Daniel Vitalis (00:28.668)
My guest today is Andreas Christou, who lives in Cyprus and is the host of the Fitness Wisdom podcast. I just recently got to be a guest on your show. Andreas, thank you so much for coming on to my show today.
Andreas David Christou (00:43.18)
Thank you so much for having me, Daniel. It was an absolute honor and pleasure to have you on the Fitness Wisdom Podcast. We had a great conversation. I'm really looking forward to educating and empowering your audience today on all things mobility and fitness.
Daniel Vitalis (00:56.468)
That's fantastic, man. I wanna start off by just, could you say a few words about where you live? It's such a unique spot when I look at it geographically on a map. And I'm also wondering, not to be crude here, but do you see fireworks from Gaza from there? mean, you're so close to the Levant.
Andreas David Christou (01:12.511)
That's very true. Well, it's a beautiful location here where I live. know, it's the half of Cyprus. The northern part of Cyprus is taken by Turkey and it's like the Cypriot side on the other side. I live on the southern side of Cyprus where they speak Greek. They speak Turkish and Greek on the other side. But no, from where we are, I don't see any kind of, you know, explosions or anything like this. Thankfully, we did have two attacks at the beginning when the war kind of started, you know, from Iran. They sent some
drones to a military base and a UK military base here in Cyprus. I feel like it was strategic towards the UK military base for some reason. Well, I don't know why, but you probably know the details because you're a bit more down these rabbit holes with the politics and the war and stuff like that. But yeah, I don't think...
Cyprus is so involved with this and thankfully, you know, since those two drones, it's not been such a big deal. But otherwise, it's a beautiful place to live. I feel like there's a lot of programming and fear being induced on the masses to not come to Cyprus for some reason. I feel like it's a form of human trafficking in a way that, you know, manipulating where people are living on the planet. you know, determining whether they go on holiday. For example, you'll see articles online, for example, that say
UK versus Cyprus, where should you go on holiday? I'm like, well, obviously, obviously Cyprus, right? But there is a reason why they want people from the UK to migrate, I feel like, back to the UK. I know that this is kind of like not part of our discussion at all, but I just feel like it's because they want the wealthy who have left the UK and they want to avoid paying all of the taxes and all the stuff. They want them to go back into the country. That's just my speculation.
Daniel Vitalis (03:04.798)
Cause I mean, otherwise I'm assuming, maybe this has to do with like my Sicilian blood, but it just kind of looks like you're in like a perfect environment. You know, the Mediterranean there surrounded by the sea, you know, for living the lifestyle that we're talking about, it seems, you know, I love where I live in Maine. It's hard for six months, man. It's a struggle to get through the winter. You have to decide not to complain about it. You have to decide that you're gonna embrace it.
Andreas David Christou (03:31.953)
Yes. Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (03:33.246)
But it's challenging and then I see someone like you just like year round, just loving up that beautiful sun outside for all your workouts. It looks lovely, man.
Andreas David Christou (03:42.524)
I try to get outside as much as I can. There is some times of the year, like maybe one or two months or maybe maximum three months where, you know, you are going to be spend more time indoors. But I still aim to get outside every single day because being outdoors is a biological necessity. That's where we have evolved as human beings over thousands of years. And so it's a very modern thing for us, you know, to live in these boxes where the air doesn't change. We don't get the natural light. Our circadian rhythms are totally thrown off, bombarded by artificial blue light. But yeah, like
I'm the same with you. I obviously go with the flow and I embrace seasonality and I really respect and appreciate seasonality. A couple of years ago, actually, I actually moved to the equator. I sold everything here with my partner, Tina. We moved to the equator around Costa Rica area and we decided to see how it is to live there, you know, and basically we kind of missed Cyprus. So we kind of came back. There were some things that made life a little bit more challenging to live there.
And so it makes you really appreciate also the seasonal aspect because I was trying to avoid the winter time. That's why I actually left Cyprus during the winter. I went to Costa Rica and then I came back, but I wasn't actually planning on coming back because it was just a one way ticket. So then we just bought a ticket, you know, to come back. But yeah, I just love it. I love the I love the winter. I love the summer. And every single season gives you something very unique.
For your biology, for example, in the wintertime, you're designed to get the cold because you have the absence of light and you're not able to make as much vitamin D. And we know that now the science is showing about the science of biophotons, which is the light, which is what the mitochondria produce when you go through cellular respiration, know, through metabolism. The more you use your mitochondria, the more you work them, basically, the more biophotons they produce. And these biophotons interact with the cholesterol
which is near the mitochondria and it helps you produce pre-vitamin D and that basically gets converted to vitamin D so it's insane.
Daniel Vitalis (05:42.569)
Let's back that up. I want to pick that apart. And I want to start at this idea of the circadian rhythm and the equator. When I was younger, I used to think I want to, you know, dip down. That's where I want to be down by the equator, you know, where there's no winter. And I guess I hadn't really realized early on how you I would be giving up those long days of summer. And you get down there and you're like, it's it's sunrise at 6am. It's sunset at 6pm. Every day, every day, every day, no end to it. Same day. And it's like,
For me, having, you know, we have winter days that are eight hours long and we have summer days that are 16 hours long. I've gotten really used to that rhythmic change and come to really appreciate it. And it sort of feels like Groundhog Day to just keep repeating the same day over and over again. Something that I would like to repopularize, I hope I have time to really put some energy into this at some point, but is the sundial. I just think that the sundial is not an antiquated.
Andreas David Christou (06:23.0)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (06:41.436)
way of telling time, it's actually the correct biologically correct way of telling time. And on a sundial, it's six to six, whether the day is 16 hours long, or it's eight hours long. So in the wintertime, sun rises at six sets at six, but the hours are shorter. And then in the summer, it's the same six to six, but the hours are longer. And time is relative to town. Like if I go to the next town, they're going to have a slightly different time.
Andreas David Christou (06:42.636)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Andreas David Christou (07:02.947)
Mmmmm
Daniel Vitalis (07:10.718)
but we've standardized it all, you know? But anyway, I was curious how that felt for you too, when you were down there, because it's not just the seasons, but it's like, for me, 6 p.m. feels like an early end of the day. Or did you feel that at all? Like what's the summer days like in Cyprus?
Andreas David Christou (07:12.621)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (07:24.353)
The summer days are beautiful here. Like now the sun rises around 545 or so. Maybe if you say daybreak, it's probably 530, which I like to wake up more towards daybreak just because you catch that pre-sunrise and you see the beautiful color cascade that occurs, you know, in the sky. And that is like the most beautiful thing that you can see first thing in the morning because it primes your mitochondria, right? But it also sets around the latest 830 in the peak summer. But right now it's setting around 7
45 but yeah, the days have already gotten significantly longer since the the clocks have changed
Daniel Vitalis (08:01.365)
Okay, great. now you're you've got a significant focus, you've already said it multiple times on circadian rhythm, and the relationship of sunlight and mitochondria. That's really interesting to me, I want to start to pick that apart a little bit. I was just I just had a guest on the other day, we were talking about mitochondria and how fascinating they are, because they have their own genetic code that comes only through the maternal line. I mean, that's just so fascinating. And, you know, they're
he was talking about them, think usually, I think of them as being the metabolic furnace of the cell in a sense, he was talking about him kind of like a factory. So maybe you could kind of take us through what's your view of mitochondria? How do you think about mitochondria? And how in the framework of how we're going to be talking about them today, you know, what do mitochondria do for us in our cell? And how do we kind of crank them up as you were talking about before?
Andreas David Christou (08:35.776)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (08:42.826)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (08:54.304)
yeah, that was a fantastic question. And I love talking about the mitochondria so much because they are the powerhouse of the cell. That's what they teach us in school, right? They produce that cellular energy, but it doesn't stop there because actually the bigger part of the story is rather when you are going through the electron transport chain, which is within the mitochondria where the energy is produced, where the electrons are flowing, you actually have these five checkpoints, these enzymatic steps. on the enzyme four, number four,
cytochrome C oxidase is the point where you actually produce mitochondrial water. And this water is the most pristine water you will ever find. And it's so important that the body actually produces this water because it actually hydrates the cell from the inside. Most people think that the water that we drink automatically translates to cellular hydration, but that's not the case. It may contribute to your blood volume, so blood hydration and lymphatic system hydration. And that may help
with the extracellular matrix, you know, where the cells are living in basically, where are floating in pretty much. But then that might not necessarily translate into the water actually getting into the cell. And so the cellular hydration is reliant on the mitochondria. And if the mitochondria are dysfunctional due to artificial blue light and non-native electromagnetic fields, for example,
then you won't produce the cellular water. Cells start to become dehydrated, they start to have less energy, and we know that we need energy for everything, for detox, repair, regeneration, and healing. So if you actually don't have energy, you are not able to do those things. They don't happen automatically. Your body needs energy to do all those processes. And the definition of life and death is the difference between your mitochondria working and not working.
It's like literally that simple. As soon as your lights go out, literally as soon as your mitochondria stop producing this water, they stop producing the ATP, which is basically the cellular currency that the body uses for energy. And also the water is acting like a battery. So let me break this down a little bit. A lot of people think that the water inside the body is like the water that we drink, but it's not the case. The water inside of our body is more gel like.
Andreas David Christou (11:11.597)
And it's found in this what we call exclusion zone, which is the fourth phase of water. This is the work of Professor Gerald Pollack. He basically did some great research on when you shine specific wavelengths of light, specifically red and infrared light, like from the sun, for example, you're able to change the form of water from what they call bulk water, which is what you find in a glass, B-U-L-K.
to exclusion zone water or as he calls it easy water and then this water has a negative charge and it has a negative charge because it draws electrons to it and then this water acts like a battery which is like a reservoir where it can be used anywhere where it's required in the body. Now remember that star electrons exactly.
Daniel Vitalis (11:55.602)
store electrons, it's that water starts storing electrons. So very much like when you say a battery, you actually mean that in a pretty literal sense. I mean, it has it has a store it's storing electrons for future uses energy.
Andreas David Christou (12:08.986)
Correct, yes. And it's so fascinating because the majority of our body, as you know, is primarily made up of water around 70 % when we are born or maybe 90 % when we are born, but it starts to decline every single decade, the hydration level. This is why we start to, in my opinion, encounter different dysfunctions in the system because hydration of all semiconductors in the body, all things that require communication at the speed of light,
require water in order to facilitate this process. so for example, one of the... Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (12:42.741)
So would you say, sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to make sure people are getting all this. I want to pick this apart. Are you suggesting that people are dehydrating decade by decade because not because of a lack of bulk water going in, but because of a lack of easy water being produced from within?
Andreas David Christou (13:02.553)
Correct. Exactly. Because you can also convert the water that you drink into easy water as well. The best form of easy water you can consume is obviously from fruits. That is actually found in an exclusion zone state. That is why when you cut a fruit open, it doesn't gush out with water, right? It's actually found in this more gel-like structure like steak. The perfect example is aloe vera. You look at aloe vera, that's like the perfect exclusion zone, right?
And so, every tissue in your body incredibly has this exclusion zone water. For example, the inner arterial wall is layered with this exclusion zone water and that is what allows the red blood cells to funnel through the arteries and the veins and the capillaries without the need of a pump because the heart is actually not pump. It's meant for vortexing the blood and structuring the blood and energizing the blood. Of course,
Daniel Vitalis (13:45.482)
Mm-hmm.
Andreas David Christou (13:56.566)
That's one of its roles, as well as as pumping, but the action is mainly to structure.
Daniel Vitalis (13:59.99)
You're saying so many things. Hold on. Roll that back a bit just because I think people need to really hear that. You know, I often will say the heart's the conductor of the orchestra, but it certainly doesn't have the power output to push through what's like millions of miles of vessels that you have in your body, right? it would be, mean, you can try, imagine trying to generate enough force with a muscle to squeeze all the blood through. mean, that's a very outdated view, but
Andreas David Christou (14:08.898)
Yes. Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (14:16.598)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (14:27.497)
That's still the mechanical view that most people have. But you're saying that, and then I guess I had the impression that it was the contractions of the smooth muscle walls of the arteries that were moving that blood through. But you're saying, no, it's more of a energetic effect caused by the easy water and probably the electrical charge in the exterior of those red blood cells.
