Does Biohacking Your Body Really Work?
In this episode, I talk about popular fitness biohacks, how they work, and whether you should just stick to a conventional exercise routine.
Ben Greenfield
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Does Biohacking Your Body Really Work?
There’s a bit of a debate in the fitness industry about the efficacy of popular “biohacks” that supposedly allow you to achieve fitness, fat loss, or performance results faster than you would normally be able to. After all, it just doesn’t seem fair that your neighbor down the street might be able to buy some fancy electrodes, a vibration training platform, an oxygen therapy device, an infrared sauna, or a bunch of supplements and somehow be able to beat all that hard work that you’re doing in the gym.
While I certainly don’t condone the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs or blood doping, I’ll admit that in many, many cases (if you’re willing to spend some money and possibly look quite silly) devices or training tools that allow you to hack your way to faster results have been proven by science to actually allow you to exercise less while getting the same or better results.
1. EMS
You’ve probably seen it before. The infomercials on TV that features a man or woman lounging happily on the couch while some fancy electrodes stimulate their stomach into an instant 6-pack. These electrode machines, also known as Electrical Muscle Stimulation or EMS, are becoming more and more common at online shopping website and in fitness magazines.
But isn’t this too good to be true? How on earth could you actually “shock” yourself fit?
A recent study entitled, “Effects of high-frequency current therapy on abdominal obesity in young women: a randomized controlled trial,” is a perfect investigation into this very question.
In the study, a group of subjects received 30 minutes of high-frequency current therapy via a series of electrodes placed on their stomachs. The subjects did these sessions 3 times per week for 6 weeks, for a total of 18 EMS sessions. The researchers measured waist circumference, body mass index, subcutaneous fat mass (that’s fat found under the skin), and body fat percentage.
The results were surprising, especially considering these women didn’t modify their exercise or diet.
The electrical stimulation caused significant effects on decreasing waist circumference, abdominal obesity, subcutaneous fat mass, and body fat percentage, leading the study to note in the final results that: “The use of the high-frequency current therapy may be beneficial for reducing the levels of abdominal obesity in young women.”
Other studies have shown EMS to be helpful for everything from pain management to helping increase muscle blood flow for warming up prior to performance-related activities. I discuss both these concepts and research in detail in my article “How To Use Electrical Muscle Stimulation to Enhance Performance, Build Power and VO2 Max,” and the podcast episode “How the LA Lakers, The Boston Red Sox & Over 104 Other Professional Teams Are Maximizing Recovery.”
2. EWOT
Exercising while using concentrated oxygen, also know as exercise with oxygen therapy or EWOT, involves the inhalation of high flow oxygen (8-10 liters per minute at an oxygen purity level of 90-95%). Theoretically, EWOT increases the diameter of blood vessels and oxygenation of tissues and cells, assists in recovery from stress related illnesses, helps prevent age-related diseases such as cancer, macular degeneration, cataracts, diabetes, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and ‘non healing’ wounds, slows down the aging process, stimulates the immune system, assists in weight loss, and reverses chronically low oxygen saturation of the blood.
Now, I used to be under the impression that you simply cannot force any more oxygen into your cells than you would be able to at the normal percentage of oxygen in the air. A red blood cell carries no more than 97% oxygen. And theoretically, you cannot force another 3% into the cell. This is indeed true.
However, the extra oxygen you’re exposed to during EWOT is absorbed by your plasma (this is what carries both red and white blood cells) and is then pushed into cells and tissue without the actual aid of the red blood cells (this is called the “Law of Mass Action”). Very little oxygen actually gets through, but if you are consistently feeding your body the extra oxygen, there will be a noticeable increase in your total tissue oxygen level.
You can read up more on EWOT research here, but it looks like the use of one of those fancy hyperoxgyenation masks may actually have some significant benefit on your training and your recovery.
