Optimal Performance Podcast: Speeding Recovery with the NanoVi™ and Supercharging Float Sessions and Cryotherapy

Sean: You’re listening to the optimal performance podcast and I’m you host, Sean McCormick. It’s the OPP. I’m a performance coach, a wellness entrepreneur, a blogger, a speaker, a biohacker and it’s my privilege to bring to you the leading experts in the field of performance, so let’s dig right in here with Rowena Gates from Eng3. Rowena, thanks for joining us.

Rowena: Hey, it’s a pleasure and good to be here.

Sean: So, we’re going to dig into so much science and so much performance, but before we dig into any of that, I like to start each of these podcasts the same way, which is to ask each guest what they have in their body for today. So today, it’s 9:30 on a Monday morning in Pacific Standard Time, what have you eaten? What sort of supplements, coffees, what’s in your body right now Rowena?

Rowena: Not much. I’ve had a small cup of coffee and some water and that’s it. I’m one of those intermittent fasters.

Sean: Every day?

Rowena: Yeah, so I go until about noon or one depending on how busy I am and then I start to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner all condensed into maybe six or seven hours, depending.

Sean: Yeah, I’m in the same way. Yeah, in a window at the same 2 o’clock till about 8 or 9 o’clock, do you take supplements or tinctures or anything like that?

Rowena: I do in the evening.

Sean: Is it targeted at sort of sleep and recovery or is it just kind of when you do it?

Rowena: It’s when I do it because otherwise I forget. I do take some stuff in the morning like Restore, Zach Bush’s product, but mostly I just do it in the evening or else I forget to do it. I’m not reliably diligent about that.

Sean: If you’re like me, you like to do all the hard work in the first half of the day when you’re sharp and light on your toes, right?

Rowena: Yes!

Sean: Yeah, me too. So, like I said we’re going to dig into all aspects of the topic and I will just sort of preface by saying that I’ve actually tried the NanoVi a couple of times, and I’ll tell a little bit about my experience with it and Rowena. You and I’ve met before at my Flotation Centre both in Seattle and Bellevue, but let’s start with the basics. You’ve been on the Bulletproof Podcast stand and I’ve seen you speak in other places too and I know that you guys are active in the conference world, but I think that we should start with the basics. So, tell us a little bit about what oxidative stress is?

Rowena: So oxidative stress comes from the use of oxygen and they call it the oxygen irony. It’s part of the sense of humor the body has where the one thing you really can’t live without for more than a few minutes is also systematically damaging because it’s like the exhaust from an engine. It’s a pollutant in the body and it’s creating free radicals and if they accumulate, then it’s oxidative stress, and if it is pervasive then it becomes oxidative stress damage.

Sean: And what can oxidative stress and oxidative stress damage lead to?

Rowena: So basically, the free radical is going to damage anything that it can get its hand on, oftentimes proteins. It could also damage the mitochondria, any cell component, the cell membrane or anything that interacts with it, and so the first line of defense for the body is antioxidants. They stand in the way, basically they interrupt the damage, thus intake of antioxidants is great but it’s not perfect. That’s the first line of defense, but there is still damage that occurs. So, the second line of defense is to repair the damage after it’s happened and that’s where the NanoVi device comes in, so we’re not an antioxidant, but we repair the oxidative stress damage after it has occurred.

Sean: Does our body have a natural way to repair oxidative stress?

Rowena: Absolutely and it produces the antioxidants itself, so we supplement it, but the antioxidants are coming from within. Then we have the exogenous supplementation and so all of those processes are naturally occurring all the time and if we didn’t repair, we wouldn’t live very long. But one thing is very interesting that’s been shown in, athletes in particular, is that the more oxygen you consume, the more oxidative stress you have, so taking antioxidants is very important. But over supplement the antioxidants and another sort of irony of the body is that the free radicals that had reactive oxygen species are both doing damage generally, but also have a signaling responsibility as a second messenger. It’s a molecule that emits a specific energy that triggers repair, so if you do too much on the antioxidant side, you interrupt too much of that process then your body is not getting the message to repair. A few years ago in Norway, they showed that the athletes that were over supplemented didn’t put on muscle mass the way the other athletes did; so you can actually undermine your agenda if you overdo the antioxidants. So that’s not a solution basically you can’t just take endless antioxidants and expect that to mitigate all the free radical damage.

Sean: Right because you’re overdoing and sort of undermining the body’s own biological processes, right?

Rowena: Exactly.