Andreas David Christou (14:42.529)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (14:51.71)
It's sort of like a magnet, you know, when you put like magnets together which repel each other and you put something in the middle and it shoots through because it's, you know, it doesn't stick to a magnet. It's exactly the same thing with the red blood cells. The same phenomenon is occurring in trees. I'm pretty sure that you're well aware of this. How on earth does water travel up to the top of a tree? It's like almost impossible, right? But it's getting there due to the fact that
Of course, know, water is always seeking, you know, where it's dry, right? So it's gonna suck it up. But at the same time, you have the charge, which is actually the electromagnetic force. The trees are grounded, which is what allowing the water to propel itself all the way to the top of the tree, to the leaves. The same thing is happening inside of the body. Because we are electromagnetic beings.
Daniel Vitalis (15:41.175)
Okay, because they'll often try to tell you it's, they'll tell you it's capillary action that it's bringing it up, which is, you know, it seems a little far fetched. I'm, I can't help but wonder how much of the earth's water was produced virgin in the bodies of living creatures. You know, like you you look out at this vast oceans, it's like how much of that water was produced through this cellular function that you're talking about. You know, I think we think of it as
The earth being like, this beautiful place where we're so lucky to have this kind of oasis of water, but it's like, are we making a lot of that water? It can't be a statistically insignificant amount with this many life forms. I don't know if that's something you've ever considered or have any thoughts on.
Andreas David Christou (16:16.341)
Mm-hmm.
Andreas David Christou (16:26.877)
I've never thought about that before, but that's a wild thought. are you basically saying that when animals die and decompose, they turn into this water or they contribute to the amount of water on the planet?
Daniel Vitalis (16:29.972)
Okay.
Daniel Vitalis (16:41.408)
Well, I'm just saying if I'm producing water inside my body, H2O that didn't exist before, so essentially oxidizing hydrogen gas, I assume is what's happening, or hydrogen ions. So you're producing new water molecules. So over the course of your life, know, however many, I don't know if that's a teaspoon of water or that's like gallons of water that you'll manufacture that didn't exist on earth before. Because you you think about like a spring where you've got
Andreas David Christou (17:05.269)
Mm-mm.
Daniel Vitalis (17:08.502)
maybe you've got ancient water that's been trapped under they'll call it fossil water or sometimes you'll see like a piece of quartz crystal and it's got a little bubble with water in there and you're like, man, that water has been in there. Who knows how long but it's been there a long time. It's trapped in there. So you think of sort of like this water that's trapped on the earth. They say some's raining down from space maybe two but like, yeah, obviously we're making water which means we're adding to that. I don't know. That's fascinating. okay, so back to it. We're talking about the
Andreas David Christou (17:29.311)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (17:36.871)
way that waters moved through the vessels of trees. So the phylum of trees and then through our arteries and I assume our veins as well, which is fascinating. And we were talking about structured water. Take us back to the mitochondria. These apparently exotic organisms that are now symbionts with animals, right? They've moved into our cells. Their DNA only comes through the maternal line. You can trace
Andreas David Christou (17:52.893)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (18:06.26)
mitochondrial DNA back to they call her mitochondrial Eve, the first woman. mean, this is like weird, far out stuff, right? But the mitochondria, what, how do we positively impact the mitochondria in our body? And are they fixed? Like, does a cell have a fixed number of mitochondria? Can you increase the amount that you have?
Andreas David Christou (18:13.674)
Hahaha.
Andreas David Christou (18:25.703)
Yes. Yes, great questions. I would like to add one more thing before we move into that about the mitochondria that they are these, they are a quantum sensor. So they sense everything in your environment and they know how to respond based on the environment that you put your body in. And so what do I mean by that? They're sensitive to the light, they're sensitive to the temperature, they're sensitive to the electromagnetic field of the Earth. Our body is literally wired to be connected to our environment.
and not disconnected. And now because we are disconnected, our mitochondria are suffering. So I already mentioned multiple things that what is actually causing mitochondrial dysfunction, right? Artificial blue light, phones, electromagnetic fields. You can talk about lymphatic system stagnation, toxins, all these different things that we are encountering in our modern life is obviously damaging and impacting our mitochondria, including a processed diet and not sleeping and all this kind of stuff. But when you were to talk about
mitochondrial optimization and how that actually helps us produce more cellular energy, know, combat things like diabetes, insulin resistance, have better metabolic health, better metabolic flexibility. That all starts on a mitochondrial level because if that energy factory is not working properly, the food that you're taking in is going to have nowhere to be metabolized. So it's literally going to be floating around in your bloodstream.
sitting there and causing havoc. For example, high blood sugar, like chronically elevated blood glucose is going to create havoc and inflammation in the system. Glucose spikes are not inherently harmful, but chronically elevated glucose is actually harmful because it actually causes damage to the arterial walls. It breaks down this exclusion zone water. And then that's where we start to build the atheromatic plaque, which is the hardening of the arteries and layering down
Daniel Vitalis (20:20.214)
you
Andreas David Christou (20:22.265)
the cholesterol to save the day cholesterol is actually the fireman it's not actually the cause of you know most of our issues today which we think about you know cardiovascular disease did you want to jump in there.
Daniel Vitalis (20:35.616)
I do, I'm sorry to keep doing that to you, but you're dropping so many pearls here as you go. And I just want to make sure they all get explored. the first of all, tell me if this analogy feels fair to what you just said. It's like every mitochondria is like maybe like a little wood stove and the blood sugar that we have is like sticks floating through the blood. And the goal would be to be pulling those sticks out and constantly putting them into the fireplace and burning them up to produce energy.
Andreas David Christou (20:37.563)
Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (21:03.894)
But if we start shutting down all of those dampers on all of those fireplaces, now they're just smoldering, all the sticks are building up. But worse, sounds like you're saying the sticks, in my analogy, that's the blood sugar, that stuff's actually eroding away that easy water. So now we don't have that superconductor. Earlier when you were talking about it, it made me think about those, kind of like the Japanese bullet trains, right? I believe that works on a similar kind of a concept.
Andreas David Christou (21:20.506)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (21:33.76)
it's the that sort of electromagnetism that's allowing the train to both float and propel, right? So something like that, like if we start to strip away that easy water, now you need mechanical forces to push those blood cells through rather than those electrical forces. And that's where you start to get damage to the walls of the artery that stuff that needs to now start building up on to patch and fix and repair. Am I getting that sort of sort of close?
Andreas David Christou (21:38.554)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (22:03.376)
There is also immune system response due to chronically elevated blood glucose. The blood is very tightly regulated, right? What's allowed in the blood or not. So things that manifest in the blood are always like the end stage. So when we take blood tests, it's kind of like, hmm, are you actually looking at something accurate here? Are you looking at something that's been going on for a very long time? It's not the best predictor of things. Of course, it can give you a predictor of long-term health, like what you've been doing, for example, because again, as I said, it's a marker of
you know, it's very tightly regulated. Things are showing that presenting themselves slowly over time. And if things are looking not so optimal on lab tests, for example, in your blood, you know that some serious stuff is going on in your body that's been going on for a really long time. But basically, again, your immune system is going to be triggered. You know, if you've got floating proteins that you shouldn't be in your blood, you know, too many lipids, too, too many car, you know, sugars, glucose.
then you're gonna create an inflammatory response, an immune cascade. that's obviously, the immune system is always there to protect you. But when it starts to perceive that what you're eating is actually a threat to you, that's when we start to encounter problems. Because that stuff is not meant to be there for over a certain period of time. It's supposed to travel through your blood to get to where they need to go to provide energy to that specific tissues like your brain, your eyes, your muscles, your liver.
But then it's supposed to get out of the blood. It's like a transportation system. The blood is meant to deliver the oxygen, for example, around the body, right? And without oxygen, we know that we basically die. And so it's a very important transportation system, but it's not supposed to be overwhelmed. This is the idea of keeping it as clean as possible. And how do we do that is by actually making sure that our detoxification system is working correct, which is our lymphatic system, our primary detox system.
And anything from the blood, the blood plasma, which is the yellow stuff, which basically in the end becomes your urine, you pee it out. It's old plasma, your urine, right? So basically it goes into the lymphatic system, it goes through the whole cycle, through your kidneys and your kidneys filter the plasma and the waste plasma gets excreted out your body and now you have clean plasma. So your kidneys are filtering basically your plasma, which is part of your blood and it's creating a big part.
Andreas David Christou (24:25.544)
big volume of your blood and so we try need to keep the blood as clean as possible so we don't create those immune cascades and inflammatory cascades to actually create damage in the arteries and veins.
Daniel Vitalis (24:39.807)
My understanding, and again, I'll yield to you here on this, my understanding is that for our detoxification pathways to be functioning optimally, our body needs to understand that it's in a safe environment where it can be relaxed enough to do that, right? So if I'm in a sympathetic nervous system state, if I'm stressed out, if I'm feeling fear, anger, frustration, impatience, and my body's
producing, you know, sympathetic nervous system hormones like adrenaline. I'm probably in other words, somebody might think I'm going to go running today to detoxify look at all that sweat that I'm purging out that's got to be detoxifying me and it's like, not the same as the sweat that's coming in the sauna when I'm relaxed and my, my parasympathetic nervous systems active, right? So my first thought is just how many people in our culture are living unaware in a chronic state.
of sympathetic nervous system activation and therefore it must be very difficult for them to ever get into a state where they can detoxify their blood.
Andreas David Christou (25:47.988)
Yeah, this is a really fantastic segue because this also ties into the mobility aspect, which we'll be hopefully talking about later on because mobility, nervous system, state, lymphatic system, blood flow, tissue tension, these are all connected, right? So most people think that, know, OK, I'll talk about mobility later. I was going to go there. But basically, yeah, when your body is relaxed, your body is more tense. You increase.
Sorry, when your body is in a fight and flight state, your body is more tense. And so that means that your tissues are more tight. And think of a muscle or a tissue, any tissue in your body, like a sponge. When a sponge is kind of like soft, it's kind of like allows water to flow through it, right? But if you squeeze a sponge, well, there's no fluid in it. And so that's basically a great analogy for your tissues in your body. Now you have going to have decreased blood flow, decreased lymphatic system flow. And because your lymphatic system
does not have its own pump like the heart has, I the cardiovascular system has, then it's your responsibility to move the lymphatic system and to assist the lymphatic system, you have to be relaxed. So there are obviously multiple ways to do this. I'm sure you're aware of Dr. Perry Nicholson, also known as Stop Chasing Pain, also known as the Lymph Doc. Do you know him?
Daniel Vitalis (27:05.527)
I don't know.
Andreas David Christou (27:06.539)
he's fantastic. Yeah, you need to check him out. Yeah, he's like the doctor if you want to. Perry Nicholson, Dr. Perry Nicholson, also known as stop chasing pain on all platforms.
Daniel Vitalis (27:10.872)
his name again?
Daniel Vitalis (27:15.435)
Harry.
Daniel Vitalis (27:20.791)
Okay, thank you.
Andreas David Christou (27:21.609)
Yeah, he's fantastic. Like he is all things lymphatic system. He went through his own personal struggles and that's how he came to the conclusion that that was like one of the systems that he wasn't paying attention to. And so basically, yes, I do always Dr. Perry's lymph resets. And I'm sure you've seen this routine online where you massage above the collarbones, which is step one, because this is where the lymphatic system drains. And you have to start from the collarbones first.
and not anywhere else from your feet or your arms because if this is congested here, then you're just going to create backup and it's all just going to flow back. And all you're doing really is just swishing your lymphatic system around without actually cleaning your lymphatic system, without draining it. So you have to, yes. I was going to say.
