
Achieve the Metabolic and Hormonal benefit of Heavy Weightlifting
Episode Description
Sponsors The Biohackers Watercooler Podcast brings you the latest in optimal health modalities as well as those that have been proven effective for quite a while, but definitely not used by the masses. Learn ways to achieve optimal health, peak performance, longevity, and vitality.
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Transcript
All right, we’re going to hit the live going live here. And looks like we’re going live. Welcome. We’re live. Welcome everyone to another episode of the Biohackers Water Cooler. I’m your co-host Fernando from Orlando with co-host Super Client Super Connector. And today we have a treat for you all. We have John Doolittle, who is a retired, retired captain of the U.S. Navy SEALs. He’s also public speaker and the Chief Revenue Officer for KAATSU Global, the original company in the Blood Flow Restriction Space, BFR. He spent 25 years in the SEAL teams and retired out of the US SOCOM or SOCOM in Tampa, Florida. And he had 13 orthopedic surgeries during his time in the Teams. His last two rehabs were done with KAATSU, which we’re going to cover in this podcast. He lives in St. Pete with his family, St. Pete, Florida. And he loves skiing, diving, and kiteboarding with his family. Captain John DooLittle, welcome. Fernando, thank you.
Thank you for having me on here. And Steven, it’s good to see you again, brother. Before we go to you, Captain, Steven, how do you meet, how did you meet John? And what has the impact that he’s had on you? And why did you invite him to be here on the show? Great. Thanks, Fernando. So John Doolittle, I met, oddly enough, I live in St. Petersburg. John lives in St. Petersburg, but we didn’t meet here.
We met actually in Austin, Texas at a now defunct, really cool biohacking conference that was called Paleo FX. Someone may keep the name by him and have a resurgence. But we met third weekend in April of 2019, going into one of the best brisket places in Austin called Terry Buckets across the street from where the conference was held. That’s right. Good memory.
More of an impact on me because I didn’t acquire my KAATSU device, which we’re going to talk about today, which you’ll see one of the bands around my arms until just under a year ago. And I really didn’t start using it regularly until probably about six weeks ago. So really, really excited about this topic. I’m not really versed at explaining it. You mentioned the term blood flow restriction, which is one of the descriptions of the KAATSU, but gets confusing because it’s not 100% blood flow restriction in the sense that people would understand what that is.
And most people don’t know what that is anyway. So there’s huge upsides, upsides to this modality. I’m really excited about it. I’m really excited about having it. Knowing John, the other thing I’m excited about with John is he mentioned kiteboarding or kite surfing is something he’s excited about. I just moved from… which is one of really two places to go kite surfing in the Tampa Bay area. You’ve got Sunshine Skyway Bridge and here. So I fully expect to have John come and kite surf and visit and teach me a couple of things so I can start learning how to kite surf here.
Stephen, I’m going to introduce you to an awesome coach and it ain’t me. But all three of my kids are Kiters. I picked it up with them two or three years ago. You know I grew up in Northern California surfing and I’m in Florida now and I needed something on the water and something to kind of keep us doing stuff together as a family and kiteboarding. It’s it.
I fell in love with it. Between kiteboarding and spearfishing, man, I am never leaving St. Pete, Florida, especially after all the COVID stuff. But that’s a rapid introduction for you also. One of the top guys at rapid release moved here from California. He’s like a 15 minute boat ride across the bay and this guy’s foil rider, the sails, kite surfing. He’s a wizard. Nice, nice. Kite foiling. Yeah, that’s tough, man. That’s difficult.
Yeah, he’s got a low center of gravity, though he’s like five, six, and he’s a really strong guy too, though. Anyway, all right. So coming back to KAATSU. Okay. Let’s, let’s go from the ground up. First, I’d like for you to kind of share kind of what, you know, your, your elevator speech or the minimal way to explain what KAATSU is, and then kind of get into your story, which is like one of the best testimonials of KAATSU that you’re ever going to hear is why you’re, you know, they’re the head of your head revenue officer and why you’re training all these guys around the country and the world.