Sean: So as far as the damage that comes from oxidative stress, I’m thinking about our audience for the hard charger type A, Mover-Shaker that’s taking supplements and taking care of their body and potentially doing a ton of cardio. If they’re doing a lot of long-term cardio are they more susceptible to oxidative stress than someone who does zero or a little bit of cardio?

Rowena: It depends on what they do to mitigate it. They’re definitely going to create more, an athlete can create 100 times more oxidative stress, but they might be in the position to repair that very easily. When you say type A; that makes me think of somebody that’s also more sort of stressed personally which means they should get in a float tank. When they’re just always in overdrive, and we see this all the time, they’re high performers, but if they don’t take that timeout, that calm time to give their body a chance to catchup, then their damage is going to outweigh the repair. There are certain athletes or types of people that just age faster because they’re not keeping up and that’s obviously an ongoing thing. If our repair kept up to the damage that was being done, we wouldn’t age because our cells have the ability to recreate themselves perfectly; and so it’s just a matter of how fast we age at some point, and then the other side of it is, depending on where the damage is and how it’s done, it could ultimately end up as a chronic illness. So, certain types of damage might show up as cancers, whereas other types of damage show up as diabetes or respiratory illness or so on.

Sean: Right! So as far as the recovery process too that sort of gets into protein folding which is an important element of what NanoVi does, can you tell us again as excessively as possible, what protein folding is?

Rowena: So, the proteins are chains of amino acids that are just kind of hanging around there and they need to fold into specific three-dimensional shapes in order to do their function. There’s this huge orchestration of activities that can be biophysical or biochemical that trigger these proteins into action and they can only function properly when they fold into the three-dimensional shape and have the right structure. So, protein-folding is critical to proper function and proper function is critical to everything. All the repair that gets done, all the movement, blink your eye and that’s protein activity, and so they’re really critical and their ability to perform their tasks is all based on them creating the correct shapes and behaving correctly.

Sean: And where are these, are we talking about the proteins like in the mitochondria in the cells themselves?

Rowena: Yes, inside the cell they are tiny and we don’t know so much about them, there’s 30,000 that have been identified, but they estimate that there’s about a million in there. Then you think of the complexity that all of those guys could interact in ways that are just so complex that it is probably never possible to figure it all out, just through a kind of analytical approach to it. That’s why there’s so many drug interventions that go after specific proteins, turn the receptors on or off, replace them if they’re missing and so on. There’s been some great advances through a kind of manipulating proteins, but that whole suite of proteins being so huge and all the potential for unintended consequences because they interact and they play possibly multiple roles that are very hard to track with all these interactions; that’s what makes it really hard to sort out.

Sean: Yeah and as we age and as we have more stress that affects the protein folding process, right?

Rowena: Absolutely, absolutely so. As I mentioned, they’re very small, there’s just tons of them inside the cell just as there are tons of mitochondria. Since the oxygen burns in the mitochondria, a lot of the damage is to the mitochondria itself and that’s a big part of what people notice about our device. It’s one of the reasons that they like it so much because they’ve been really focused on mitochondrial function and if you can repair damage related to the mitochondria, you get better output, better energy and that’s kind of fundamental to the whole system working better. So, athletes notice that, and it’s great for concentration which is like running a marathon only with your mind and so it’s that mitochondrial function is also kind of the foundation piece of health.

Sean: Right and before we get into the device and how the device works and what it does, can you tell us a little bit about your background with Eng3. Can you tell us how you got involved, I mean how does anyone get involved with longevity devices and health devices like, tell us your story a little bit?

Rowena: Oh, my story, it is a circuitous path. I was in tech, my first company was in 1995 and we were doing trade or logistics over the internet and it was pretty challenging. These investors didn’t really know what the internet was and there were very few people who really believed that it was something that would be used in commerce. I mean it was kind of early, and then the next company I did was more specifically related to international trade documentation. The first one was called Inpassage and it was around for a while, but then I started focusing on the trade documentation and I shifted out of that company. I was going to take some time off and I said I would help Hans Eng because in spite of his name Hans Eng is a big German guy, he is not Chinese, and his English was not as good then as it is now, let’s just say that. So I was helping with getting the English right and things like that, and then we get these phone calls about how helpful it was to people and it really swept me up because it was a much better purpose than international trade documents. I mean nobody ever called and said international trade documents changed their life and so I just kind of got caught in that feeling like I was doing something meaningful and I shifted over. By now, I feel like I know quite a lot about the medical device space but at that time I really was brand new.

Sean: You were drawn by the passion to help people and provide them with something interesting.