Daniel Vitalis (28:06.38)
Right. Let's make sure. good. I just want to make sure that our listeners know what we're talking about. Let's talk about the lymphatic system just briefly, because I think this is one of those things people hear it and they it almost feels like what you're supposed to know what it is. Sometimes people want to ask. And so I want to make sure we're clear. So we were talking before about your circulatory system, you know, your heart, veins and arteries. So that's like one system. But obviously, there's
Andreas David Christou (28:14.622)
Yes. Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (28:35.308)
that blood has the plasma you were talking about. And that stuff sort of roughly, you could kind of say, like leaks out around the tissues or you could, think of it more like, I think of it like a sewage system. It's like you have your water lines of clean water in your house, your cold water, hot water, but then you have the gray water that's like in your leach field or your septic tank or whatever. That stuff is the lymphatic fluid. And if somebody, if you think of somebody with swollen lower legs, like that's,
Andreas David Christou (28:43.292)
diffusers.
Andreas David Christou (28:48.744)
Correct.
Daniel Vitalis (29:02.708)
edema that that's all basically lymph. But like you were saying, the lymph does not have a central orchestrator like the heart. So muscular action and movement propel it. And my understanding of lymph vessels are lots of chains of sort of one way valves so that as fluid is moved up, let's say from your leg, if I jump up and down fluids moving up and down, but it can't go back down. So it keeps moving up and up. And I believe you have
channels into your lymphatic system where they drain, sorry, your lymphatic system drains into your venous system at the groin and at the collarbones, is that right? And the last thing I'll say is most people have felt lymph nodes before where they get swollen. Those are junction points in the lymphatic system. You've got obviously lots of them in your armpits and your groin. You know, something that's always interesting to me, Andreas, and I'll turn it back to you is how...
Andreas David Christou (29:42.406)
Correct.
Andreas David Christou (29:49.094)
Cheers.
Daniel Vitalis (29:57.399)
the parts of the body that we often cut out of people are all lymphatic tissue, right? So it's, we remove breast tissue, adenoids, tonsils, lymph nodes themselves, the appendix, all of that is lymphatic tissue. And so it's really interesting that one of the most common ectomies that we do, it's like, there's a problem with the lymphatic system, we just cut it out instead of figuring out how to drain it and clear it, right?
Andreas David Christou (30:25.583)
Yes, very dangerous. Very. No, no, no, it's very dangerous. Like when I, in my opinion, when you do that, because your lymphatic system is obviously where the majority of your immune system lives. And you, when you look at, for example, a lymphatic system anatomy, and you look at a chart of all the vessels represented in green, typically, you know, normally you have the representation of the cardiovascular system of red and blue.
Daniel Vitalis (30:25.878)
So anyway, back to what you were saying.
Andreas David Christou (30:50.594)
then you've got the representation of the lymphatic system in green representing kind of like sewage or like, you know, more like waste. But the majority of your immune system actually lives within your lymphatic system. And if you actually are eliminating a lot of those lymph nodes, you're actually removing a lot of checkpoints that are built in your body by design in order to scan your lymph.
And when your body is able to scan that lymphatic system and understand what's actually in there, it can produce an immune reaction against that specific thing to kill it before it goes too far. But if you don't have those checkpoints, which is your lymph nodes, and you remove them, then you are now reducing basically your immune system function. And so it's kind of like nepharius, you know, when they do this, but because they don't teach people how to take care of the lymphatic system, and there is so many ways to take care of it. But number one,
is stop intoxicating in the first place because it's like you're one of the major roles of your lymphatic system is detoxifying your body getting rid of damaged cells, metabolic waste for example, cells like cells produce energy and with energy comes waste as well.
And so one of the roles of the lymphatic system is to clean the waste from around the cells. The cells cannot accept nutrients and oxygen well if they are living in a soup, which is not conducive for health. So this is like, again, like the lymphatic system role for that. So again, it's your primary detox and cleaning system. Stop intoxicating your lymphatic system, but then learn how to move it.
So the more you move it, the more it's able to scan your body of what's actually going on there and you can keep your immune system in check. So you're able to fight off anything which could potentially bring you down or keep your terrain in order. I don't believe so much in the germ theory. I kind of believe that the body is living in this. We're kind of like half bacteria and half human cells or we're more bacteria than human cells. So we're kind of like...
Andreas David Christou (32:57.182)
in this that we have an entire universe inside our body, pretty much as above so below, right? Like everything outside of you is inside of you. And so when you look outside, you see a representation of what's actually on the inside. We're just basically a fractal of nature.
Daniel Vitalis (33:14.348)
Well, okay, again, a lot there. Thank you. I have background, so form part of my life, a couple of jobs that I've done. One is I worked with severe special needs foster children. And I also worked as a body worker in a clinical setting. Both of those instances, I worked with people who either had essentially no mobility. So I worked with kids who were,
bedridden all day long on feeding tubes. And I also worked with people who had spinal cord injuries and had been, you know, essentially relegated to a wheelchair. And what I noticed with people who don't have the ability to move around is how much lymph they end up swimming in. And what I noticed was, in particular, I'm thinking of someone who was a very significant, I mean, this was an athlete.
Top Gun pilot, fighter jet pilot, and then a commercial pilot who had a skiing accident and ended up living the rest of his life in a chair as a quadriplegic. And I watched over time how many growths started to appear on his skin, how much edema he developed, a lot of like an odor that he developed. And I'm talking like skin tags and moles and growths just everywhere. And it appeared to me
that that was because his lymph was not being cleared regularly, because there was nothing to move that lymph except the body work that I was doing. I that would be a big goal of mine was just try to move some fluids up from his legs to his groins. And like you said, from his arms and torso to his collarbones. I just don't think people appreciate enough this component when we talk about obesity and from lack of movement.
Andreas David Christou (34:52.863)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (35:07.01)
that you've got extremely swampy stagnant fluids that need to be filtered out. people just think like it's just about your cardiovascular health. And it's like, man, that's a, you let your cells swim in that toxic soup too long, you kind of know where that's headed.
Andreas David Christou (35:11.059)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (35:23.921)
Exactly, and it is part of your cardiovascular system. Like people think lymphatic system and cardiovascular system are separate. It's pretty much one system. You require it in order for your cardiovascular system to function properly. But you mentioned something very important there about obesity and that brought me my train of thought back about the lymphatic system and how the connection between lymphatic health and fat gain, for example.
So a lot of people may be doing all the diets in the world, they may be over-exercising, they may be like trying to do all the things, right? But if they're living in a very toxic environment or a very non-native EMF-filled world, a very stressful job, or they are sitting a lot of the time outside of training, then they are gonna have congested lymphatics. And congested lymphatics means that the fluids are not moving.
So what happens to a lake or a river that stops moving? It starts turning green, right? That's basically what happens to your lymphatic system inside of your body. It turns like a swamp. And then in order for your body to protect you, because your lymphatic system, as I mentioned, is your primary detox system of your body, if there's a lot of toxins that it's trying to remove and it cannot because the fluids are not moving,
then the only option is now is to store it in body fat because that is an easy way to put it somewhere where it's not going to damage your brain or your vital organs until it sees that your lymphatic system is flowing again and it's more clean so you can start losing the body fat again to start dumping the toxins back into the lymphatic system to get detoxified. A lot of people when they start losing a lot of weight and this is through my experience as a coach through over many years,
helping a lot of people lose like 40 kilos, 50 kilos, that's like over 100 pounds, they start to experience a lot of sickness, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, these kind of symptoms of detox because their body cannot handle the amount of toxins which are being dumped into their lymphatic system so fast from the fat loss. So rapid fat loss can actually be quite dangerous on the system, especially if your fat is holding on to
Andreas David Christou (37:35.854)
a lot of toxins or even mold from your environment.
Daniel Vitalis (37:41.55)
because most of the things that are taught, many, many of the things that are toxic to us are fat soluble, right? And so they dissolve in oil. And so your body, you've got a big drop of oil in every fat cell, your body just like you said, deposits it there for safekeeping or because the channels aren't open enough to remove it. And then, yeah, that's always scary to me. Somebody starts, and you know, now with the advent of weight loss drugs, now people who are able to lose that weight very rapidly,
Andreas David Christou (37:46.534)
Yes, correct.
Daniel Vitalis (38:11.307)
And that means, yeah, you're talking heavy metals, you're talking glyphosate and other, you know, herbicides, all these environmental toxins are suddenly free floating in the blood. It's all that's a lot you think that it would be wisdom to pair rapid weight loss with detoxification program that would account for some of that.
Andreas David Christou (38:32.315)
And even if you do pair it like it's rapid fat loss is still a problem like nature doesn't favor Rapid fat loss because you actually like your body never wants to lose body fat This is something that I tell every single client of mine at the beginning do not have your expectation or Your target or your motivation on fat loss fat loss It should be a byproduct of a healthy lifestyle And so if you live your life in a healthy manner your weight will drop
Daniel Vitalis (38:44.511)
Yeah
Andreas David Christou (39:00.996)
Gradually and safely, but if you aim to do it too rapidly, it can still be problematic It can still overwhelm your lymphatic system Of course, it's better to lose the weight than to not lose the weight because I feel like you just improve your overall health in general your metabolic health your overall mortality risk when you lose body fat, but at the end of the day again You need to be like cautious in your approach. I think most people are having too hard time losing body fat. They're not having a
an easy time losing a lot of body fat. But as you said, with the introduction of these GLP-1s, then you see a lot of people are losing their eyesight. Maybe they're encountering some stomach paralysis or you see that they're aging rapidly. And that is because there are multiple different things that are occurring there. think the way that because your stomach produces its own GLP-1, right? Through healthy living.
But then when you take it exogenously, don't know why it causes you or why it can contribute to stomach paralysis But I can imagine that that's probably one of the reasons because now your body is like, okay I don't need to do this anymore Probably loses some of its functions. I don't know what that has to do with the the function Yeah, yeah exactly
Daniel Vitalis (40:10.275)
Yeah.
It's like your testicles shrinking when you take exogenous testosterone, right? And then your testicles shrink because they don't need to produce that anymore. Yeah, that's fascinating. I think that, I mean, I guess this is probably obvious to everybody, but we've gotten to this point now where, you if you look back to, had a, I knew a guy who had this collection of Playboy magazines from the 19, probably going back to the earliest days. And I remember seeing them and that the, for the articles, the,
The way people looked in magazines in the 70s versus how they look today, there was very little emphasis on muscularity, very little emphasis on leanness because people were much leaner than anyway. But back then, people would just be on a cover of a magazine with like whitehead pimples, which you just like, you don't see that anymore, right? Everything's been polished. Everything is, if you don't have abs, they're gonna put them on you. You know what I mean? Like they do all the things. And now we're at this stage where people are happy to accept
Andreas David Christou (41:05.316)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (41:12.863)
accept the facsimile of something rather than the real thing. And so what I just heard from you is like, looking fit is a byproduct of a lifestyle. People don't want the lifestyle, they want the byproduct, but not the lifestyle. And it turns out all the ways that you get that byproduct without doing the lifestyle are pretty bad for you in the end. And I feel sad because so many people are taking not only taking
Andreas David Christou (41:27.47)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (41:40.859)
all these cocktails of peptides, but I mean, they're buying them on the black market, which just experience tells me I've been alive almost 50 years now experience tells me nothing's free. And we'll find out down the road, all of this stuff's going to come out. And it's going to be sad because so many people were wanted to have abs so bad or whatever it was they wanted to look fit so bad, or they wanted to lose weight so rapidly that they
Andreas David Christou (42:07.415)
this.
Daniel Vitalis (42:10.852)
we're willing to take experimental black market drugs in an environment where like, I mean, it's like if you want to do recreational drugs today, you have to be so careful because things like fentanyl are in the drug. We don't even, we're not even looking at what's in these right now. That's terrifying to me and we don't know what effects they're gonna have. And we don't know what tissues are being activated by them outside of the target ones. And anyway, I'm not to get us too far off track, but I do think it's important to say that
Like you said, the weight loss should be a byproduct of the lifestyle. The goal should be feeling good, not looking good. Looking good should come from feeling good.
Andreas David Christou (42:42.177)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (42:46.431)
Exactly, because if you do everything in alignment with nature, like nature seems to optimize biology. It seems to optimize all living things. And when you live in alignment with the light and dark cycles, the seasonality, the change in the temperature, like for example, the temperature even throughout the day, in the morning it's cooler and it gets hotter in the middle of the day and then it gets cool towards the evening again. Your body's meant to experience all of those changes because all of these things entrain your circadian rhythm.