So kind of share with everybody first, what is this little thing I’ve got around my arm and this little deal here that’s the base unit for it? Kind of kind of…okay. Yeah, man. Thanks, Steven. K-A-A-T-S-U And John’s got it on his shirt, which you can see. But that’s what KAATSU is right there. KAATSU. KAATSU. Japanese word means increase pressure. Atsu is pressure in Japanese. KA means increase.
There’s actually another word for this modality called jiyatsu. So KAATSU is the increase of pressure. Jiyatsu is the release of pressure. So KAATSU includes pressure on and pressure off. So I’m actually doing KAATSU cycles while we talk right now. This is our KAATSU portable device called the C3.
And you can see I’m at pressure right now for another 15 seconds. And that is 200, just under 230 SKUs, which is millimeters mercury. It’s just another word for MMHG. And at the release, which happened right there, you see the pressure go all the way down, the next pressure will be 10 millimeters mercury higher. And it does that over and over and over.
Automatically, very precise, 10 millimeters climb each time. One set is eight of those cycles of pressure. So every time the bands pressurize, I think it’s important. This is actually a leg band. This is not a tourniquet. This band stretches and moves with the limb. So BFR, on the market, there’s a lot of BFR bands.
BFR bands are basically repurposed surgical tourniquets. They are rigid. They’re much wider than this band. And they don’t give at all. KAATSU, on the other hand, which has been around in Japan since the early 70s. And we can go down a rabbit hole with all the background of it. But KAATSU is very different than your traditional BFR because we start at homeostasis and we gradually increase these cycles of pressure.
And every time the bands pressurize, I’m pressurized right now, and I know we’re on video, I will always have capillary refill, if you can see in the camera. If you’re listening and you can’t see, basically I’m pressing in the meat of my hand. And even at these higher pressures, I always have capillary refill. So what happens is all the tissue distal of the band dilates or stretches open.
So you’re dilating tissue and then relaxing over and over again. And when you do that and you combine multi-joint movement, your body spits out all kinds of hormonal responses, metabolic responses that we can talk about more. But that’s it in a nutshell. John, so for people that you just said so many amazing, beautiful words and some listeners might understand some of those words such as BFR, others don’t.
And if you can give one or two say I think benefits of and you did but I’m thinking more for say you said that two of your injuries you were healed because of this technique. Ah, okay. Right? So yeah, yeah. When I was in the SEAL teams, I had 13 orthopedic surgeries.
My last two ortho surgeries, the PTs at SOCOM at Special Operations Command, they did my rehab. So my orthopedic rehabilitation, they did with KAATSU. So they used a different version of this device, a bigger version. They used this device as an adjunct, as an additional tool to existing PT modalities.
So as an example, one of the surgeries was a full-thickness supraspinatus tear, a rotator cuff tear. There are certain, you know, very recognized movements that you do with very light resistance bands, like Therabands and whatnot. They added KAATSU onto that rehab protocol. And what’s interesting, Fernando, is it’s the exact same injury I had had six years earlier. So I was six years younger and full-thickness tear, three anchors. Back when I had that injury the first time, it took 11 months for me to be back to full range of motion, strength, power, and agility. Six years later, when they used KAATSU for my rehab, exact same surgery, same anchors, same anchor points.
It was exact same. The only thing we did different is we added KAATSU to the rehab protocol. At five and a half months, back at St. Pete. Steve, Steven, you’ll know this at St. Pete Masters. I was back swimming at St. Pete Masters swim team. Butterfly was back to 95% range of motion, strength and power and agility. So half the time.
And I was six years older. And I was still active duty in the Navy when that happened. And I was like, oh my God, man. They totally got my attention. And then I was getting ready to retire anyway. So I went out to Tokyo, Japan, where the founder of KAATSU lives and works. And I met Dr. Sato.
And long story longer, I retired out of the Navy five and a half years ago, and I’ve been working with KAATSU ever since. So it really speeds up orthopedic rehab. That is one of the tools of KAATSU. Is this for everyone? So young kids, probably not.
From an FDA perspective, I have to say that if you have strokes, if you have a history of stroke or seizures, cardiac events, or what was the third one? Oh, pregnancy. If you have those three things going on, then you, it’s not that you can’t use KAATSU, but you should get guidance from your primary care provider.