Rowena: Exactly and it was accidental, I’m embarrassed to say but I mean I was helping people with trade documents so that felt fulfilling, but this was just so much more helpful and you probably noticed that too with Natural Stacks and your load projects where it just really feels good when you have a good outcome.

Sean: Yeah, it really does and speaking of the outcome, you guys’ website is really comprehensive and we’re going to get into who uses the device like pro-athletes and hard-charging investors. The site does a really good job to explain sort of the qualitative responses that you get from people, and we’re going to have links galore for this podcast, but before we get into that, can you explain how the NanoVi works, what it is, how it looks, how you use it?

Rowena: Sure, just let me walk through from the very beginning and people can visualize it maybe. The device has bubbling water to create humidity and then that humidity is passed through excitation chambers and what we’re doing is mimicking what the body naturally does. So, we’re mimicking that reactive oxygen species that I mentioned earlier that emits a specific signal that is used to trigger repair and assist the body with protein folding and function and so we’re only mimicking what the body is doing, and all that research is out of the cell biology, it’s already done basically. So, our innovation is to find a way to do that artificially and augment the body’s processes and so the air passes through the excitation chamber and you inhale it, but what happening is all biophysical, there’s no biochemistry, which people find confusing because when you inhale something, everybody thinks it’s oxygen, but in this case what we’re doing is modifying the water droplets. So, the water droplets have a different state, we’ve shown that in research labs, we have verified that that it has these particular properties that are what’s needed to ultimately help the protein folding process. So that adjustment to the water is called ordered water, it’s also related to Dr. Pollack’s work and other’s work in EZ-water, exclusion zone water. It’s a different state and they call it the fourth phase of water because it’s not solid, liquid or gas; it’s almost like a gel state and its sort of special properties and special to the body. So that is inhaled by the user. You can either use a nasal cannula, which is like an oxygen delivery, or you can breathe it directly from the tube on the device, and once you inhale it goes through the mucous membrane out through the watery environment, so it doesn’t have to go directly into the lungs. As soon as it touches the water, there is all this interconnected water in the system and it something like 99% of your body’s molecules are water. So, there’s a lot of water there, but the body is not like a big bag of water, it’s more like a cloud. It’s like pockets of water because the cells divided up, and so the humidity, which are droplets of water, work very well in that environment. Dr. Pollack actually wrote a piece about that to explain why the humidity is so important, you can’t just drink this water and have it do the same thing because you need a lot of surface area and so each of the droplets has that surface area. So that is essentially how the person gets it into their body. There’s three versions of the device, and just so people know they’re ranging from a little over $5000 to a little under $14,000. So, it is an upfront investment, then you use it for anywhere from an hour with the cheaper one to 15 minutes with the most expensive one, and so all of our pro-athletes and dentists and doctors will often buy that expensive device because they want the shorter time period, but the other devices are great and it doesn’t have to be done in 15 minutes; that’s what the executives get.

Sean: Right, just give me the best one, give me the best one you got and is the different prices for the power of the actual chambers, is it because of the complexity of the chamber?

Rowena: Yeah, it’s the output of the device. So, it is more powerful and you are really doubling up that output.

Sean: So, you talked a little bit about some of the athletes that use the device. You know, Ben Greenfield has talked a lot about it, I know Mad Boy who is local to me up here in the Northwest, pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, I got to imagine that this is also really highly beneficial not only for endurance athletes, can you tell us a little about some of the experiences that these athletes have had?

Rowena: One of the things that is really noticeable for them is when they use it after training, so if they’re running or riding a bike or whatever they’re speeding recovery. They can significantly reduce the time it takes them to recover when normally it takes them a few days. What this means to a performance athlete is they can train harder because there’s just going to do more of it. That’s how they develop their skill and that’s how they win races, and so the biggest thing that any trained athlete can notice is that they recover faster. Recovery includes kind of all the aspects, energy levels, soreness, all the aspects of recovery, and we have even had one guy who was one of the tougher type guys who said he felt cheated afterwards because he wasn’t sore and he knew he worked out really hard and he should feel bad and he is like “I don’t even feel bad!”

Sean: Yeah; that’s funny.

Rowena: So that’s a really big one, especially for endurance athletes because they’re really doing the long haul and we have one guy that’s done, okay I might say this wrong, a Deca-Ultra Triathlon which is 10 ironman competitions 10 days in a row. He has also done the Arctic race that are largely above the Arctic Circle and so on and so for people like that it’s a really big aspect. They’re never going to keep up with that kind of damage in 10 days; however, over the time in the months following, it’s still going to really help them with regeneration.

Sean: And what does this athlete talk about, I mean have you talked to the athlete directly, do you know like would they use it like right after a race?