This is why the circadian mechanism is the foundation of health and that's where everybody should start if they want to actually look good and feel good because looking good starts with a healthy metabolism and metabolism is governed by your circadian rhythms because mitochondria are circadian in nature. They follow also a 24-hour cycle. They need the rest and the repair as well. They can't just work 24-7. Otherwise, you burn them out. This is why people who drink all the time coffee or they stimulate their body all the time
they literally are exhausting their mitochondria. They're producing too much reactive oxygen species, too much biophoton emission, and that is actually damaging to the system. Obviously, ROS, reactive oxygen species, is not inherently harmful. It's also acting as a messenger. So basically, it informs other mitochondria. And you asked me a question previously about how can we actually increase the amount of mitochondria in the body? And the answer is yes.
through mitochondrial biogenesis. And every time when you exercise your body, you actually produce new mitochondria. You are building muscle, you are requiring from your system that is making new tissues. So therefore you're gonna build more mitochondria as well. So you've got more of these energy factories in your body, raising your metabolic rate, putting you in a natural deficit without changing your food intake, and therefore leading to fat loss. Because fat loss always requires
deficit in some form, whether that is to restrict the amount of food you're eating or to expend more energy than you're taking in. And there are many ways to optimize metabolism and metabolic rate, but most people don't know this. They think that the only way to be in a deficit is by restricting as much as possible. But I would rather people not restrict much and actually optimize their environment to raise their total daily energy expenditure, which includes not only your
Andreas David Christou (45:12.139)
basic metabolic rate, means what you're burning when you're sitting down doing nothing, but your total daily expenditure involves all of your movement, your eating, your digestion of food, your thinking, your fidgeting, your tasks, your exercising, like all of these things. That's your total daily expenditure. And the higher that is, the more obviously you're burning. And then if you're not overeating or eating the same amount, you're going to maintain your weight. But if you eat less than that, you're going to lose weight. So it's literally that simple.
Daniel Vitalis (45:41.687)
It's so easy for people to underestimate the power of little things that you do throughout the day. So, or let me invert that. It's very easy for someone to work out for an hour a day real hard, and then spend the rest of the day sitting around and being a sedentary person. Conversely, it's easy to underestimate the or so in that case, I guess you're overestimating the value of the exercise, the exercise is valuable. But if you've got 23 sedentary hours aside from that,
Andreas David Christou (45:46.316)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (45:56.023)
Yes. Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (46:10.38)
It's hard to kind of overcome that. And conversely, you my wife is amazing about this. Every time she eats, she goes, we installed a track around our our land. So we have just like about a 10th of a mile track, you know, you'd have to run it 10 times for a mile. But it's a big, you know, oval track. And every time she gets done eating anything or snacking, she goes and walks that thing and she takes the dogs and they walk it. And I always say to people like the value of having dogs is that you you know, they take you for a walk every day.
But there's so many things besides just that one hour of exercise, you wanna be, like I like that you said fidgeting, know? Because when I see somebody who sits still chronically for a long time, I'm like, oh God, I just can't, you know? But all of that movement is so important, right? To contributing so that you don't have to just dietary restrict, but you can actually burn.
Andreas David Christou (46:39.796)
Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (47:03.24)
Yes. Yeah. And what else are you doing when you're fidgeting and moving your pumping your blood in your lymph? Again, like you talked about the that that patient or that that person that you're working with who was sitting down and they couldn't move or not sitting down rather they were, you know, they were immobilized. And so basically, the muscles literally act like a pump. And one of the major roles of the calves actually, is to pump your blood and your lymph back up to the heart.
because actually your heart is not strong enough to be able to push the blood so strongly all the way down and then magically bring it all the way back up. So your calves actually literally are your second heart. They actually pump your blood and your lymphatic system back up. so movement is absolutely critical. Something which I say all the time is like movement is a biological necessity. Exercise is nice. What does that mean? It means that exercise is the deliberate, hard, intentional
like movements or exercises taking you towards a specific goal, like whether that is like strength or agility, explosiveness, muscle mass, whatever. But then movement is what you do outside of that. So that's like walking, road flow, swimming, like yoga, cycling, like all of these things are supposed to be in addition to your exercise because they contribute to your total daily energy expenditure.
but they contribute to your overall health and well-being because they shift your nervous system more into a parasympathetic state because hard exercise shifts your body more into sympathetic dominance and that's okay for a short period of time. And that's actually one of the benefits of exercise because it shows your body the contrast between doing and not doing. And the not doing is signaling to your brain and nervous system that now we can shift into parasympathetic state.
But when people don't exercise at all, or they don't do any hard exercise, they are, and they are encountering a lot of stress, their body doesn't know what the difference is between, you know, pushing and not pushing. So they have this chronic moderate stress, and the moderate stress is what kills us. It literally kills us. Like if chronic stress is like one of the, you know, up there, one of the leading causes of death.
Daniel Vitalis (49:19.813)
Yeah, wow, this is such an important part of it. And I think it's very easy in this kind of a conversation to default to talking about sedentary people. But I want to talk about the other side of that too. You know, I go to a CrossFit gym, I'm probably gonna get in trouble for this here, because my community is gonna hear it. But my wife coaches at a CrossFit gym, I go two to three days a week, if I'm really on top of it, I mostly train I've got
a gym here at home and a lot of space to train and I like to train alone most of the time. So, but I like being part of a community as well. Now most of the people that go to that gym go five or six days a week and CrossFit for anybody who knows is you're running from the tiger. That's how I think of it. It's like, it's like a life or death. You know, the workout I did yesterday there, I mean, it's life or death is how it feels and you're on a clock and a timer and there's competition and stress.
Andreas David Christou (49:53.393)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (49:56.815)
Wow.
Andreas David Christou (50:00.13)
Yes. Yes.
Andreas David Christou (50:08.706)
is
Daniel Vitalis (50:12.079)
Now what I've noticed is that the people that do that every day, they're only training, their workouts are short usually, five to 20 minutes. A 30 minute workout would be really long in CrossFit. Now they're doing short workouts, they get some incredible benefits, but they also all are basically taped together after a while. Like as they get older, it's like knee sleeves, elbow sleeves, tape. And to me it just looks like your body needs to run from the tiger sometimes, but not every day because that...
Andreas David Christou (50:40.269)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (50:41.627)
induces so much stress, what it looks like to me, and then I'll see a lot of them start to get chronically overweight, like they can't get rid of their body fat, even though they're training really hard. And it's like, well, your cortisol levels are through the roof, you're inflamed, you're not getting rest, your sympathetic nervous system state. know, something I learned from, I don't know if you know the work of Andy Galpin, but he says, at the end of a hard workout, he recommends a blindfold for five minutes of meditative breathing to say, hey, the tiger's gone.
Andreas David Christou (51:07.511)
Hmm
Daniel Vitalis (51:09.925)
You're not running for your life anymore. But what I notice is people get done these really intense workouts. They run out to their car, they get in traffic, they stress the whole way home, they go to work the next day. And even though they're doing something that could be good for their body, it's almost as bad in some cases from an injury perspective as being sedentary. So it's like, there's gotta be balances here. And I love what you're saying too, because about movement being separate from exercise.
Andreas David Christou (51:16.376)
Jeff. Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (51:37.479)
Cause like I walk my dogs every day. I don't think like I'm going for a walk, a workout, you know, but that extra mile a day is pumping lymph. My calves are obviously having to move. I'm on unstable surfaces. I'm getting all that exposure to the elements, but it's just part of my day. And I think if we're gonna schedule workouts, it's really important that they aren't all the kind that make your body feel like it's life or death. I think that that's a huge mistake. It's just something I've noticed that people, athletes, athletic people often
Andreas David Christou (52:01.495)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (52:06.842)
do that to their own detriment.
Andreas David Christou (52:08.661)
Well, if you're aiming for optimization and longevity, like feeling good for the long term, you should not be training that many times per week. OK, maybe you don't need it doesn't matter if you do train. as you mentioned, the training should not be so intense because again, you're breaking your body down more than it's rebuilding. And we know that the body rebuilds itself outside of the gym, not inside of the gym. And so actually, you you build your body in the kitchen.
Through the food you eat, the nutrition, the building blocks, the sleep, the light that you get, the movement is vital for recovery and regeneration. Because again, assisting that blood flow, that lymphatic system flow, doing sauna, doing rebounding, foam rolling, massage gunning, doing all these things are vital. I would say that they're even more important than the workout itself. the workout, it depends what the goal of the training is, right?
for every individual and everyone has a different desire and goal and ambition. But in my view, a workout should be something that gives you more than it takes away from you. And so if you leave the workout feeling absolutely trashed, you're going to need one or two days to fully recover from that. And what I mean is your nervous system state to feel normal and your energy levels to feel back to normal. But if you train at a point where you train around 80%, not 100 % every time, you're going to leave a little bit room, you know, in your
in your body and in your nervous system to be able to spring back and to feel good and energized. So it's giving you something more than it's taking away. So again, at the end of the day, people are digging a hole that they cannot refill. So this is what's happening when you're training more days a week versus then no, no training days, because the no training days are, I would say even more important than the training days. So I would say that someone who is optimizing for longevity and
health and wellbeing in general and actually improving their performance even more. I'd argue that training less is more beneficial for your performance than training more. True to the fact that you're having a greater recovery time, making you less injury prone, having more energy and intention going into the workout. How many people do you know who are getting to the gym and because they come every day, they're kind of dragging themselves and then they kind of feel like, I don't maybe need to give so much of myself today.
Andreas David Christou (54:30.483)
It's better if you actually don't go at all and go tomorrow and give, you know, 100 % of yourself, you know?
Daniel Vitalis (54:38.044)
Yeah, and that I would say on the reverse of that is when I see people who are afraid to ever push to their so let's say like in the heart rate heart rate, you you have that idea of like heart rate zones. One of the reasons I love CrossFit and I like to go is because it puts me into that upper heart. I mean, I touch my highest heart rate there. And I have a hard time doing that on my own, you know, like, so if I'm home training, it's easy to go to 80%. It's hard to go to 9798 99%.
Andreas David Christou (55:07.666)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (55:08.016)
but in that group environment I can get there and I'm guessing that when I push to the point that I can't, we have this thing we say in CrossFit about being in the pain cave. So there's workouts where at the end you're on the floor going like, and I'm like, I gotta be making mitochondria from that. mean, when my body goes, just like with strength, if I lift something to failure, my body goes, I gotta come back stronger for this. I would assume that when I hit those high cardio points where
I'm maxing out my heart rate, my body says, wow, in order to uptake more oxygen, we're gonna need to make some improvements to the system. So I wanna make sure I'm not just saying the negatives and I see the value of both, but it's like, I only wanna get to that place once or twice a week. I don't wanna do that every day. That just seems really dangerous.
Andreas David Christou (55:48.178)
Yes, yes.
Yes.
I don't have a problem with people pushing themselves to the limit. mean, I feel like that's, you we're designed to do that as human beings. And that's if you look at hunter gatherers, for example, and you know this well, you know, they're not going to be sprinting all the time. They're going to be sprinting when they want to hunt and gather their food or hunt their food rather and, you know, catch a prey. But then they're going to chill the rest of the time or they're going to walk or they're going to commute, you know, to new locations. Yeah, exactly. And so therefore they have the big stress.
Daniel Vitalis (56:18.716)
lot of hammock time.
Andreas David Christou (56:24.519)
for a short period of time and then rest, followed by big stress, followed by rest again. And this is key to the recipe. And I think that human has forgotten this, you know, this is why I'm saying that I don't have an issue with pushing yourself to failure, as long as you have enough recovery time to adapt and come back bigger, better, stronger and faster than before. But you're never gonna have all of those things if your body hasn't adapted and adaptation only occurs during parasympathetic activity.
