Rebuilding on the Cellular Level

Peter Wasowski: Close, yeah. Basically, what we’re doing I bio-mimicking the physiology that naturally occurs in children. Whenever you see kids your age, whenever you see four, five, six, seven, eight year olds, you don’t see them walking. They’re always going full speed ahead. If you were to look inside their quad muscles, you’d see very highly concentrated lactic acid. The reason the concentration is high is because the body is short, the muscles are short. They, of course, use those muscles tremendously. They concentrate huge amounts of lactic acid.

The keyword here is concentration, not the amount. The concentration is what drives a very powerful signal to the pituitary gland, to the brain, requesting growth hormone to rebuild those muscles back to pre-exercise conditions. Children just do that naturally. Of course, they have a high level of growth hormones because they’re growing. They boost those hormone levels.

This is one of the reasons why a child is such a resilient being. If you bring a child to doctor with a meniscus tear or ligament tear, most of the time there’s really no medical intervention necessary. The child recovers very quickly on his own. We are actually bulletproof until we hit puberty. Once you hit puberty, of course, your body is taller, there’s more real estate here. You can no longer concentrate lactic acid to those levels because those muscles are longer. You also don’t have time to run around all day. You’re closer to your adult height so your natural hormone secretions are slowing down. Because of those three things, every 10 years, we lose 14% of our, what’s called, anabolic hormones, the hormones that rebuild our body, 14% every 10 years.

If you go to a medical professional and they check your hormone levels, they’ll say, “Well, guess what, you’re getting older.” The truth is that our hormones don’t decline because we age. We age because our hormones decline. The idea here was to see how we can increase the hormonal production without having to do Crossfit Insanity P90X or some of those very, very intense type of exercise that less than one percent of the people are doing. It, of course, has some injuries tied to it. It’s absolutely very, very tough to do. At my age, I would not be … even if I could do it, I would not be comfortable doing it.

Dave Asprey: There aren’t a lot of 69 year old crossfitters, that’s very true, or endurance runners. Any of the things that you can do until you’re 35 get progressively more difficult. I know a few people 50+ who do that. There are amazing people like, Mark [inaudible 00:15:56] been on the show and he still does a ton of exercise. Even he has switched his long, drawn out runs to a slower pace because he finally got better results.

I think the argument is, if you’re like me, my goal is to live to at least 180 years old. That’s not a joke, it’s not PR. I actually think it’s possible, actually, every damn thing I can to do it. One of the things is not destroying my knees. I’ve had three knee surgeries. I had them before I was 23. I have a screw in my right knee. I had arthritis on my knees since I was 14. It’s gone. I don’t have those problems. I’ve trekked the Himalayas and the Andes. I still though if I was to go play basketball for awhile. I’d probably have an unstable knee. I know how much it sucks to be limited in mobility like that.

How does the cooling and how does this affect from the Vasper work with bad joints or sore joints or thing like that? What’s the stress load that it’s putting on the body?

Peter Wasowski: Excellent question and we’ll get into cooling. One thing I wanted to just briefly point out about intense exercise is that, I’ve done a lot of work with professional and amateur athletes. Of course, we all want to look awesome. A lot of these people that I come across, they, from the outside, their bodies look amazing, chiseled, beautiful bodies. But then, if you check their hormone panels, it’s like looking at a car that has 20 layers of paint and it’s rusting on the inside.

Many people don’t realize the physiological price you pay for running on pavement for two hours or doing very, very intense exercise that actually breaks down your body.

Dave Asprey: Without recovery.

Peter Wasowski: Without recovery. Vasper is an antidote to that. Let’s get to cooling. Cooling is very, very important because what happens when we exercise is we normally sweat. In order for your body to sweat, there’s a tremendous amount of blood that has to be brought to the surface of the skin. Of course, the skin is the biggest organ in your body, it has six and a half million pores. Each one of us has a finite amount of blood on board which happens to be eight percent of your body weight. If you’re looking at a hundred pound person, you’re looking at eight pounds of blood inside that person, a little more than a gallon. If you exercise with intensity, you can actually shunt as much as almost 40% of that blood or close to it to the surface of the skin-

Dave Asprey: Just for cooling?