3. Saunas
I’ve covered the benefits of wet saunas, dry saunas, and the use of heat to maximize cardiovascular blood flow and your tolerance to exercising in the heat on a heat acclimation webinar for USA Triathlon, and I’ve thoroughly discussed a myriad of other health benefits of heat exposure, using everything from dry saunas to steam rooms to those dorky sauna suits in my interview with Dr. Rhonda Patrick.
Nowadays I’m spending at least two and, based on the results of this Finnish longevity study, as many as five days per week in an infrared sauna. As the Mayo Clinic has reported here, several studies have looked at using saunas in the treatment of chronic health problems, such as high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, and rheumatoid arthritis, and these studies have indeed found some evidence of benefit. For athletes using a sauna post-exercise, those benefits can extend to being as powerful as illegal performance enhancing drugs (as long as you go use the sauna for at least 30 minutes once you’ve finished your exercise session).
4. Vibration
During a conference I attended a few years ago, I hopped on a “Bulletproof Vibe” vibration platform. Within a few minutes, another conference attendee walked up and got me to go into a single leg standing yoga balance pose while on the vibration. This massively worked my nervous system within just a couple minutes and I felt like my brain had an intense buzz after focusing, posing and vibrating at the same time.
Later that year, while exercising at a gym that had a vibration platform, I attempted several 30-60 second isometric squats on the vibration platform, followed by 2-3 minute cycling intervals on a nearby stationary bike. And the next week, I repeated the same protocol, but with treadmill running instead.
After both sessions, I not only experienced the same “brain buzz”, but was able to push myself much harder during the actual cycling and running intervals.
So, how does this vibration thing work?
Whole Body Vibration (WBV) therapy (basically, standing or moving on a vibration platform) is used in universities, professional sports teams, and medical facilities around the United States. WBV was invented by Russian cosmonauts in 1960s and has been shown to:
- Detoxify and strengthen the immune system (pumps the lymph system thoroughly)
- Help regain muscle strength and bone density
- Reduce recovery time
- Stimulate healthier brain function
WBV therapy can stimulate your hormonal, cardiovascular, lymphatic, and nervous systems simultaneously. You can use it to get the lymphatic and circulatory benefits of hours of walking, or you can perform exercise on it, or use it prior to more complex weight training exercises or intervals.
A vibration platform’s benefits include decreased time to fatigue, increased strength compared to resistance training alone, higher hormonal response to exercise, and much more. Of course, beyond just standing on a vibration platform, which quickly becomes easy (and frankly, boring), you can do squats, pushups and of course, any number of balance poses and yoga moves.
But can vibration training affect endurance performance?
There are a number of studies that have used vibration therapy for improving anaerobic performance, longevity, recovery and injury resistance in endurance athletes. You can read about them in detail here. And a search of PubMed for whole body vibration will yield dozens more studies on effects of vibration on hormones, strength and power.
5. Hypoxia
Pick up a straw. Breathe in and out through the straw. That’s resisted breathing. Consider it to be weight training for your lungs.
Now go for a swim. Experience what happens when you breathe every 5 or 7 strokes instead of every 1 or 2 strokes. That’s restricted breathing, which sends a clear message to your body that oxygen molecules are few and far between.
Finally, go climb a mountain or crawl into an altitude tent. That’s hypoxic training, in which the air is truly thinner and you’re actually pulling less oxygen into your body.
Resisted breathing enhances your endurance by strengthening your inspiratory and expiratory muscles, which increases your ventilatory capacity (your lung size). Hypoxic training not only strengthens those same respiratory muscles, but also results in:
- improvements in oxygen uptake, transport and utilization
- production of neuroendocrine hormones that can have an anabolic training effect
- improvements in immune system strength
- increased activities of antioxidant enzymes in the brain, liver, heart and other organs (assuming you don’t overdo it, in which case you actually get suppression of normal antioxidant processes)
- as you’d probably guess, increased production of red blood cells, resulting in an increased oxygen carrying capacity of the blood
Finally, restricted breathing actually gives you a bit of the benefits of both resisted and hypoxic training.