Daniel Vitalis (56:56.294)
Why are, I think you'll easily be able to answer this, my wife teaches a yoga stretch class once a week at our gym and most of the people who are willing to push to that really intense place every day can't touch their toes, can't reach their back, they're so stiffened and when they go to stretch they can't but make audible noises of like.
right? Because it's like everything is I love that we use the term for high blood pressure, hypertension. It's a great term. It's like, it sounds like well, that's you doing it. Right? It's like you're just a hyper tensed. But why is it that those people in the sympathetic nervous system state all the time can't touch their toes?
Andreas David Christou (57:25.434)
Yes. Yes.
Andreas David Christou (57:32.134)
That's so true. Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (57:44.08)
Well, mean, as I said to you at the beginning, that nervous system state drives tissue tension. And so if you think that mobility is a byproduct of tissue tension and hydration and tissue health, then you should ask the question, what is governing my nervous system state? And so then you have, OK, I can list a couple of things. have sunlight versus blue light. You have sleep, recovery.
grounding, breathing. Breathing is the window into your autonomic nervous system. It's like the fastest way to regulate your nervous system. Then you have emotions, trauma, like all of these things are influencing your nervous system state. And so yeah, if you think about that and also your proprioceptive input, and what does that mean? That means your ability to perceive your environment through your five senses. And so if your ability to perceive your environment is dampened,
What do you think your nervous system is going to do in order to protect you? It's going to make you freeze because it doesn't want you to move in case you hurt yourself. And so a lot of people are lacking all of those things which I just mentioned or they are doing one or the other. For example, if you're getting too much blue light, you're sympathetically dominant because it activates our stress response, our alertness, right? If you're exposed to it 24 seven, like most people are, they have brighter.
nights and darker days, which is the opposite of brighter days and darker nights. Then you get circadian rhythm disruption. You have sympathetic dominance. Therefore, you have increased tissue tension, which leads to decreased lymphatic system flow and blood flow, which means less oxygenation to tissues, which means that now your cells are becoming hypoxic, which leads to further contraction.
And so, it all goes like this. And then obviously tissue hydration, which is what we talked about through the mitochondria, through sunlight, through high quality water, by taking shilajit, by taking like ocean minerals in this way to keep the tissues healthy. But yeah, the main reason is because of all of these different things is mainly lifestyle driven is not because you are lacking stretching. Stretching is sort of like a plaster on top of like
Andreas David Christou (01:00:01.536)
You know, it's like taking a pill if you have pain. You're not going to the root cause of the pain. that pain? You don't have a pill deficiency. You don't have a stretch deficiency. Why do native people, hunter-gatherers, never stretch or never exercise? Because they're always in a ready state and their nervous system is primarily in a parasympathetic state. And the ready state occurs because they're always, they're never really sitting. They are
Daniel Vitalis (01:00:25.469)
Mm-hmm.
Andreas David Christou (01:00:30.698)
squatting or they are leaning or they are ready like an animal, ready to pounce, ready to move. So they don't need to let me stretch real quick before I do something. They're all ready to leave, right?
Daniel Vitalis (01:00:43.045)
Yeah, like my dogs. My dogs will be like fast asleep and then you know, a delivery will come and they don't stretch they go from sleeping to running and barking in a fraction of a second and it doesn't they never pull anything or get injured from that. Also, one of the things I remember you know when in body work we would often stretch people so you know maybe somebody's let's say that they're supine
and you maybe stretch their hamstring for them. And I remember learning from anestheticians and surgeons that when people are anesthetized, they have full range of motion because they are not creating tension in their musculoskeletal system. So one thing that I noticed when I watch people try to do some basic yoga poses is I'll think like, they don't know they're fighting themselves.
Andreas David Christou (01:01:27.362)
Yes. Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:01:38.314)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:01:38.386)
they're sending tension to the muscle and then they're trying to stretch the muscle that they've sent tension to. And that's kind of a funny thing, right? Cause it's like your mind is, you're in your body, you're like at war with each other. Cause I noticed when I'm stretching something or if I'm holding a pose, the more I use my breath and my psychology, the more that thing just lets go and lets go and lets go. So I would assume that a lot of people are hypertensive emotionally.
Andreas David Christou (01:01:51.433)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:02:07.803)
and then they're wondering why they have no freedom of movement. But it's like, if you stress me out, I'm gonna, everything tightens up, you know? And then it's like, if I never let that back out, I think a lot of people don't ever really let that back out. And then obviously, all they have to do is turn on their social media or their news and get the nonstop stream of fear porn that keeps you even more tight and tense and stressed and your enemies.
your neighbor's your enemy, your family member's your enemy, and then like everything is threatening and then it's just like, you're so tight, right? I mean, it's just like a loop that everybody's stuck in.
Andreas David Christou (01:02:44.575)
your body is meant to by design become tight in a heightened nervous system state due to the fact that that prepares you for what it says in the name fight and flight because when your tissues are tighter you're more explosive that's why people who do explosive sports sprinters they will never stretch before a sprint they will dynamically move there's a difference there through full range of motion but they will not deliberately
deliberately do these long stretches where they are forcing the body to and their tissue to become long because once you stretch a tissue beyond a certain point, it becomes like sort of loose and it stays like that for a period of time. And if you do not integrate strength with that new range of motion, your brain freaks out. And what it does to compensate for that, creates guarding, which is what most people are experiencing these days. And it tightens up even more
as compensation mechanism. And so this is what I see all the time with some of my clients, because I teach mobility. I'm like a movement coach, right? So that's like one of my passions is to help people regain their range of motion and their functionality, to help them people be pain free and move well throughout life. And so I teach them ways to not have to stretch all the time. And how do we do this? We need to actually rewire the communication between the brain, the nervous system and the muscle.
And so you're able to communicate to the brain via the muscle. But if you're showing to the body something extreme or you're forcing a stretch, what's going to happen is your brain and your nervous system is going to guard that muscle to protect you because it understands that you haven't earned the range. You have forced the range. once you how do we actually earn the range is by exercising and moving our body through full range of motion with intention and control.
And control is a synonym for strength. So when you move with strength through full range of motion, let's take an example, a deadlift, right? Straight leg deadlift so that your knees are pretty straight and you have a nice and straight back. There's a difference between going all the way down and touching the floor with the bar versus just going halfway down, right? Well, the other one is good for more hypertrophy focus, going kind of like halfway down, but going all the way down is better for function.
Andreas David Christou (01:05:07.053)
and mobility because it's actually mobility which is going to stick because you're telling your body I'm lifting a certain load under tension and I'm going in this range and therefore I must acquire strength throughout this entire range and show that your body because you're doing it with intention that it's safe. Now that's the key word safe because if it doesn't feel safe and it feels threatened you will not acquire that range and you won't get stronger either. So it's always starting off
where your body is at, meeting your body where it's at, and kind of progressively loading the body in through full range of motion, going in and out, not staying in the length. That's the mistake that most people make when they think about lengthening and mobility, they stay in the length, but your body craves the contraction as well, which is the shortening of the muscle, not only the lengthening.
Daniel Vitalis (01:06:00.927)
I really agree with that. It's also interesting to note how we have these deficiencies between our range of motion and our strength and like if I were to stand and then try to raise my one leg up on we stand on one leg and raise my leg up, you know how far I can raise it with my muscular force versus if you came over you could pick it up several more inches. So I have more more range of motion than I have strength to move through that range of motion. Whereas if I think of like a professional dancer
Maybe she can, through muscular effort, pick her leg all the way up over her head. She has control of that full range of motion. And what I found, like you said about the body guarding, if I'm in a compromised position where I'm into mobility that's beyond my strength, not only is that where I can get injured, but that's where my body wants to panic too, because like, uh-oh, I'm not in control of this anymore. Yeah, I'm just kind of curious if that leads to anything for you, but that's just something I've noticed.
Andreas David Christou (01:06:51.427)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (01:07:00.505)
Yeah, mean, a lot of people, I can tell you a personal story of my own, why I actually understand and share this knowledge now, which I'm sharing with you today. know, most people think that, oh, if I'm tight, I must stretch more. But like stretching actually only makes the problem worse. In the past, I used to be very stiff because I only did bodybuilding style training. I started training when I was 14 years old because I was overweight and obese. That's what actually got me.
down the path of fitness, nutrition and circadian health eventually. And basically I became very tight because I didn't do any kind functional training. I didn't do any mobility. I didn't do any TLC outside of the conventional lifting. And so yeah, I started doing more yoga and stretching. But then the problem was I became hypermobile. I went to the other end because I started doing too much stretching, too much mobility, too much yoga. I forced my body to become flexible.
But now it had a lot of range which it couldn't control. And what did that lead to? It led to a lot of sensation of tightness, not tightness necessarily in the muscle. The muscle, I could still pull it and do the thing, like do the pose, but it felt tight when I was relaxing. So there was clearly a subtle contraction occurring in the muscle because it felt unsafe.
And I also experienced a lot of burning sensations in like hip flexors, lower back area, a lot of aches and pains because of stretching too much. And as soon as I stopped stretching and I started focusing more on just strengthening and moving my body through movement, so holistic movement like primal movement, animal flow, moving on all fours, which is incredible for your proprioception, by the way, because you're moving on your hands and your feet.
So you're getting that extra proprioceptive input. You're signaling safety to your nervous system. So now your body's able to move with more ease and it's restoring how the muscles should be functioning. Because once you stretch your muscle beyond a certain point, it's like pretty much, it's more dysfunctional. You're less explosive. You're more slow. And that's actually less advantageous as a human being. You wanna be explosive. You wanna be fast. You wanna be agile. You wanna be pain-free. You wanna be able to move well.
Andreas David Christou (01:09:17.462)
And you want to be able to do that all times without having the need to stretch real quick. So in order to be in the ready state, you have to prime your body to have to own the range through strength. It's that simple.
Daniel Vitalis (01:09:24.447)
Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (01:09:34.057)
You're making me think about Tom Myers model of the tensegrity of the body. So for listeners who might not be familiar, a tensegrity structure or something, maybe you want to look at some images online, but essentially it's a series of struts and like stretchy cables that create a structure where no two struts touch each other. It's sort of like how our skeleton is. No two bones actually touch if they do. That's called arthritis, not good.
but bones are actually floating inside a connective tissue matrix. when you said about sprinters before, when I watch those hundred meter sprinters, you know, like the Olympians and you to watch them warming up and they're doing a lot of skipping drills where they're bouncing on their tensegrity. So rather than being like, I need to be longer, it's actually holding tension in all the right places so that the body
Andreas David Christou (01:10:03.969)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:10:28.243)
bounces along and has spring to it. And that's so different than, cause if I take all of the, you know, it's like when I'm fishing, you know, you've got a fish on the line. The key is that I don't yank it and I can't give it any slack. If I give it slack, the fish is off that hook right away. If I pull too hard, I'm gonna pull the hook through. It's just keeping that perfect amount of tension. And I feel like that's what's going on in our body. So like for a big heavy lift,
Andreas David Christou (01:10:30.977)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:10:56.465)
You can't do that without tension in your body. If I just let all the tension out of my body, I'm gonna like break somewhere, give somewhere. If I try to run, you know, I watch this with people sometimes who try to run, they're almost, they're so mechanical in it, like almost thinking like, this muscle's supposed to go, then this muscle's supposed to go, then I supposed to do, and it's all like herky-jerky and not coordinated movement, like a robot would move, you know? Whereas,
Andreas David Christou (01:11:04.043)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (01:11:16.439)
You
Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (01:11:23.079)
it's actually like bouncing along lines of tension. You know what I mean? It's coming from that right balance. So if I'm making things too tight or conversely too loose, I can't hold that integrity in the structure that I need, right? Something like that.
Andreas David Christou (01:11:37.494)
Correct, yes, and this is like a perfect example and what you mentioned about the slack. That's a really, really big deal because when we're thinking about athletic efficiency, anybody who is playing a sport, okay, let's rewind a little. Most people train because they want to burn calories. That's the wrong approach. You know, when you're approaching exercise, you should be exercising to improve many aspects of athleticism and skill. And as we mentioned,
Daniel Vitalis (01:11:55.583)
Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:12:03.859)
You burn more calories if you build more muscle or you increase your total daily energy expenditure. What you should be aiming for in exercise is athletic efficiency. So how do we achieve efficiency is by not wasting energy and how do we not waste energy is by removing slack from the system. We don't want to be too tight or too loose like you mentioned. When a system is efficient, it's able to run as fast as possible with wasting the least amount of energy. And that is the goal. That was always the goal for human beings because
Daniel Vitalis (01:12:23.263)
Right. Right.
