy problems, lethargy, fatigue, cramping, higher heart rate than normal, we'll just about guarantee that addressing sodium will fix it. So that was really cool. But then we started getting tagged on social media where folks are like, hey, love the keto aid, but when I was traveling, the TSA didn't like my three bags of white powder because they're like carrying all this shit with them. And so we just asked the question. We're like, I wonder if people would use some sort of a stick pack type deal for the convenience and whatnot. And so we put the company together and launched it, and it's done really well. We Lance Armstrong had us as his podcast sponsor. We have some inroads into the special operations community, a couple of SEAL teams, NHL, NFL, MBA. It's been really cool. We've expanded out well beyond just a lower carb kind of scene because lots of people seem to benefit from this higher sodium and electrolyte intake. But it was an interesting process because we identified a problem. We had a solution to problem that was a freemium deal. Hey, just download this and do it and report back. And we got a ton of feedback. It was like, man, this stuff kicks ass. And then we developed a product around it. And it knock on wood, but it's really done well. And just as an aside, when we did the original formulations and flavors, we weren't sure if this stuff would work as an electrolyte. And so we flavored them so that if it totally tanked as an electrolyte, we could market it as a margarita drink base. Yeah. And the the uh lemon habanero and like the citrus salt and all that type of stuff.

For for the record, it's a really nice addition to the classical Norcoun margarita.

It's it's you don't need anything else.

No, it'll be really good. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and I know you guys do offer, I think it's yeah, a free plus shipping. Where do you want to check that out?

Sorry, uh uh the free plus shipping is gonna go through the end of January. So that depending on when this goes up, it may or may not still be there, but we always have something brewing and the website, we have a mountain of if people are like, wait, it's supposed to take more sodium, like that that seems counterintuitive. We have a mountain of evidence-based information on the website. It's uh drinkelement.com.

Awesome.

And it's L M-N-T. Drink L M N T.com.

Yeah, I do say, and it's I have no dog in this fight. I do really like it. I just I add it to the amount of water that I drink every day normally, and it adds a good taste to it, and it just allows me to drink the water more easily. I actually want to drink it. And I do, like I said, I am surprised that I like a habanero mix, but it just seems to work. Even the chocolate one seems to work well. So I've been trying to think about, I know we only got about 10 minutes left on this, so I want to articulate this question really well because it's something that having been in the coaching fitness, nutrition world for a long time, work with a lot of coaches and gym owners and influencers in that area. As we evolve as a coach, first year of coaching for me was like, okay, I'm learning a CrossFit pus paleo will solve all the world's problems. If you just do those two things in combination, cancer, uh, world war, you name it, we can solve social inequity, everything.

Yes, yes.

And then I started to educate myself more. Then I came across James Fitzgerald and I started doing all the OPT now OPEC stuff. And I started going on this knowledge journey, and it made me realize that I know nothing. So then I lost. So initially up front, ton of confidence as a coach, paleo crossfit. I even got in like arguments at bars at night with other trainers from other gyms. Then I went into this period of time of, I don't know anything, and I really need to learn stuff. And I lost confidence in what I was doing. And then I started to learn more, and then I started building more confidence, and I realized the answer to most questions is it depends. And that that changed everything. And I'm wondering for your journey, Rob, having been so down so many rabbit holes, what has that have you experienced something similar in your career? And how do you navigate all that? Because there's constantly new information coming out. And nutrition is probably the most debated topic in human history. Uh it's crazy. Well, walk us through your experiences at America.

