Today’s episode features Dr. Ben House.  Dr. House has a Ph.D. in Nutrition from the University of Texas at Austin, is also a Nutritionist (CN), Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist (FDN), and Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (CFMP).

Functional Medicine is Ben’s life’s passion. He has studied under some of the best in the world and continues to regularly attend and present at conferences and seminars around the world.  As a strength coach, House has worked at both the high school and collegiate levels, including time under Coach Wright at the University of Texas Basketball. Besides practicing Functional Medicine, coaching, and writing articles for Functional Medicine Costa Rica, House has numerous publications in peer-reviewed, high-impact scientific journals.

I first found Ben’s work on the Train Adapt Evolve website several years ago, and seeing his journey to practicing functional medicine and leading retreats in Costa Rica in the time since been nothing short of inspiring.  Ben is a versatile and exciting guest because of his experience and knowledge of multiple aspects of human beings, from nutrition, to physiology, to training concepts, to meditation, restoration and recovery.  Ben has a tremendous knowledge of the associated research, and how this fits in with many current training trends.

On today’s show, Ben talks about meditation, recovery methods to calm athletes down from training, his take on the concept of training from a hormonal perspective, and also how to simplify corrective methods such as PRI into a user-friendly training session.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

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Key Points

Quick thoughts from Ben on the Westernization and use of meditation

Means of getting athletes in recovery mode post-exercise session

How to use breathing and other integrated means to get athletes calmed down post workout

Sympathetic and parasympathetic states and training

Types of training and effects on the anabolic and hormonal processes of the body

Differences between males, females and testosterone (or lack therof)

Simplifying and integrating PRI based ideals into a training program

“We’ve really westernized meditation”

“People who have been meditating for 25 years, they kind of rest on that default mode network, so they are more present, less reactive”

“People would generally rather shock themselves then sit in silence”

“You could turn (post-workout box breathing) into a repositioning exercise… there are so many different ways you could take it, you could do body scans, you could do a Feldenkrais class”

“For some people who really like to train, their only stress reliever in life is another stress reliever… we have to give them other tools.  I find that a lot of people that I coach have two stress relievers, one of them is food, and another one is exercise.  Those are two coping strategies that I really don’t want people to use with stress”

“Our mindset around stress is very important, if we believe we are going to break, stress is very debilitating”

“I would never chase something happening in the endocrine system with my training”

“Females generally can put 85% of the muscle on as men, relatively they can put on (almost) as much muscle as men and they have 1/20th of the testosterone”

“Unfortunately, we’ve been looking at a good indicator of over-training or over-reaching for a really long time, and none of the hormones really pan out as far as a 2017 meta-analysis”

“What is the best marker we have for over-training?  It is an increase in training volume or training intensity, met with a decrease in performance”

“Just sciency enough, just bothers me so much, because a lot of people are trying to sell a simple story with science”