Andreas David Christou (01:12:33.309)
If you can waste the least amount of energy, that means you can survive and catch your food. And so if you can survive and catch your food, it's a big win because then you can live another day and you can do it all over again. So this is what our aim should be through lifting as well. Finding the right tension through lifts, eliminating slack, not rushing things, being intentional with the way that we do things. And our breath is at the center.
sits at the center of our tensegrity system. So when you look at a lifter, for example, or a power lifter who's doing a massive squat or a deadlift, they're gonna suck the air right down into their belly, right? They're pushing their diaphragm down. They're creating that intra-abdominal pressure, which is the core, like the cylinder, right? Like a can. And so the can cannot be crushed because it's filled with air. But as soon as the air starts going out at the wrong time of the lift,
You start to crush the can and now you put pressure on structures of the body, on joints and muscles and that's where you get injured. That's where they hurt a ligament or a tendon.
Daniel Vitalis (01:13:40.446)
And anywhere there's that slack we were talking about, that's the energy leak, right? That's the hole in the balloon where everything kind of leaks out on you and you start to come apart. Hey, while we're on this topic of sort of lifting intention, something I wanted to bring up was I, know, looking through your Instagram account, I saw that you and I were both onto throwing patterns, you know, and it's something I wanna talk about because I see that it's just sorely missing.
in the, you you go into a gym here in the States, we just have these massive Globo gyms, you know, and you go into them and they have every imaginal piece of equipment except nothing to train a throwing pattern. So again, to that robot model, everybody's pushing, they're pulling, you know, they're pressing all the time, they're squatting, but they're always moving in that sagittal plane and they're never really getting the torsion and
Andreas David Christou (01:14:15.645)
Yeah, yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:14:22.941)
Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:14:27.475)
Yeah. Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:14:39.26)
One thing that I've found from lifting, I started lifting as a teenager, and it wasn't long until if you asked me to throw a baseball, like it would physically hurt me to try to do. I noticed it too from casting a fishing rod as a throwing motion, know. All hunting essentially used to be, right? Because it was throwing something, could be a spear, could be an atlatl, can be a fishing rod, whatever it is.
Andreas David Christou (01:14:49.479)
Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (01:15:06.781)
But we don't train that. And then to do that, you see a lot of specialized equipment. So the club bell, the mace bell, the Bulgarian bag, the kettlebell can be used that way, the rope for rope flow. And it seems like people are just starting to kind of wake up to there's been this, I wanna make sure I don't understate this.
the most significant important movement that the human does, which is basically like link that like left foot to right arm, right foot to left arm across in a transverse way with rotation at the core and at the shoulder. It's just like missing from it. And so what you have are all these people who are carrying this load of muscle mass that actually is super dysfunctional.
Andreas David Christou (01:15:46.482)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (01:15:49.873)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:15:59.769)
And it's very funny when you watch, I wanna give props to those wrestlers who are like super jacked, steroid bodybuilder looking guys that are athletic, because there is a contingent of them. But for the most part, big jacked people move really badly if you ask them to do anything athletic, because they don't have the fundamental athletic patterns, they just have push pull, squat, hinge.
Andreas David Christou (01:16:15.303)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (01:16:21.959)
Yes. Yes. I mean, that's just like one directional movement. And that's the issue because the patterns your body like optimizes for what you do most. So if you're going to do only these one directional patterns up, down, forwards and backwards, then your body is going to get really good at that. And it's going to get rid of, know, you know, that saying use it or lose it. Right. Your body like starts to deprioritize things and neural connections that are it doesn't use often. And it starts to prioritize the ones that you do most often.
And so in order for you to keep your brain sharp and also to keep your movement sharp, need to practice this rotational movement, which you talked about through maces, club bells, rope flow, kettle bells. You can do that with some dumbbells as well. You can use dumbbells for rotational stuff as well and cables as well. You just need to know what you're doing. Yeah. And so...
Daniel Vitalis (01:17:12.084)
Kind of sucks, but you can. Yeah, landmine for the barbell is great actually.
Andreas David Christou (01:17:18.192)
Yes, exactly. love I'm pretty sure you're aware of Landmine University. Do you know them?
Andreas David Christou (01:17:26.566)
They're fantastic. Yeah, because that guy, he...
Daniel Vitalis (01:17:28.352)
Yeah, I haven't, I haven't trained with those folks, but I'm, I am seeing a lot of that. And you know, I have to say I love one of the things that I like that we do in CrossFit is Olympic lifts versus just power lifts. So we also Olympic lift, which are, you know, your snatch and your clean and they generate so much power at the hip. But barbells just destroy me. I'm just too asymmetrical at this point, too many injuries. So I don't like to
Andreas David Christou (01:17:39.826)
Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:17:52.892)
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (01:17:55.211)
to do power movements with a bar. I mean, I wish I could, I just don't. But on the landmine, now I can do them functionally, I can build that, you know, just like a kettlebell swing, I can still get that explosive hip extension that keeps power in my system as I age without having the damage to my shoulders and hips that I get from being locked into the barbell.
Andreas David Christou (01:18:12.613)
us.
That's the issue, right? Like when you have these muscular imbalances or the foundation, like, you know, whether you are aware of it or unaware of it is off. You know, if left and right side is not working equally, that is one of the dangers of using something which is fixed like a machine or a barbell or a Smith machine, because you can't be like wearing things out over time and eventually it will lead to injury and aches and pains. And yeah, this is why I love to train this stuff because my training specifically is just
Primarily bodyweight training so high volume calisthenics pull-ups rings dips resistance bands Kettlebells and all this kind of stuff I don't train inside a gym at all because I want to optimize my biology as much as possible and I train outside in the Sun and So because we are actually designed to train outdoors grounded, you know barefoot
to the earth. If we can, of course, I'm not trying to make people feel like you need to have the perfect environment to train, but it's the most ideal environment where we have evolved to do this type of stuff. It also improves your blood flow because UV light, UVA light specifically stimulates nitric oxide production. So it vasodilates your blood vessels and it delivers more oxygen to your tissues. And it also improves your cardiovascular fitness because if your blood is able to move better, you're able to receive more oxygen.
And so yeah, and also shifts you more into a parasympathetic state between your sets as well, because the outdoor environment really harmonizes your nervous system state. But going back to what we were saying about the different tools, I don't want to miss this because this is very important about the fascial system. The fascial system is so crucial, right? This is what we talk about when we talk about removing slack, because the fascial system, which is the connective tissue system of the body, the triple helix
Andreas David Christou (01:20:05.687)
collagen network, which also carries water through it and communicates throughout the entire body, know, bio photons, photons at the speed of light, it sends, you know, your, your, your nervous system and your fascia system, they are one system, they work together, it's integrated, they're interwoven, like, so there's nothing separate. And people need to think about the fascia system sort of like a webbing on an orange.
which is like, you know, it's not the juice of the orange. The muscle is the juice and the webbing is the fascial system. So it holds everything together and the muscle doesn't do anything without the fascial system. And so you need to have a specific tension. Go ahead.
Daniel Vitalis (01:20:45.611)
Can I jump in on that? Let me just say this too. If people are familiar with this, if you open the orange, the whole interior of the, under the skin is wrapped in that white fascial material. But then you've got all of the segments of the oranges and they're each compartmentalized. But then if you peel those away, there's all those little segments inside and they're all wrapped in that. And that's, cause every muscle fiber is in connective tissue. Then all the bundles of fiber in connective tissue.
Andreas David Christou (01:21:02.455)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:21:14.923)
then they're bundled together into groups, then that's bundled together into muscles, then those continue on to become ligaments and eventually tendons, and then all of that's connected to the subcutaneous layer of this connective tissue. I mean, this is like, you're not exaggerating. In fact, the orange is almost like a dumbed down version of how incredibly networked we are with this stuff, right?
Andreas David Christou (01:21:36.876)
Yes. Yes, and if you think about the fascia system like a sheet on a bed as well, when you pull one end of the sheet, it's going to impact the whole sheet. And so this is why if you have tightness in one specific muscle of your body, let's say in your calf, it can affect the back of your neck because the fascia system has a limited range. so you're going to imagine you're tightening the sheet somewhere, it's going to impact the entire sheet. It's going to throw
your balance off. So why do we actually want to train these rotational movement patterns? Because you unify the muscle with the fascial system. You're training the fascia with the muscle, not separate. When you do conventional lifts, you're sort of training the muscle without considering the fascial system, without considering the elasticity or the full function or the full expression of the fascial system. So your body is actually designed
to rotate, everything is spiraling within the body. When you look at the fascial slings or the fascial trains as Thomas Myers talks about is you have these trains of the fascial system. He calls them trains, but I call them lines, right? Or slings. Because you have, for example, wrapping under your feet, it goes all the way around your calf, it spirals into your inner thigh, it goes into your hip, it goes to your lower back and then it crosses.
in front of your body and goes to your shoulder. So it's literally like a spiral and you have multiple of these. I think it's seven different fascial lines in the body and together they create what we call the tensegrity system, which is what holds you up together. And so this is like the most standing should be the most efficient thing to do. And so when people are leaning forward because of like poor posture, because of habits, behaviors, phone use and all this kind of stuff.
then you're literally taxing certain tissues of the body or overloading certain tissues. You're doing the exact same thing with conventional training. You're taxing and overloading certain tissues if you don't express your fascial system to the fullest. And so what I challenge people to do is if you train conventionally, you can train unconventionally as well. So you can be very muscular, but you can also be functional. And my definition of functional is to be athletic.
Andreas David Christou (01:23:55.861)
to move well, to be pain free, to be agile and mobile. That's my definition of functional. So you can have both. It's not either or. A lot of people think, well, if you want to be muscular, you can't be functional. Well, if you train both, yes, of course there are some limitations to your ability to do certain positions and certain things. But if you train the ability to move well, you will be able to move well. But it's just important to put it into your weekly practice as serious as your
conventional training.
Daniel Vitalis (01:24:27.426)
Some of these guys out there now in SEMA comes to mind in the rope flow world, so jacked, but so athletic and mobile or a Jujimufu, so jacked, so mobile. So it is possible to be that hybrid. I also wanted to say, and I'm sitting down with Tom Myers actually next week, he lives in the same state as me, so a great guy. I love this guy, I haven't talked to him in a few years. If after you have any questions, forward them along to me.
Andreas David Christou (01:24:30.521)
yeah.
Yes, exactly.
Andreas David Christou (01:24:38.9)
He's incredible.
Daniel Vitalis (01:24:56.756)
One of the things I love about the club bell, the mace, the Bulgarian bag, the kettlebell, is when you're ballistically swinging it, you're putting tension onto the connective tissue, lines of connective tissue, and they're getting stretched and swung. Whereas if I'm just like bicep curling or bench pressing, like you said, the fosh is not really doing anything. I'm just contracting motor units versus there are times like in the kettlebell swing, once I in,
once I explode through my posterior chain, there's no muscular effort going on. I'm just following the kettlebells ballistic arc. But that little bit of stretch is obviously communicating to my body to strengthen connective tissue, right and to lay down new fibers. So that's something that is really lacking in how most people are training, especially if you're just using machines at the gym. I mean, again, like, if you're my
Andreas David Christou (01:25:41.885)
Yes.
Andreas David Christou (01:25:51.23)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:25:53.602)
82 year old mother-in-law, like by all means, I want you to just please just do that. That's fine. I don't care if you're just doing the machines. I'm happy that you're training. But for those of us who are trying to really optimize some how we're training and carry that forward into old age, especially that's what I'm thinking about now. It's like, I want my connective tissue to be robust and not tearing and coming apart all the time. Because you see people it's like they're dematerializing because they never trained that stuff.