Now, I say all of that because I have to, because we are not a cleared FDA device yet. But in Japan, they use KAATSU as treatment for cardiac events. They use KAATSU on people dealing with strokes and seizures. They use KAATSU on pregnant ladies. But here in America, we are not a medical device. It’s really important that I say that piece.
And for those before you real quick, Steven, for those that might not know the health status or longevity of Japanese people, and I remember reading a little bit about it. What’s the longevity of Japanese people? So Japan has a very low birth rate right now. They’re not the lowest in the world, but they do have the oldest demographic.
They are the oldest demographic on the planet. So when Dr. Sato approached the government of Japan to start a study at the University of Tokyo Hospital, a 10 year long study, it touched 20,000 different cardiac rehab patients. The whole overarching goal of the study was to find noninvasive and non-drug ways to help with longevity, specifically to help eliminate sarcopenia.
Sarcopenia is the muscle wasting that without appropriate exercise protocols, once you start turning 50 years old and older, you start losing a percentage of your lean body mass, your muscle tissue every year. Dr. Sato went to the government in Japan and said, I know that that is not the case if you use KAATSU, would you help me develop a study to study this?
So they did a 10-year long study. That study ended in 2014, and all the outcome measures and published research from that study are why all these BFR companies started appearing around 2015, 2016. But this is the original. It’s where it all started. And it really was about cardiac rehab at the beginning.
But the biomarkers and the blood markers they were seeing with cardiac patients were the same type of responses that orthopedic rehab guys were looking for. So then it moved out of cardiac rehab into orthopedic rehab. And then when you’re in ortho rehab, you start crossing paths with trainers, coaches, strength coaches, and it moved then into the sports world.
But Dr. Sato really cut his teeth with all this with the cardiac rehab piece. And what they would do is the patients would come in after having a stent put in and at University of Tokyo Hospital, they put them in a bed. The next day after the surgery, they would put a KAATSU leg band. They would start with just one KAATSU leg band and they would exercise the heart.
Think of something called ischemic training. And they would exercise the heart by just putting this band on and doing very, very gradual KAATSU cycles, just a little bit of pressure. And the heart’s not going to pump faster, but you’re forcing the heart perfusion to go up. You’re forcing the heart to pump harder when the band inflates. And that was kind of the gist of all the cardiac rehab studies they did.
And they looked at all kinds of aspects of what was happening, but fascinating. And that’s where it really all started, even though he started playing with this stuff in the seventies. Awesome. Thanks. Yeah. So let’s get into some fun stuff about this. And that is how is KAATSU used for exercise training mostly in the resistance training space? And what is the result to the muscle versus conventional resistance training and frequency?
If you want to speak to that and how KAATSU is different and how that also impacts chances of injury and treating injury also with KAATSU. So that’s kind of a big little topic there, but talking about how you use it for resistance training and the differences between this conventional and frequency. Yeah, good point, Steven. So traditional resistance training, let’s just talk about traditional hypertrophy training, right?
80%, one rep max, you go to failure, you go close to failure, you literally physically tear down muscle fiber. And then you rest that muscle afterwards. And you let the protein synthesis play out. The muscle comes back repaired and stronger and bigger if that’s what you’re after hypertrophy.
With KAATSU, instead of 80% one rep max, we only need about 20%. Some of the literature says 30%, some says 10. When I do things in my backyard, I shoot right around for that 20%, one rep max. That doesn’t sound like much weight. Let’s just say you max in some movement at 100 pounds. Well, with KAATSU, running in this cycle mode, you just put on 20 pounds instead of 100.
And what happens is very quickly you get a lactate response and it starts to feel like a hundred pounds. And then it starts to feel heavier than 100 pounds. So what’s really cool about this is your brain and your body react to that hormonally. The hormonal reaction and the response and the metabolic response is as if you are going very, very heavy.
But the reality is you’re putting almost no strain on that muscle. And because you’re not putting a heavy load, you’re not actually tearing muscle fiber. And because you’re not tearing fibers, you don’t get an inflammation response. So you can do that movement again an hour later. This is why people that do KAATSU on a regular basis, you will see them work the same muscle groups every day, no problem.