Dave Asprey: Without recovery.

Peter Wasowski: Without recovery. Vasper is an antidote to that. Let’s get to cooling. Cooling is very, very important because what happens when we exercise is we normally sweat. In order for your body to sweat, there’s a tremendous amount of blood that has to be brought to the surface of the skin. Of course, the skin is the biggest organ in your body, it has six and a half million pores. Each one of us has a finite amount of blood on board which happens to be eight percent of your body weight. If you’re looking at a hundred pound person, you’re looking at eight pounds of blood inside that person, a little more than a gallon. If you exercise with intensity, you can actually shunt as much as almost 40% of that blood or close to it to the surface of the skin-

Dave Asprey: Just for cooling?

Dave Asprey: When you cool cells as well, there is a distance electrons have to move inside the cell, the electron transport system, we used to call the chain but it’s really a diffused system more like a chain link fence than a chain. When you shrink the size of one of these, now I’m talking like a network engineer because it’s actually my background. In training, I used to run the webinar and internet engineering program at the University of California, and believe it or not, back in the early days with the internet. If you need to send something from here to there, it’s not a big deal if it takes one second to get there if you only send one thing. If you need to send something back and forth a billion times, that one second is now a billion seconds.

If you can shrink that one second to half a second, you saved an enormous amount of time because it’s amplified by a billion. When you shrink a cell by making it cooler, even just a little bit, the billions of electrons that flow through it actually flow through it more effectively and more efficiently. I think you’d get a cellular improvement there which is shown in better oxygen consumption. Your utilization of the air you breathe, you can measure in the gas that’s breathed out from your body.

Have you seen any other research or done any other research on effects of the cooling or just the entire Vasper system on mitochondrial size or density or performance or anything else on that neighborhood?

Peter Wasowski: Yes, yes, absolutely. There’s a lot of work that’s been done in that area especially with people that suffer from heat sensitive disease like, for example, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s. What you described is fascinating because that’s exactly what happens. Each one of the neurons has a small gap in between. That gap in called node of Ranvier. Ranvier was the French anatomist that discovered this. What happens is that a normal core body temperature that pulses only two milliseconds is very small. If you lower the core body temperature by very slight, about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit, you actually increase the amplitude by 400% to eight milliseconds.

What happens is you end up with what’s called a salutatory conduction. That drives, you can actually jump over the damaged neuron or you can amplify a much, much stronger signal to the fast switch muscle fibers and perform much much better. The results we’ve seen with heat sensitive disease people like [inaudible 00:22:46] are absolutely off the charts. People that have fibromyalgia and so forth. This is precisely what you have described. That’s what happens. We increase the amplitude of the electrical impulse and our body is an electrochemical device.

Dave Asprey: It is interesting that you talk about fibromyalgia. If you’ve been listening for a while, you might have heard me alk about this. I’ve been diagnosed with chronic lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and toxic mold poisoning. I believe that all of those symptoms can be and usually are tied to environmental toxic mold exposure. I filmed a documentary about that called “Moldy”. Interviewed some of the top experts in the field as well as people like me who had been infected by it, sleeping in a bedroom that had slime behind one of the walls, just things that are non-obvious but have a huge impact.

All of those conditions, and also MS, ALS, Parkinson’s have at their core a mitochondrial weakness. Your mitochondria stopped working. The batteries or the power plants in your body, they don’t work. “Head Strong”, the book where i’ve spent the last two years researching this is how do you make sure that the weak mitochondria die and the strong ones either get bigger, more efficient or replicate themselves? You can have more power, literally more power. Like you’re saying, you can train the body to have more power. Even at the 40 years, I was then, neurofeedback institute that I’ve opened up in Seattle, one of the four different things that we do for your brain is we increase the voltage potential in your brain, literally teach the cells in your brain to make more power so that you can use that for thinking. That’s a local effect.

Are we teaching our muscle cells to make more power when we’re using the Vasper? What’s the effect where the cooling is versus everywhere else? What are we doing to the mitochondria there?

