Ben Pakulski and Eng3’s Rowena Gates discuss proteins, biohacking, and exercise recovery on the Muscle Intelligence Podcast
Ben Pakulski is a bodybuilder, fitness coach, writer, and podcast host. He’s also a big NanoVi® fan.
Ben did his first podcast on NanoVi several years ago and recently invited Rowena Gates for a second Muscle Intelligence Podcast. Hear the complete conversation below, or read the transcript of this episode of the Muscle intelligence Podcast here.
Ben has been using NanoVi—which he calls one of his “favorite biohacking technologies”—for several years and has experienced its benefits firsthand. The biggest difference he’s noticed from his fitness routine before NanoVi to now is his post-recovery workout. In a recent conversation with Eng3 Vice President Rowena Gates on his Muscle Intelligence podcast, this is what Ben had to say about NanoVi:
“I usually do it post-workout… it’s exceptional. Its ability to mitigate soreness, either immediately after a session or the next day, is tremendous, and I noticed I don’t get as tired after workouts. So, if I do a crazy killer leg session and I do 30 minutes of the NanoVi, I don’t feel nearly as mentally drained.”
Ben studied kinesiology in college, so he’s well versed in the mechanics of the body and has taken the time over the years to educate himself about how the body operates beyond just physical movement. He doesn’t just understand that he might be fatigued or sore after a workout, he understands why: building muscle mass means first damaging muscle fibers. In their conversation, Ben and Rowena discussed how, as with any other kind of damage it sustains, the body responds by trying to repair or replace this muscle “damage”—even if the damage is being done in service of the body itself.
The body’s natural repair mechanisms can’t keep up with the pace of the damage sustained, especially in cases like Ben’s, where workouts are quick and intense, so the proteins that direct the repair process may unfold and not perform at their optimal level. As Rowena explains to Ben in the podcast, unfolded proteins must first repair themselves before they can assist in the muscles’ repair, meaning the recovery process drags out. “[It] can be days. That’s where people will have these long-term recoveries,” in which they’re still feeling the effects of a workout long after they’ve completed it.
The NanoVi device is designed to influence the water that surrounds proteins—“it’s giving it the environment to allow those proteins to recuperate faster,” as Ben puts it. Improving protein activities speeds up the recovery process not only so users can recover from a workout much more quickly, but also so new muscle fibers can also be created more efficiently. And when you’re trying to add or maintain muscle mass, that speed makes a major difference.
For Ben, who describes himself as a natural skeptic, the fact that NanoVi’s technology has been consistently validated by scientific researchers is a major reason he’s happy to give it his stamp of approval. Science, combined with endorsements from others made it easy for Ben to get behind NanoVi.
“Everyone I know that’s bought one of these machines absolutely raves about it. For improving heart rate variability, to improving your focus, to improving my perceived recovery times. Meaning, if I train legs today and I do a 30-to-60-minute session after on the NanoVi, my legs training, or my leg soreness will be a fraction of what it otherwise would have been. My energy [and] rest is massively increased.“
If you’d like to learn more about the NanoVi device, its proven benefits, and the price, sign in below.
If you have any questions about how NanoVi can take your recovery, training, and performance to the next level – or anything else please put a note in the comment box.
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00:00:14 Ben Pakulski
Welcome back to the Muscle Intelligence Podcast. I’m your host, Ben Pakulski. As always I aim to bring you the best information that exists to allow you to make an impact in the world, to allow you to show up at your best, to allow you to lead, live a life of integrity, and ultimately create a body that supports all of those things – and sometimes that means going outside of conventional thinking.If you guys remember back to the old Muscle Expert Podcast, I had a guest on by the name of Doctor Gerald Pollack and he talked about something called structured water. Most people have never heard of structured water, they don’t know what it is, but we all have it. We all have it in varying amounts and it tends to degrade as we age. It’s been shown to be very correlated with decreased function, decreased health, decreased recovery and a lot of very vast implications as our amount of structured water starts to decrease.So, if you may or may not know, every cell in the human body is charged; we all have an electrical charge, and the structured water is the thing that’s said to hold the negative charge and allow your body to send these electrical transmissions. Whether your goal is to use your brain more, it needs electricity, or whether your goal is to use your muscles more, it needs electricity. We’re electrical beings and the ability to hold these electrical charges is very important and ultimately dependent on this structured water.This fourth phase of water, otherwise known as EZ water, structured water or exclusion zone water, because the body has actually created a system where it excludes the protons and creates this wall of negatively charged electrons. It’s really interesting to look at if you’re interested in listening to podcasts to do with Gerald Pollack, is definitely worth it.Now, here’s why I bring this up. Our guest today is one of the founders of one of my favorite biohacking technologies – and some of you love biohacking and some of you don’t – it doesn’t matter. If you’re interested in optimizing your body and ultimately listening to how valuable this tech piece could be, today is a really great podcast for you.The NanoVi is a tech I’ve been using for gosh, probably 3 or 4 years now, maybe even longer. I first met Rowena Gates, who’s our guest today, in Germany in probably 2016, where she told me about this tech and I tried it and I was like, “OK This is really interesting.” I loved it, I read some of the research, I bought one and ultimately been using it consistently ever since. I absolutely love it, it’s one of my favorite techs because I immediately feel a difference.