There’s no need to rest the muscle groups because there’s no inflammation response. There’s no tearing of muscle fibers. It’s why Dr. Sato, and actually for your show notes, I’ll send you a great picture of Dr. Sato taken on his 75th birthday. I mean, it’s crazy. The guy looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean, he looks like a bodybuilder. He’s all about muscle hypertrophy. But at 75 years old, he doesn’t lift weight.
Instead of adding weight, he adds pressure. And he does those same movements every day. Sometimes he’ll do them twice in a day. So it’s a very different approach to working out. If you’re not after bulk and hypertrophy, it’s also a good way to increase your cardio, what’s called your VO2 max and your aerobic capacity.
We have several studies showing just doing the cycles and very light resistance, very easy movement, like walking on a treadmill. We see aerobic capacity go up in VO2 max and VO2 reserve. And that’s not even getting into the recovery stuff that KAATSU can do. We can go down that road too, if you want. But did that answer your question? We will.
So as far as the outcome, so two things. How long would a would a good training, you know, minimum effective dose length of a training session? And what’s the outcome of that training session to the muscles versus that normal teardown to get to hypertrophy? What do you get as a result of that KAATSU training and how long the length of the training would be, would be, you know, typical? So I’ll answer that question with my morning routine ’cause I like to work out in the mornings.
So I’ll wake up, I’ll put KAATSU on in cycle mode while I’m making some coffee and doing some stuff in the kitchen. Then I’ll go into my office, stand up desk, and I’ll do emails. Again, I’m still in the KAATSU cycle mode. All of that time, you are exercising everything distal of the bands. You’re engorging tissue and relaxing, gorging and relaxing.
But it’s all passive, it’s all passive use. I’m not really exercising, but I am moving. So you feel it when you’re doing these things. You’re just typing on a keyboard. You definitely feel it. But after I’ve done about a half hour of emails, I go in the backyard, I got some Therabands, I got some TRX, I got some really lightweights, a couple battle ropes, not a whole lot of equipment. And what I do have is really light resistance and lightweight.
I’ll go in the backyard and instead of running in cycle modes, I’ll put this device in constant mode. So that’s another mode. You can pick a pressure and have it stay at that pressure. You don’t have to do it that way. That’s pretty aggressive, but that’s what I like to do. So I’ll go in the back. After I’ve been doing cycles for a good 40 minutes, I’ll go in the backyard, I’ll put it in constant mode, and then I’ll do some seemingly very, very easy movements.
But with the bands on in that constant mode, kind of trapping all those metabolites inside the tissue, everything gets super hard very quickly. And I just do very basic movements, but you’re working your whole body because this is a systemic response. Think about the way blood perfusion works.
If you have these leg bands on, and you’re running through cycles of pressure, or you’re running them at constant pressure, regardless, while the bands have air in them and they’re pressurized, because your perfusion has to go up, you’re pushing blood much harder into your legs, but you’re pushing blood much harder everywhere.
So think of retina blood flow, subcutaneous forehead, blood-brain barrier, everywhere where blood goes. Think internal. You’re improving blood flow everywhere. So there’s a systemic improvement to blood flow when you’re doing KAATSU. That is really what a lot of the researchers find fascinating with this stuff. And it’s why the IOC has taken it on as a recovery device for the governing bodies for Olympic athletes.
Wow. Well, can I say something real quick? I don’t think Fernando, go. I don’t think we acknowledged the holiday today. And you just talked about, and you just talked about blood flow. Yep. Happy Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. Right here. That was the first thing I was supposed to mention. I didn’t even read it. Look at that. Good.
Thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Teamwork, teamwork. So blood flow, well, it was more of a joke, Valentine’s Day, blood flow to go to the areas that we use during Valentine’s Day. However, it can be serious, right? Yeah. Increased blood flow. Increased blood flow everywhere. Yeah, Dr.
Sato calls it a, actually, Dr. Nakajima calls it, and I’ll tell you who he is, a natural vasodilator for the body, a natural vasodilator for the body. So now think of somebody struggling with ED that’s on meds. This is a non-invasive, non-drug way to improve blood flow everywhere. And Dr. Nakajima is a fascinating guy.