Rowena: They typically will use it as soon as they can afterwards, sometimes that’s not logistically possible and in some cases we’ve also shown for athlete that if it’s used before performance, it reduces lactic acid very significantly and so for some athletes. If you were, say, a sprinter, it would be pretty easy to find the time to use it and then go do your race, but for others like the hockey players, they have a bunch of prep and gearing up and all that so they couldn’t use it right before. Ideally if you’re using it every day, you still get that sort of benefit that you’re going to have less lactate in your system. Unfortunately, we don’t have the measurements of that. So, we have a double-blind placebo-controlled study showing, using it prior to all out exertion exercise will reduce lactic acid by as much as 17% and that’s a controlled crossover study, but what we don’t have is the sort of that follow-on research that would say well if he used it three hours before, would it have the same affect and so….

Sean: Wow! That’s really compelling, I mean 17% can mean a difference between a top 10 finish and not qualifying for something.

Rowena: It’s really stunning. Now, I just want to remind everybody that all our exertion tests is when the athlete goes to depletion, which is either the doctor stops the test or the athlete does, has to be supervised, but they go to full exhaustion and pretty much nobody does that in sports, so you wouldn’t expect the same number from what people’s normal activities, but it’s still very very dramatic. I mean, people have not seen anything like that basically. So that’s a great aspect of it and I think and we’ll see more and more use for these in all kinds of sports whether if they’re running down the field or court or whatever, the lactic acid is a big deal for a lot of sports.

Sean: Yeah and what about for non-athletes?

Rowena: Well for non-athletes, it’s only the people who want to have healthy aging that need it and so it is repairing the damage and helping people age more gracefully. They may or may not notice more energy, very often people do, or they might have more clarity and focus, but the biggest thing that most people notice and actually this relates really well to what you’re doing with the flotation tanks is it balances the autonomic nervous system. You can show that with heart rate variability testing and that as you know has a huge benefit for all aspects of health and the most noticeable one for us is better sleep, but it also is noticeable for people’s mood, anxiety and so on when they get that advantage. It’s a really great combination with flotation because you’re just helping that person get out of the sympathetic state which is the stress mode and into a parasympathetic state where they’re going to be calm and relaxed and so; that’s why the Type A executive benefits so much from it because they spend a lot of time in that sympathetic state of the autonomic nervous system.

Sean: Right, it’s akin to endurance athletes because for people who are mentally straining day after day, I’m taking a vacation tomorrow because I know that my body needs it, you know I need a break, I need at least a couple of days to recharge my batteries and the fact that NanoVi can not only reduce lactic acid and help recovery but in assistance with the protein folding, it’s actually helping because we know that there’s a lot of mitochondria in our brain that it helps with that mental strain and you’ve seen that time and time again, I assume.

Rowena: Yeah, absolutely and I think that such a good point to makes on because I don’t think people realize that you do oxidative damage by your tremendous concentration and focus. It’s like physical activity in that you’re burning a lot of calories, your brain is a huge user of oxygen and when you really challenge the brain which is fantastic; that’s how people perform so well and do great things, but then you also need that recovery time just like you would if you were an athlete and I think that’s where people started getting behind and they run their careers and suddenly realize, “oh man, you know, I’m just not feeling as good as I should be at” if you’re 60 or something.

Sean: Yeah, how often do you use it?

Rowena: I use it almost every day. I don’t use it on weekends. This weekend, I took it home, but often I just have it at my desk and so I use it often a couple of times a day too. So, do a session in the morning and evening. You don’t have to do a whole session all at once, you can do more smaller sessions, you can use it a lot and I should explain that when I talked about the device, I mentioned its biophysics, but you’re not introducing any foreign substance, you’re not doing anything that can create problems. So, if you use it a lot, it doesn’t have the potential for contraindications or any downside to it. So, I figure well if I am at my desk anyway, I might as well be using it.

Sean: Yeah, why wouldn’t you because you potentially be using it like all day, can you do too much of it?

Rowena: Yes and no. There’re people that use it while they sleep at night, but the only time you can really do too much is when you first start using it. Part of the cells job is to get rid of the waste products. So in fact there is a Nobel prize in medicine for that in 2016 for the person who did that background research to look at how the cells identify when something is wrong, recycle what they can and eliminate the rest of it. So if people have a lot of that toxicity that’s build up, I don’t know, I guess it’s not necessarily toxicity but sort of that waste in the cells whatever it is, then they should start using the device slowly because when you get better cellular function, it’s going try to get rid of its waste products. If your elimination system doesn’t keep up, then you could end up with diarrhea, skin rash, headache; these sort of attributes of detoxification, and so then it’s important to go more slowly so that the system is comfortable and then you’re fine.