Before I give you some practical recommendations to implement resisted breathing, restricted breathing and hypoxic training, let’s get something straight: many resisted breathing devices are marketed as hypoxic training devices, but are not simulating altitude at all and do not result in any hypoxic adaptations.
Take, for example, altitude training masks, which seem to have become rather popular of late.
Most of these masks, which look like a Swat team gas mask or the Batman villain Bane, cannot (despite some manufacturer claims) actually change the atmospheric pressure that you’re training in. They must be designed as Intermittent Hypoxic Training (IHT) devices to accomplish this, and most are not. Fact is, when you’re charging down the treadmill sporting your scary-looking altitude training mask, you’re still breathing air that is approximately 21% oxygen, with the same partial pressure of oxygen as whatever altitude you happen to be at. Most masks are simply restricting your breathing by covering up your mouth and nose. These masks can certainly be effective for improving ventilatory capacity, but don’t result in the same physiological adaptations as true hypoxic training.
In contrast, true altitude training would require driving your car to the top of a high mountain, getting out, and going for a run; sleeping in an altitude training tent from a company such as Hypoxico; using Intermittent Hypoxic Training (IHT) sessions to expose the body to periods of hypoxia (9-14% oxygen) inhaled through a mask; or moving to live and train in a place like Colorado.
It is in these true altitude situations that your body doesn’t get as much oxygen, makes more hemoglobin to shuttle oxygen to your muscles, and experiences many of the other favorable hormonal and immune system adaptations to hypoxia. Of course, simulating altitude or training at true altitude can be a logistical nightmare that turns into a time-suck if you don’t actually live up in the mountains or have a spouse or significant who finds an altitude tent a romantic bedtime setting. Probably the most practical and implementable method currently on the market is the type of true altitude mask I mentioned earlier, which you can find in a home model through Hypoxico.
When combined with proper breathing patterns throughout your work day and a habitual deep diaphragmatic breathing pattern, these type of methods can be extremely efficient at improving your ventilatory capacity and efficiency of oxygen utilization .
Summary
Finally, I’ve certainly heard the argument that by using these and many other biohacking tricks that you may somehow “miss the journey” of getting fit, whether you’re trying to lose 20 pounds or train for an Ironman triathlon. Depending on your perspective, this could be true. For example, if I decide to visit my Grandma in Florida, I could hop in the car and take a roadtrip across the country, taking in the sights and scenery of America, rather than forking over my hard earned cash for an afternoon airplane flight. I could also sign up for a fancy outsourced grocery delivery service rather than setting aside time in my weekly schedule to go navigate the grocery store aisle. I could take that one step further and even outsource my food preparation rather than spending time in the kitchen cooking my own food.
Ultimately, it depends on which parts of the journey you personally enjoy. I enjoy riding my bicycle, but if I can skip the long 5 hour rides and instead compete in an Ironman triathlon by riding my bicycle inside a sauna for two hours while wearing an elevation training mask, I’ll likely choose the latter, since it leaves me three extra hours to hang out with my kids. Or if I know that training with a vibration training platform prior to weight training may allow me to do a couple fewer sets of squats, I may choose the vibration, especially if I’m pressed for time. And as far as the cross country road trip vs. the direct flight to Grandma’s? I’d probably choose the option that let’s me spend more time with Grandma.
But that’s just me. How about you? If you have more questions about whether biohacking your body actually works, or if you have your own thoughts on biohacking your fitness, then leave your thoughts over at the Facebook.com/GetFitGuy page!
Biohacking image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Ben Greenfield received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology; personal training and strength and conditioning certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA); a sports nutrition certification from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), an advanced bicycle fitting certification from Serotta. He has over 11 years’ experience in coaching professional, collegiate, and recreational athletes from all sports, and as helped hundreds of clients achieve weight loss and fitness success.