Andreas David Christou (01:26:19.065)
Dematerializing I love that word but you know the perfect example for this is if you can lift like hundred kilos on a calf raise So let's say 200 pounds on a calf raise and then you put that same individual to do and I like an athletic jump where they're just literally like Bouncing once off the floor and you're asking them to go as high as possible Well, if they use muscle to do that and they don't use like connective tissue They're very easily going to injure their muscle because the connective tissue is responsible for
Daniel Vitalis (01:26:21.985)
you
Andreas David Christou (01:26:48.728)
storing mechanical energy and also the electrons that we talked about because the fascia system is a fluid-filled system as well. So if that system is dehydrated due to artificial blue light, constantly training a specific tissue and muscle in a specific way and not hydrating enough, it's more injury prone. so like connective tissue is more prone to snapping when you don't train
these athletic movements because the more you train them, as you mentioned, you're layering down more connective tissue, more collagen, you're strengthening the tissues. So tissues get stronger the more that we use them, use it or lose it. But then again, the hydration is super important and that is occurring from the sunlight. So sunlight is key for hydration throughout the entire body and the fascial system. And of course, sleep, you need to optimize those two things together because light and dark circadian rhythms, hydration,
It's all connected.
Daniel Vitalis (01:27:47.458)
Okay, I want to go through your like list of tips would be good. Like how do we you know, give us your lifestyle tips. But first, I just want to say because it's come up several times here. The difference between externally hydrating yourself like I'm drinking the bulk water and hydrating myself, but I'm hearing you saying it's important that you're producing new water from inside. So the hydration is
Andreas David Christou (01:28:14.332)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:28:16.949)
because like most of the universe is hydrogen. Like there's no shortage of hydrogen. And guess what? If you burn it, the ashes are water, right? Because burning is oxidizing. So if you can mix hydrogen, you burn hydrogen, the exhaust is water. So our body can produce water internally and that water is of a different quality in nature. It's actually in a different phase than the water that we drink.
Andreas David Christou (01:28:36.518)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:28:45.685)
I just think that's such a cool idea to hydrate from within. I think that's fascinating. But carry us through, what does it look like to put this stuff together? Are there a list of do's and don'ts that you typically kind of think about?
Andreas David Christou (01:28:59.974)
I think it's important to start with the don'ts because most people are doing too many of the don'ts and once you start getting rid of the don'ts then the to-dos are quite easy. So the don'ts are quite obvious and self-clear. We mentioned them multiple times throughout this episode which is minimizing artificial blue light and artificial blue light specifically inhibits cytochrome C oxidase which is the fourth enzyme in the mitochondria and when you inhibit that step you don't produce ATP.
but you neither produce cellular water. So you're actually dehydrating yourself when you're exposed or yes, from blood. This is why ages you.
Daniel Vitalis (01:29:34.658)
from blue light, really? And what about okay, let's say that I get exposed to blue light in the morning versus I get exposed to blue light in the evening. That seems to me like it would be very different. Because first thing in the morning, it's blue light that's pouring in through my windows, right? So I mean, so at that time of the day is the light from my machines as bad for me as it is
before I'm going to bed.
Andreas David Christou (01:30:06.06)
It's less bad, but it's still bad due to the fact that it's not full spectrum because the sun comes with full spectrum with the all colors of the rainbow and everything is counterbalanced. So for example, we know that UV can be quite stressing to our DNA, right? But the cool thing is with the exposure to UV, you actually make vitamin D, but then with that stressful effect, you have the combination of red and infrared light.
Daniel Vitalis (01:30:10.913)
the intensity of it. Right.
Andreas David Christou (01:30:34.006)
And red and infrared light is responsible for healing, repair, regeneration, all the stuff that red light therapy panels are trying to, you know, give you, right? That's the whole point of using red light therapy or doing an infrared sauna is actually to get all of the benefits of the red and the infrared light. And so, again, it's always the light outside is always balanced. So you're getting the stressful aspect and the healing aspect, the parasympathetic aspect of...
of light, but when you're getting it in isolation and you're getting only a specific slither, which I believe is the 450 nanometers, which is the most stressful part of blue light and it's blue light by design, not by accident because blue light is addictive and we are meant to be addictive, addicted to being outdoors. Our biology is wired to be addicted to nature. screens are blue light by design and all the tech companies know this and that's why every single screen is blue lit.
And so basically artificial blue light dehydrates us. So we need to minimize that as much as possible. Don't look at your phone first thing in the morning, get outside. So that's like one don't and one do. So get outside in the morning. As soon as you wake up, try and wake up with the sunrise or pre-sunrise. Open your windows and just look up at the sky. You don't need to look at the sun directly.
to get the benefits to start your metabolism, to entrain your circadian rhythm and to optimize your biology. Because as I said, circadian rhythms are the foundation of our health. Then the next thing would be is to minimize artificial blue light after sunset. I think this is critically important. In a modern world that we're living in right now, blue light blocking glasses are a non-negotiable because you have blue light everywhere. It's in the cars, it's in your fridge, it's in your bathroom.
Daniel Vitalis (01:32:21.473)
How much of the day are you wearing them? How much of the day are you wearing them?
Andreas David Christou (01:32:25.367)
How much of the day?
Daniel Vitalis (01:32:26.913)
Yeah, like how much of how much of the day do you have those on? And do you have any concern that they could be blocking anything important? Like for instance, yeah, like I mean, obviously, sunglasses themselves, I'm very skeptical of I own sunglasses, I very rarely, I use them to fish in or if I'm like driving, and I'm gonna die if I don't wear them. But otherwise, I'm pretty sure that they're damaging not only damaging my eyes, but blocking important light frequencies that I need.
Andreas David Christou (01:32:33.461)
course.
Andreas David Christou (01:32:40.043)
Guess.
Andreas David Christou (01:32:44.171)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:32:54.143)
So I wonder about that, because I see people in those so much. And you can imagine over the years I've been sent a thousand pairs of those and I just never really use them. So I want to give you a chance to sell me on this.
Andreas David Christou (01:33:00.565)
Yes. Yeah.
So you only want to use it only when you're looking artificial blue light or when you're under artificial blue light. If you're outside under natural blue light from the sun, you should never be wearing them because the blue light from the sun is meant to entrain your circadian rhythm. Every time when you're outdoors, it's like a timing cue. It's giving a signal to your brain. Okay, it's this time of the day. It's this time of the day. It's this time. It's keeping your body on track and you know very well that your body has every single tissue in your body has its own clock.
and it does specific thing at a certain time of the day. And if you throw off the master clock, which is in the brain behind the eyes, you throw off all the other clocks, which is the peripheral clocks. And so if you throw those off, then your metabolic health declines, your insulin sensitivity declines, your leptin sensitivity declines, your ability to heal and regenerate is non-existent, and then you age faster because that is basically what aging is, is when your clock is out of sync.
And when your clock is in sync, then you are able to preserve your age or even reverse your age. This is why connection with nature is a non-negotiable. And this is how we help to build this exclusion zone water that we talked about. Grounding is vital for the exclusion zone water. It provides electrons from the earth to the connective tissue of your body, your fascia system, and your sweat glands. They are absorbing the electrons through your sweat glands.
and then you're funneling it through your fascia system to throughout the rest of your body and you this exclusion zone water that you have is storing that free energy that you just gathered from the earth. You charge it, yeah, and you create, you create as well.
Daniel Vitalis (01:34:41.387)
Okay, so that's how you charge the battery. You charge the battery of the EZ water. So in other words, those free electrons that we always hear you can get through the ground by grounding those electrons. And obviously, you know, it doesn't have to be your feet, you can touch the ground with your hands or sit on it with your butt, right? But when you're in contact with the ground electrically, free electrons, I've always heard come into your body, but what I hadn't heard before was that they store in the EZ water
Andreas David Christou (01:34:51.765)
Yes. Yes.
Andreas David Christou (01:34:58.433)
Correct.
Daniel Vitalis (01:35:10.677)
the way when you plug your phone in, electrons are storing in the lithium ion bath.
Andreas David Christou (01:35:15.176)
Yeah, because this concept that we call charge or voltage, like every single cell, I'm pretty sure you've heard of this before as well, that runs on a specific voltage. And when it drops, when that voltage drops, that's when we experience things like cancer or non-desirable things in the body, because your body needs a specific charge and voltage. And if that drops or you don't have the adequate charge, your body cannot run its processes anymore. And that's when dysfunction actually takes place.
So you want to combine obviously grounding, if you're outdoors grounding, you're going to be exposed to sunlight most likely, right? If you're outdoors. And that is actually charging and increasing your water battery now. So it's expanding the exclusion zone. So the red and the infrared light specifically, it targets the cytochrome C in your mitochondria. So it does the opposite of blue light. It flips the switch. So you get blue light from the sun, which is going to turn off.
the cytochrome C, but then it's gonna switch it back on with the red and the infrared. And so your mitochondria keep making energy without you even needing to put food in your system. This is basically how you get energy from the sun. Once light strikes your skin, melanin takes the photons and it splits them, and it splits the water molecule underneath your skin into oxygen, hydrogen, and electrons. So you literally split the water molecule.
So melanin in your skin is not only for protecting you from burning, but it's also for harvesting free energy from the sun. And because we split the water molecule, now we have more of this free energy, but we're also expanding the exclusion zone water because we're exposed to the red and the infrared. But anything that is generating internal red and infrared light from the mitochondria,
also produces exclusion zone water. So what would that be? That would be movement, that would be exercise, that would be like infrared sauna, that would be regular sauna. Anything that is a heat, so a fireplace, for example, is an incredible place, way to charge and to expand your exclusion zone water and take care of your fascial health. So imagine like all of these things that I said are like,
Daniel Vitalis (01:37:23.489)
Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:37:31.085)
None of that is including like exercise or, you know, trying to like force your body to do something. You're taking care of your hydration and your fascial system by being in connection with your natural environment. And so the second thing, which is the don't, which I want people to do especially is to distance themselves from non-native electromagnetic fields. And why these are such a problem is because they induce calcium influx into the cells.
And the calcium influx is causing contraction. You know that when calcium flows into muscle, it causes muscle contraction. Magnesium is the opposite of that, causes muscle relaxation. That's why we take magnesium, because too many people are stressed these days and we're depleting magnesium because we're constantly contracting the system, which is depleting our magnesium levels. So we're burning through our minerals faster. And this is why I said earlier that you should be consuming high quality ocean
full spectrum ocean minerals which have all the different minerals, not just sodium like some electrolytes have, and shilajit because shilajit is the herbal mineral substance.
Daniel Vitalis (01:38:40.896)
How do you, how?
Andreas David Christou (01:38:43.801)
Go ahead, sir.
Daniel Vitalis (01:38:44.884)
Where do you Okay, so she legit, I understand, you know, how to access that the ocean minerals, what form are you taking those in?
Andreas David Christou (01:38:54.131)
There are many brands which have like a vast amount of minerals. So instead of having like just the three, four minerals like electrolytes have, which is typically like sodium, potassium, magnesium, and like maybe chloride or something like that, then it has like 75, 85, 90, know, minerals matching what's in the sea because the sea and your blood are almost identical in terms of mineral composition. And so in order to actually get
the most benefit from hydration because people think if they drink water it hydrates them but if your body's lacking minerals that water goes straight through you and especially if you filter your water like reverse osmosis and you remove everything from there which is including all the bad stuff all the good stuff as well the minerals that you need then you need to remineralize it otherwise that will strip the minerals out of your body and from your bones it's gonna you know demineralize your body it's not ideal
It's okay for some cleansing periods, but you shouldn't do it chronically. And you need to remineralize it in order for your body to actually retain the water that you drink. And it doesn't expel it because you know, the only thing that holds onto water is salt or minerals. Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (01:40:08.638)
It's funny when you look at a bottle of here in the States like aquafina and Dasani. I think those are the Coca Cola and Pepsi's RO water. They produce it locally because they'll use the tap water, filter it, but they inject mineral ions back into it. And if you look on the back, it'll say for taste because you can tell when water has been demineralized, it's taste terrible and it's not hydrating.