Sean: Yeah going from I’m not processing effectively enough to I’m doing too well; my body is not used to that. It’s not trained for functioning at this high level.

Rowena: Yeah and usually those people know who they are because they’re sensitive to everything in it. It’s great to get that taken care of, its just that you want to be comfortable. Actually there’s one other thing, it’s really a good thing but it’s something that I learned quite a bit from Athletic Training Institute, you know those guys. If there’s old injuries that didn’t heal correctly, the body is going to go and create the inflammatory process that heals it and then it resolves; so in athletes with old injuries that weren’t properly healed, they may notice that it gets worse before it gets better, but then it will resolve them. I should mention that like with mitochondrial function, it’s great for inflammation and we also have double-blind placebo-controlled studies on the inflammatory markers that show higher immune response and I want to point out, we tend to go down this path of inflammation is bad and actually it’s good and bad. If it’s chronic, it’s bad, it’s not productive and that it can be traced as underlying many many diseases and poor performance, but that acute phase of inflammation that’s productive is essential, it’s what gets rid of the cells that have gone off the rails, it’s protection against pathogens, it’s what gets wounds healed without getting all infected and so on and so the acute phase of the inflammation is very important and that’s what this study showed that after being over stressed then that acute inflammation was significantly improved by 10% to 17% when the NanoVi device was used, but I think it’s so important for people to kind of separate these type of inflammation because there is a bit of a bandwagon effect of just everything reduces inflammation and some inflammation is very good and that’s what we see with these athletes, that it can be uncomfortable as it kicks back in that healing cycle.

Sean: Alright. What are the studies, are there other double-blind placebo tests that you’ve done that you would like to reference because I know that there are listeners, they want the data, is there other things that you can mention?

Rowena: Well, those guys are expensive. So please understand and I should mention those studies were not done by us; they’re independent and so we can always get exactly what we want from them in terms of data because we don’t pay for them or publications, we don’t control what they publish. There was an Olympic Training Centre in Vienna that studied double-stranded DNA breaks in athletes, but it’s not a blinded big study, but it’s a very reliable, it doesn’t have to be in a way because they’re taking blood samples and they look at the double-strand breaks that will fluoresce during this testing process, it’s expensive to do, but they can see how much DNA damage there is and so they did that on a smaller group of athletes, but they showed pretty substantially reduction in the double-strand damage, that was something like 13% to 35% less damage. Again, that’s going to depend on the overall condition; what else is in the system, what’s the state of the athlete, but there’s always a significant improvement by the reduction of damage and I should also mention that double-strand damage is the tricky stuff because one strand can’t replicate off the other strand. So, it’s really the dangerous stuff and it’s also the stuff that is done through radiation, that’s why people take so long to bounce back after some of the therapies that involve radiation.

Sean: One thing that you and I chatted before turning the record button on was the other sort of differentiating between oxygen therapy and antioxidant therapy. This really does something different than all of those and really works in tandem. Can you explain how this is different and complementary to like use of a hyperbaric chamber?

Rowena: Sure, hyperbaric, actually it’s interesting, anybody out there who has got a hyperbaric chamber, you really should add the NanoVi because you get much better outcomes. So that’s just for the person using it. It’s a big advantage. The hyperbarics flooding the system with oxygen, it’s even in the plus it’s really upping the oxygen in the system. If you follow it with the NanoVi session, you can essentially extend that value by getting better utilization of that oxygen. So NanoVi doesn’t add anything but if the cells can utilize it better, then you’re going to get a much better outcome. You also get better tolerance of the hyperbaric. We’ve had one center that’s already purchased three or four of the biggest devices because there is just a remarkable difference. It’s a little handier to use but its doing something different. So, there’s hyperbaric essential for certain acute healing, wound healing, burns and so on. I mean NanoVi will not replace it at all, but it will improve the outcomes and complement it really well, the same with if you want to exercise with oxygen therapy, when the two are combined, it’s a great combination.

Sean: Right because when you’re giving the system more oxygen and you’re oxygenating you blood which is what’s happening in a hyperbaric chamber, the NanoVi can work with that oxygen, work with that increase in blood oxygen level to like you said to help optimize outcomes, right?

Rowena: Correct and also when there is more oxygen, there is more oxidation, and so you also want to mitigate that damage as actively as you can and so there’s a cleanup project plus there’s a utilization aspect of it; that’s why they pair so well with any of the oxygen the