For me, probably like a lot of you, time matters. I don’t want to just do everything and maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, so I’m never an early adopter. I’m always somebody who’s a skeptic who’s like, “Okay, let them try it first. I want to try it later once they’ve proven it actually works.”
Everyone I know that’s bought one of these machines absolutely raves about it. For improving heart rate variability, to improving your focus, to improving my perceived recovery times. Meaning, if I train legs today and I do a 30-to-60-minute session after on the NanoVi, my legs training, or my leg soreness will be a fraction of what it otherwise would have been. My energy the rest is massively increased.
NanoVi is something that I have my kids on because it’s literally just water where they change the electrical signature of the chemical structure, but I won’t tell you anymore about that because you have to listen all the way through this podcast as Rowena Gates shares all of this incredible information, all the research, all the data, on why this thing is an incredibly effective recovery modality.
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Sleep is one of the most important levers in our ability to recover and grow and thrive and think and ultimately be high performing humans. So, I’ve recently implemented some red lights into my room where I do reading at night so I don’t have to expose myself to any type of blue light. It’s interesting, it definitely feels different. It tends to put me to sleep if I’m being honest. If you have a hard time sleeping, it can be very, very helpful.
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Have an amazing day guys, I hope you enjoy the podcast with Miss Rowena Gates.
Rowena Gates, welcome back to the show!
00:05:15 Rowena Gates
Thanks, it’s nice to be here.
00:05:17 Ben Pakulski
Yeah, we always seem to be running into each other remotely around the world and now we’re very blessed to have you back on the podcast. So thank you for joining us.
00:05:24 Rowena Gates
Pleasure.
00:05:26 Ben Pakulski
You are the owner and creator of the NanoVi which is one of my favorite technologies that I’ve been telling everyone about for, gosh, it must have been four years now I think I’ve been using your system. You continue to come out with new information, new data on the efficacy and utility of the NanoVi. I’d love to have you just kind of refresh our listener’s minds as to what it is.
00:05:51 Rowena Gates
Sure, sure. First of all, I should say I’m not the actual creator, I’m a partner…
00:05:58 Ben Pakulski
Hans, who was on the show in the past.
00:06:01 Rowena Gates
Yeah, and what’s happened more recently is more studies of the technology itself. The humidified air that comes from the technology verifying that it’s doing what we wanted it to do. That’s really leveraging the water science, which is Gerald Pollack and a bunch of other people. Then the more exciting stuff for me is the experiments done on proteins themselves and on people. I always love to see the data because that’s what everybody wants.
00:06:36 Ben Pakulski
Yeah, let’s dive into that. When you say protein, what are we talking about? I don’t want to assume anyone…or you can continue to talk about the NanoVi first, I just want to make sure we don’t miss over the protein.
00:06:47 Rowena Gates
Well, the protein part is a good place to start actually, because I think it’s very interesting, especially for athletes because every athlete is familiar with proteins, peptides, protein supplements and all of that, knowing that that’s all needed by the body if you’re going to build muscle and endurance and strength and so on.
If we start with the protein that you eat, which can just be your food or something supplemental, we have to get from that protein to the protein inside the cell, which is a very different thing, but it’s made out of the proteins you either eat or some that the body create endogenously. About half of them the body has to make itself and about half of them come from food. If you think of that chain, you start by breaking down the protein you eat into the individual amino acids. That’s why we care so much about what we eat because we want to make sure the right building blocks are there. Then those building blocks make up the proteins in the cells. You then have them configured in about a million different ways that create different proteins. They have to be made correctly, and they have to fold correctly in order to function.
Then if you kind of step back to what the protein does, it’s all your muscle, it’s almost all of your structure, it’s almost everything in the body is built out of proteins, but then they also do all the work. It’s some orchestration of proteins that’s your immune system, your digestive system, or movement itself, anything is actually a protein function.
So, they really are kind of everything and that’s only our focus at Eng3 and the NanoVi device, we only look at protein activities, but they’re very complicated and there are many of them. They’re poorly understood so far. We might be able to name about 30,000 of an estimated million different proteins. So, we can’t even name them, let alone know exactly what they do, how they interact and so on.
For Eng3 our focus is not on the individual protein, but on its environment. Our goal is to improve the environment for the protein, then let it do whatever it’s supposed to do. It knows what to do; the body knows all that part of it, we’re just going to make the environment a little bit better. I know that’s an area of interest for you because of the EZ Water in Dr. Pollack’s work…
00:09:37 Ben Pakulski
Yeah.