Peter Wasowski: We’re definitely increasing the profusion. There’s a tremendous amount of blood that is channeled through the entire body including the compressed muscles. There’s a huge detox that happens. The reason Crossfit Insanity P90X, those very, very intense anaerobic exercise, actually produces benefits. It’s because it forces this massive flow of blood through the body that can only happen during very intense exercise. We’re basically biomimic and exactly the same physiology on Vasper, except you’re sitting on a chair. The oldest person using Vasper is 97 years old. The youngest is 10 years old.

Then, we have Navy Seals, astronauts, professional athletes in the middle, so we can adjust the software to each one of these people to give them a benefit of very, very strong anaerobic exercise. They’re safe and they’re doing a low impact type of workout.

Dave Asprey: I’ve had a couple of people ask what’s the difference between this and Kaatsu, which is another compression technology. Can you talk about Kaatsu and Vasper in similarities and differences?

Peter Wasowski: Kaatsu is a very innovative type of exercise. This is something that actually got this whole what’s called BFR. BFR stands for blood flow restriction exercise movement going. The gentleman, Yoshiaki was a brilliant man who was a body builder at one point. What he discovered is that in Japan, when you sit, you don’t sit on a chair like we’re sitting. You’re sitting, you’re basically on the floor and your feet are under you. He discovered at one point that if you sit there for about half an hour or so, you touch your quads, that the hardness and firmness of those quads is very similar to what it feels like when you do, you pump iron for a while.

That’s how Kaatsu came to being. The Kaatsu uses a very small part of what Vasper is all about. They’re basically the compression at a very high pressure level. They go about, I think outputs of 250 millimeters of mercury, which is intense pressure, it’s basically [turnika 00:27:12] type exercise. It does produce results but it takes a strong willed, determined person to do it on a regular basis simply because it’s quite intense. I wanted to design something that could be used by a 97 year old. You would never see a 97 year old, perhaps using Kaatsu, on a regular basis. It’s great for athletes who compete and some of the athletes use it.

Dave Asprey: It’s a more intense thing. The Kaatsu guys were at the Bulletproof Conference which is cool. You were there as well.

Peter Wasowski: I met Yoshiaki Sato, a very, very nice man. He’s the same age as me and looks like incredible hulk.

Dave Asprey: He’s doing something right. You’re using chilled water pressure and the Kaatsu system uses an air pressure?

Peter Wasowski: They use air, correct.

Dave Asprey: Is it also cooled?

Peter Wasowski: No.

Dave Asprey: No, okay. It’s basically, it’s blood flow restriction but without the temperature changes.

Peter Wasowski: That’s right.

Dave Asprey: I haven’t done Kaatsu yet although it’s been on my list for a long time. I can tell you that the chilling has a huge effect just from the exercise that we did yesterday. It’s very different than what I was expecting. As long time listeners know, I have an ice bath with a digital temperature control. There’s a cryotherapy chamber right underneath where we’re sitting, that uses liquid nitrogen. I’m comfortable with using cold as one of the main biological signals that come into us.

If you look at biohacking itself, the definition of biohacking is changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology so you can do whatever you want to do. The big variables in your environment are temperature, light, food intake, the time of day matters like there’s circadian biology. Then, there’s emotional stress and physiological stress. What you’re doing is you’re tweaking physiological stress, and I forgot air, air pressure and air composition is important, like how much hydrogen, how much nitrogen and what pressure and things because you can vary those. EMFs I guess would be the other ones, electromagnetic frequencies, as well as light.

That’s the set of things we can manipulate. By doing intensity, physiological pressure, as well as temperature at the same time and controlling them precisely, I think you’ve created a unique workaround for this problem of how do I get enough intensity without overworking the system so that you’d get the healing signal without all of the joint stress and all the other time that it takes to do this.

Peter Wasowski: Correct. It’s amazing that you’ve mentioned all of these things because all of these things including EMFs is addressed at Vasper.

Dave Asprey: Talk about EMFs in Vasper, that’s interesting.

Peter Wasowski: The EMFs, when you’re in Vasper, you’re barefoot. You’re barefoot and you are on your feet on brass plates that are being cooled.