Andreas David Christou (01:40:34.05)
Yeah, I mean you can feel it on your teeth immediately. Like I instantly get a bit of a like, it almost feels like sharp on the teeth because it literally starts to break down your minerals like instantly like because minerals are attracted or that water is attracting minerals, right? So if any minerals you put it's going to disperse and this is what you're trying to do is you're trying to create an equilibrium before you put it inside of your body so it doesn't strip your own body but
Going back to the non-native EMFs real quick, so to make it bit more practical for people, try and put your phone on airplane mode when you don't need it, for example. That is like the easiest way to minimize your non-native electromagnetic field exposure, distance yourself from cell towers as much as you can. Try and just be outside ground. I know it's getting hard, the thing is, the inverse square law, which is like the...
Daniel Vitalis (01:41:21.184)
It's getting hard, It's getting hard.
Andreas David Christou (01:41:29.065)
how close you are to the source of radiation is what determines how damaging it is and also the duration and the intensity of the exposure. So this is like your biggest hack when you're trying to mitigate non-native EMFs. Of course, it's getting harder and harder to distance yourself away from it, but if you're grounded, you're also getting rid of a lot of the accumulated voltage and stress which is coming in your system.
Daniel Vitalis (01:42:00.096)
computer in here. Sorry about that. What I just want to say about that. Oh, I wanted to just comment that you're right, your suggestion about putting the phone on airplane mode. One of the things I noticed is now when you put your phone on airplane mode, you have to manually take off the Wi Fi, take off the Bluetooth take off there. You know what mean? It used to just shut all the signals off. It's getting harder and harder. The devices are becoming more ubiquitous. The towers are everywhere.
Andreas David Christou (01:42:03.422)
No problem.
Andreas David Christou (01:42:20.713)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:42:29.576)
All the appliances are talking constantly. Everything is just getting, smart everything. It's getting challenging, right? Everything's putting out blue light. It's amazing to me when you get into a hotel room or you get a new appliance and it's just got a permanent blue light that just supposed to stay on all the time. And it's just a mind numbing to me that this stuff is everywhere. But I agree and I like what you said about,
Andreas David Christou (01:42:32.238)
Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:42:51.54)
That's so annoying.
Daniel Vitalis (01:42:57.722)
how powerful even a little bit of distance from these devices is because, you know, I was watching a girl yesterday and she had on a big oversized hoodie and she had her phone in there and it just sitting right on her uterus in the little pocket of her hoodie, you know, and just like, man, people just don't think about it where
Andreas David Christou (01:43:00.468)
Yeah. Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:43:11.124)
Yeah. Yeah.
Andreas David Christou (01:43:15.893)
I know it's just, it's even written inside of the terms and conditions or in the settings. If you go to the about of the phone, in every single phone, there is a warning and it says to you to keep it 10 centimeters away from your body. you know, we're obviously holding it as well in the hand, right? It's in direct contact with the hand. That's a big problem. But of course, to sensitive tissues like the brain, like the, you know, the reproductive organs, the heart.
If it's close to those organs, it can be very, very dangerous. And I know many people who have gotten real big issues like cancers and all kinds of things by keeping their phones, know, taking a lot of phone calls or putting it in their pocket, for example, and stuff like that. So it's a really big issue just because it disrupts the cellular mechanism because you're constantly stressing the system out. It's just the exact same thing as why stress is bad. It's just another stressor in your bucket.
And unfortunately, it's a really big stressor in our world today. And it's a really big issue because it's invisible. And most people still think it's kind of like woo-woo stuff. But everybody feels it. Everybody acknowledges that when you use your phone, when you use your laptop, when you use a screen, you feel more stressed. But it's not necessarily only what's on the screen, but it's actually what it's producing, what it's emitting to you. So it's the non-native EMF. It's the artificial blue light. And if you're exposed to that more often, your resilience
goes down. So that means you get sicker more often, your ability to recover decreases, your risk of injury increases in exercise, you become more dehydrated, your performance decreases, your ability to build muscle declines, your ability to lose body fat decreases, you actually might even increase your body fat because your body's stressed all the time. So it's so important to mitigate this and to minimize, you know, turn your Wi-Fi off at night, put your phone as far away from your bed as you can in another room if you don't want to turn it off.
Again, like respecting the inverse square law and, you know, obeying the laws of nature because we're designed to be connected to the native electromagnetic field of the Earth, which is around 7.83 Hertz, which like matches the, you know, the heart's electromagnetic field and also the brain electromagnetic field. And when all of those three align, you have perfect coherence. And that's when your nervous system is
Andreas David Christou (01:45:38.488)
is operating most optimally and that's when you can really feel like you're thriving. This is why people feel their best when they're on holiday, they're getting a lot of sunlight, they're getting a lot of grounding, they're having a lot of sex, they're eating good food, they're sleeping more, they are optimizing their coherence and their biology and they're doing what humans are meant to do, right? And so this is the way.
Daniel Vitalis (01:46:06.207)
It's almost like they want you sick, man.
Andreas David Christou (01:46:08.658)
It is. It's by design, brother.
Daniel Vitalis (01:46:16.447)
So what are our list of do's?
Andreas David Christou (01:46:19.888)
So the list of do's is, again, like starting from the beginning, is get the sunlight, get the grounding, get your, you know, respect your sleep, the night and dark cycle, use your blue light blocking glasses, yellow ones only when you're looking at screens and under artificial lights, and red ones after sunset, strictly, because everybody has some form of blue light in their home. Even if you have the most circadian friendly home, there is one silly device somewhere that is emitting some annoying blue light.
And just that tiny amount of blue light is sufficient to signal to your brain that it's daytime and suppress melatonin production. And we know melatonin is not just a sleeping hormone. It's one of your most powerful anti-cancer and regeneration hormones in the body. So it's responsible for autophagy, repair, regeneration, detox. Your body and your brain cannot cleanse itself if you do not go into deep and restorative sleep. And that's only able to happen if you have high enough
pineal melatonin. And did you know that the body actually produces cellular melatonin in exposure to red and infrared light? So that means that your body is meant to melatonin 24-7 and most people are disrupting the process in both ways. During the day they're not getting outside and they have artificial blue light at night. So that means you're never getting pineal melatonin and you're never getting cellular melatonin. So what do you get as a result from that?
You get increased aging, damaged cells, and, you know, the C-word that I just mentioned earlier.
Daniel Vitalis (01:47:56.618)
Fascinating how you'd think, I mean you and I don't think this, but you'd almost expect that there'd be all this health technology that would be superior, but what we keep finding is it's like, no, it's the ancestral stuff. It's just always the stuff that would have naturally happened to you, and that every departure from that just seems to be a problem. And I worry about the technologies because,
Andreas David Christou (01:48:15.609)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:48:23.697)
what unforeseen consequences do they have, you know? Or, you know, recently I was sent a device from Europe, they wanted me to test that was for checking your heart rate variability. And it's kind of like a wearable, but you only need to wear it for three minutes. But you gotta wear it for three minutes when you, I'm not gonna say names, but they want you to wear it when you wake up. And the problem is to do it, you have to have your phone. And so now,
Andreas David Christou (01:48:39.709)
Is it a longer?
Andreas David Christou (01:48:50.347)
Yes, yeah.
Daniel Vitalis (01:48:53.171)
You know, I tried it for three days and then I was like, or five days or whatever I needed to get that baseline. And then I was like, I just can't. I don't keep my phone in the room. I don't want to touch my phone when I wake up. I don't want my phone to be just so that the thing can tell me that I don't feel good when I'm like, I know I feel good. or I do feel good if I, you know, it's like, I don't need a device to tell me how I feel. And I definitely don't need that device to make me get on my phone first thing in the morning. This just makes no sense. And so I find that
Andreas David Christou (01:48:59.125)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Andreas David Christou (01:49:09.439)
Yeah.
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:49:22.963)
that I have an infrared sauna, it's great, but you know, I feel even better when I'm in front of my fireplace. So it's so interesting how all this tech can be beneficial to mitigate problems created by tech, but it's never superior to the real thing. So it's like, I worry that we create tech to solve problems tech creates that creates new problems. So you've got to create and you just keep stacking stuff. And sometimes it's like,
Andreas David Christou (01:49:37.279)
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:49:50.483)
you just be so much better off to just go naked out in the sun and move around a little bit than to do all of these things. And so I appreciate that after everything we've talked about, it all just kind of came back to the same kind of basic principles we all know and we all feel best when we do.
Andreas David Christou (01:49:56.683)
correct.
Andreas David Christou (01:50:06.283)
Foundational principles. This is why like circadian health is foundational because it's tied to nature like nature is cyclical in it, right? It goes in a cycle you have Every single day the Sun rises every single day the Sun sets thankfully right like that We hope that it does every day and then we get to live another day and every single evening when we sleep It's like a reset button for our biology. So sleep is not just so you don't feel tired It's so you heal repair regenerate detoxify and come back
like better than before if you know if you're optimizing your biology. yeah, nature just optimizes every living organism and when you are in alignment with that you are thriving and when you remove yourself from that that's when disease begins to manifest. Obviously there are levels to this levels of resilience. Nature makes your resilience buckets bigger so you can tolerate more modern day stressors and modern life small it makes your bucket smaller.
and piles you more stressors, so it overflows. And what do you get when it overflows? All kinds of like autoimmune conditions, diseases, diabetes, like blood pressure. You know, you get everything that you know today. Almost all Neolithic diseases are due to a modern lifestyle. You put a person back into nature and you eat an ancestral diet, which is pulsed and cyclical in nature, not like the carnivore diet or the vegan diet. You eat everything like together in full spectrum, just like you receive full spectrum of light. You need to...
receive full spectrum nutrition, that's the way that you actually thrive.
Daniel Vitalis (01:51:41.631)
Yeah, I love what you just said. I love everything you just said and that idea of cyclical, because you could chart it like a sine wave. So obviously it's like sunrise, then noon, then sunset, then midnight. And that's just the sine wave or the temperature you talked about how the mornings start off cool and then they warm up and then you get peak. And so everything can be charted like a sine wave. And that's what the ground we walk on should be this way. And then flat line, we all associate with death.
Andreas David Christou (01:51:56.744)
Correct.
Andreas David Christou (01:52:07.101)
Yes.
Daniel Vitalis (01:52:11.356)
but then we seek a flat line in temperature, we seek a flat line in light exposure, we seek a flat line in everything that we're doing and it's like, it's so obvious that that's the way of death, know? And what you're talking about is the way of life. all right, so tell us all the things. How do we connect with you? How do we follow your work? How do people work with you if they want to? Where do they find you? All those kind of things.
Andreas David Christou (01:52:15.037)
Ha
is.
Andreas David Christou (01:52:31.752)
I just want to say thank you so much for having me on and I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm really glad that we went down the rabbit holes of circadian health and nature in general. And we started off on the mitochondria because I wasn't expecting that our conversation was going to begin in that way. I was like fully prepped that we're going to start talking about mobility from the get go. So I was really happy that you went like we went really, really deep, you know, because this is the stuff which controls our biology and which optimizes, you know, how we feel every day. You know,
None of this information matters. All that matters is like how you feel every day and how you feel is determined of your connection with nature or your lack of connection with nature. So that's the message that I want to leave people with. So people can find me like through my podcast. As Daniel said at the beginning, Fitness Wisdom podcast is on YouTube and also on Spotify. And my primary website right now is patreon.com forward slash Fitness Wisdom podcast. You can connect with me on there.
connect with a like-minded community and Shripe who shares topics and ideas like this. I write blogs and health optimization protocols. I share my own personal programs on there that you can get access to. You can get access to workouts, mobility routines, which consider your brain and your nervous system. So we're not doing passive stretching. We're only doing dynamic stretching or moving with intention and through full range of motion.
So, and also all the social media channels as well. So that's like Instagram, Andreas underscore David underscore Christou. And is there anything else that that's pretty much it. People can find me through those main platforms. Thank you so much, Daniel.
Daniel Vitalis (01:54:16.86)
man, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I'd love to have you back on sometime. It seems like there's more stuff we could talk about. So I really enjoyed this and it seems like we're on parallel paths, man. So really happy that you came today. Thank you so much.
Andreas David Christou (01:54:30.598)
Thank you so much brother and I would love to do it again.