00:09:38 Rowena Gates
…where every protein is immersed in water. Most of our body is water and it’s 99% of the molecules in there. Every protein is in water and interacts with the water in order to do its job. Our goal is, well, let’s make that water a little bit better, help them out.
00:09:59 Ben Pakulski
Yeah, so as I said just before we jumped on, I had spent the last couple hours listening to some of Dr Pollack’s stuff and some of your stuff and Hans’ stuff, just to make sure my brain was kind of up to par with the structured water. The first thing that jumped out to me, as you just said, was people are so mechanistically focused on the muscle itself and the protein within a muscle without acknowledging that 99% of the cells as you say – or sorry, of the atoms – are actually water. So, if we if we put a little bit of our focus then on to, as you say, this environment which is comprised of 99% water, I think there’s certainly an opportunity that exists there to improve the proteins that exist within the water and maybe just improve the functioning of the body by paying attention to optimization of that water environment and that’s ultimately what you guys are doing.
00:10:47 Rowena Gates
Right, and to think from your standpoint where you come from, I think we’re going to be in the next few years learning a lot more about how water is essentially structurally leveraged in the system to get movement and to do things.
00:10:48 Ben Pakulski
Yeah.
00:11:05 Rowena Gates
Some of the things the body does are quite amazing that just pure leverage with mechanics doesn’t explain it, but if you almost add hydraulics, it gets pretty interesting. I have the feeling that that’s an area we’re going to see a lot more information on.
00:11:22 Ben Pakulski
Super interesting. I’d love to have you just first of all give our audience a reminder as to what structured water is. I’m sure you way more versed in it than I am. I’d love to have you just give us the simplest example possible.
00:11:36 Rowena Gates
Sure, structured water is a phrase that’s virtually anything where the water molecules are organized in a way that’s more organized than just regular water. There’s lots of ways to do that. What we do is one subsection of structured water. We want a very specific situation and that involves having the water molecules densely packed together and so it’s referred to as ordered water. So, there’s ways to structure and cluster water that aren’t ordered water.
That’s why we kind of have to narrow down into our funnel, which is this particular condition where the water molecules are closely packed together, they’re highly organized, and then that’s what Gerald Pollack refers to as an EZ type of water exclusion zone meaning that they’re so closely packed together that they exclude anything else, and they push it out of that layer of water.
We’re talking about very thin layers of water, like in a cell or around a structure like a protein. It doesn’t exist like that in bulk water, it would be a very thin layer of the glass of water around the structure – the edge of the glass or the surface potentially, but not a whole glass of water.
00:13:04 Ben Pakulski
One of things that Dr Pollack was saying that this does, so the exclusion zone is excluding the protons, putting the negative charge to the edge of the cell as you say, and that he says has tremendous implications on energy production. So, a lot of the energy being produced in the body is coming from infrared, which causes negative charge, and these negative charges are in some way influencing energy production. You know about that?
00:13:29 Rowena Gates
Yes absolutely, and I think it’s a really interesting area and it explains the benefit of things like red light therapies, other related therapies that are kind of complementary, but what’s unique about the way we approach it is to do it from the inside out through inhalation. So, the humidity from our device touches the water surface in the body and then that transfers throughout the body from the inside out. It’s a different process, a different approach, and it complements if you’re coming from the outside in, maybe topically with red light or PEMF or something.
00:14:18 Ben Pakulski
So when you say outside in, we’re looking at the sun, we’re looking at infrared light, we’re looking at saunas, we’re looking at movement. All those known to create structured water inside the body.
00:14:27 Rowena Gates
Yeah.
00:14:27 Ben Pakulski
Inside out being, “I’m going to inhale this and then assume” – and I’d love to have you talk about this –“assume that once it hits my lung cells, one, its going to work on my lung cells, but two, it’s also being dispersed to other parts of the body where necessary.”
00:14:39 Rowena Gates
Yeah, well that was one area where Jerry was really helpful to us and wrote a piece about why the humidity is important for what we’re doing, rather than say, a glass of water, bulk water, but we’re organizing the humidified droplets. The surface of them becomes very ordered, which is what we’re wanting. That’s verified by a lab in Italy that Dr Pollack introduced us to. They’ve done some great work, which is all kind of a little bit boring to me because it’s just proving it, but it’s not humans. Then when you inhale that you’re connecting the water from the droplet to the body and the transfer through the body is not like diffusing a substance that moves out. It’s more like connecting across the water in the body. You know that game where you take a ball, and you drop one end and the other end goes up?
00:15:40 Ben Pakulski
Yep.
00:15:41 Rowena Gates
It’s working like that where you’re just connecting across it, and so it can go throughout the body very rapidly and very readily. Even though you’re inhaling it, it can affect the water in your feet, or in your arms or wherever it is in your body. Think of it more maybe like an electrical
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