Yeah, I had exactly the same experience. When it's funny, I had tons of success with CrossFit and our interpretation of CrossFit. Like my wife developed this thing called the On-Ramp Program very early on because we noticed that it was the experience that people had of just entering a gym and starting the workout of the day is similar to taking an old piece of a tree and throwing it in a chipper. Like the whole tree went in and then just parts came out the other side. And not surprisingly, that was terrible for the client and it was horrible for the business. I remember we had been open maybe like three years, and mind you, this was maybe 2008 and yeah, right around 2007, 2008. But we looked through all the waivers that we had collected over like the last six months, and it was like a thousand waivers because we were still in that mode of come in and do a free workout or free week or whatever. And we had about a hundred people signed up. We're like, holy shit, like our retention is horrible. And we just started looking at what we were doing and realizing that the the volume and intensity that people are exposed to in the beginning is way too much. People don't have the movement and the mobility prerequisites. And so this on-ramp program and the development of a personal training track provided these much more graded on-ramping on-ramping experiences for people. And I had my nutrition and training philosophy wrapped into that. And it was really beneficial to a lot of people, helped a lot of people. She hadn't been in the gym in a long time. And I saw her, I'm like, hey, you look great. What do you what have you been up to? And she's like, she was really like cagey. She's like, I I've been training with this guy, and he does paleo, but it's a higher carb paleo, and I'm just really killing it on it. And I'm like, wow, that's cool. And I was like, why didn't you? And she's like yeah, I was really struggling on the low carb. I was like, why didn't you talk to me about that? And she's like, everybody else in the gym was succeeding, and you're a really nice guy, but so I didn't want to bum you out. And so it was interesting that it, and because I was early in this scene, like I had a lot of survivor bias. Like it, my methods helped a lot of people, and particularly in that kind of like gut autoimmunity, type 2 diabetes kind of scene. Like I helped a lot of people, and I'm really proud of that. But if somebody was a little bit more of an ass kicker, a little bit more of an athlete, I failed them because I assumed that this one size fits all low-carb approach was the bee's knees. And it's an amazing tool, just like a hammer is an amazing tool. But you don't want to cut flooring with a hammer. You know, you want a really precision saw to do that type of stuff. And so that was a huge wake up for me. And I I also talked with James Fitzgerald and uh uh people like John Welbourne where I'm like, hey man, where are the edges of this Venn diagram? Like, when do people do well on low carb? When do they don't? It's a continuing process there. As I've gone on, it's interesting that I think I've focused ever more on sleep and lifestyle as my kind of like center focus because it's it's interesting, particularly if you're working with hard chargers like like CEO, corporate exec types. They're totally in the I'll sleep when I'm dead, sleep is for the week. And it's interesting if you can get some improvement in their sleep and circadian rhythm, they immediately feel better. And then it's also this skinny end of the wedge where it's hey man, are you feeling better from your sleep? And they're like, Yeah. I'm like, if we cleaned up your diet, your sleep would be even better. And you can just see them like shake their fists. They're like, no, but it's like, hey, it worked once, it'll work again. And so then it's funny because I orient everything around sleep, circadian biology. This is how I walk people back off of constant super high-intensity workouts. It's hey, if we periodize this a little bit and your sleep, and I don't do a ton of HRV testing, but if somebody's really a pain in the ass, I will recommend that just so we've got an objective measure of what's going on. I'm like, if we let's agree to this, like, we're gonna set out some performance goals. And as part of achieving that, you need to prioritize sleep and periodize your training. And then I will promise you that you will meet your performance goals. But every day in the gym is not going to be a PR. That is going to be something that we work towards. Like you didn't sell your first tech company on day one. It took process and planning. And so we're going to trust kind of a similar process. So, you know, I definitely have learned to grow and modify my methodology over time. And interestingly, I'm basically the food guy that mainly talks about sleep and circadian biology at this point, because I would say that in general, I'm way less likely to fuck something up focusing on sleep than I am with food. There's some big picture generality, a whole on processed food and all that type of stuff. But the only time that I've really seen some scenarios around sleep where people benefited from sleep avoidance, they had some really severe depression or some things that they needed to be working with a psychiatrist with, and they would actually put them in a sleep clinic and use planned sleep deprivation as part of like their depression management and stuff like that. But that's super high level, totally outside the scope of anything I would do in like a gym setting, but we were able to refer people out for that stuff by seeing the challenges that they experienced on the sleep. So now I orient almost everything towards sleep, whereas in the beginning I knew that sleep was important, but it was all about the food. Whereas I wouldn't say the food is it is secondary in a way, but it is all oriented around the focus of improving sleep.

Yeah, and it's so I I have a graveyard of wearables. I I now use the Garmin Phoenix in combination with the Morpheus HRB system, and I get pretty good, but I never really trust my sleep reading because how does it really know? Like how much is deep sleep, how much is have you found anything accurate on that end?

Waking up and then being like, I feel like I could go kick some ass today. That's about it. And part of that, like an HRV platform would have been really good for me in my 20s when I tried to commit suicide via volume and intensity. It would have been a great control rod for me then. Now it's I never dig a super deep hole. Like I've just learned, and all of my strength training is to support my jujitsu, all of my conditioning is to support my jujitsu. And then at jujitsu, I just try to be a fat, lazy slob and do as little as possible. And so I'm I'm really in a very different way. I try to stay strong and maintain explosiveness and everything, but mainly as an anti-aging thing, not to be better at my jujitsu. The jiu-jitsu is all for me all about improving technical proficiency and then just being as armor-plated as I can. And so I just I did the aura, I've done multiple platforms. And the funny thing is, it would just piss me off because it would give me kind of marginal sleep numbers. And I was like, I have no idea what else I would do. Like I talked to Joel Jameson, I talked to all these people, and I don't know, you know, and so it was I started doing things like I would take the the aura ring off while I was reading because it would interpret my reading time as delayed sleep, sleep latency. And so it would ding me for that. And so then I just started like cheating to try to get a better score. I'm like, this isn't doing me anything. So I'm really pretty these tools as a way of getting compliance out of people, but I'm um I'm slow on on the trigger to pull it for them. I try to get people just in their skin and experiencing their their body and you know what's your internal dialogue and rip relative perceived effort doing any given thing. And I I really like leaning on stuff like that.

Yeah, I think that's good advice. Technology's catching up quickly, but it's gotta be still, it's it's gotta be what you feel in your own skin and training people to react to that, right? Man, Rob, that was a fast 45 minutes, man. I really appreciate coming on. I know you you probably got uh more of these to do. Other than Robwolf.com, is there any other place that you're sending people now or people want to get a hold of you? Where do they go?

Yeah, uh so robwolf.com and then our our community is join.thehealthierbellion.com. And gosh, we have the the Healthy Rebellion Radio, which is the podcast that my wife and I do. And then I do also spend a good amount of time producing material for element, and that is drinklmnt.com. And those are the places to track me down.

Right on. Rob, thank you for everything you do for coaches and humanity. It's appreciated. And uh keep going down those rabbit holes, man.

Thank you, and I can't wait to see you up in the Flathead Valley. That's gonna be awesome.

Welcome to Montana, man. You made a good move. You're making a good move. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, Rob Wolf. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, Catbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because I put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the feature of fitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.