He is the guy that built that cardiac rehab study with Dr. Sato, and he’s the former cardiologist to the emperor of Japan. So formerly the number one cardiologist in the country. And the studies that Nakajima’s done with KAATSU are just fascinating, fascinating. But yes, systemic blood flow natural vasodilator throughout the body.
Okay, so more specifically for those that maybe didn’t get my bad joke, this will help with erectile functioning or defunctioning. Yes, yes. Bingo. So now we’re going to have a whole bunch of purchases for ED, not optimal health. All right, so John, the other thing we didn’t get into there, which is always the thing when, you know, people look into the uses of KAATSU, so we have the cycling mode, which, you know, I’ve got my hoses on, it’s just running through these cycles while I’m doing normal activities.
And then you have the option to pressurize, unhook from these. It holds the pressure and you do workouts and sets. For those that end up acquiring this or want to look into it more, how many sets or how long would you go without releasing the pressure if you go at the pressurized route for working out and doing sets? And again, much lighter weight, you’re looking at 20% of a one rep max. And, and again, I can tell you from experience, it feels like you’re doing, you know, five times, whatever you’re doing as far as weight.
That’s part of the point of this whole thing, because it prevents injury. Like, I’m at the, I’m 55 years old. Now I’m tired of doing deadlifts and squats with a ton of weight and get, even though it’s very, very rare, inevitably, at some point, something happens where I tweak something, very unlikely that that’s ever going to happen with KAATSU. Not only is it unlikely, but John, as you can profess, you use this as a rehabilitation device for if you do get injuries doing other stuff. But on the workout side, if you do go pressurized, how many sets or how long would you go before you, like, repressurize and release that?
So this, this device, when you have it set up in constant mode, it will shut off at 10 minutes. We used to say 10 minutes for arms, 20 minutes for legs. Now we just say 10 minutes. And we figure if the device shuts off at 10 minutes and they start again for another 10 minutes, that’s fine. As long as that band is not pressurized longer than 10 minutes.
So to answer your question, Steven, yeah, if you’ve had it pressurized and on for 10 minutes, now again, not a tourniquet, you’re still going to have blood flow, so it’s safe, but it’s just that it gets really uncomfortable if you even make it to 10 minutes. When you look at the research, the prescribed sets that are set up for the research, they developed it that way to make it very standardized throughout all the experimental groups and control groups.
And the standardized set regime is first set 30, rest for 20, 30 seconds, second set 15, third set 15, fourth set, whatever you got left. What Dr. Sato would tell you is when you’re doing KAATSU, it is so different for every single person. Everyone reacts to this stuff differently. In general, your first set, you just go till you start to feel fatigued and take a very short rest.
And then the next set, go again, but slow the reps down a little bit. Each set, slow the reps down a little bit and go until you start to get that lactate, that fatigue. And then you just keep slowing it down as you go to the, and then let’s say the fourth set is what you’re going to use is your last set. You’re just doing a very, like a super slow movement.
And it’s weird with KAATSU, because you’re not pushing heavy weight, you don’t ever really get to failure, but you get right there. You get right there very easily, and you just work through that until your comfort level, you know, whatever you can handle. And then you stop. So no more than 10 minutes, please, in the constant pressure.
And if you do untether like Stephen was talking about, you should watch your stopwatch and make sure you’re depressurizing after 10 minutes. So you can run constant mode connected, you can stay connected, or you can do what you said, Steven, you can unhook. And I like unhooking because in that mode, it’s waterproof. So these are neoprene.
You can go into pool with them and you want to talk about a good full body multi-joint workout. Just go in a pool and do some like water aerobic, some of those goofy moves in the water. And it’s crazy. It’s crazy. But yeah, 10 minutes. Wonderful. It’s grueling. Go ahead, Fernando. Did you want to talk about this or not worth it? Sure, yeah. No, it’s okay.
That’s okay. I definitely want to talk about it because you’re wearing them. Well, I’m wearing it because you reminded me, I had forgotten about them. Yeah, there’s another company called like Smart Cuffs or something like that, or I can’t remember. Yep, there are a lot of companies. There’s about 20 of them. One of the companies, Fernando’s wearing right there. And those bands are not elastic. They’re rigid.
And the company that makes those, you pump it up to a certain pressure and then you unhook and you have a very high, you have this pressure and the bands are rigid. In my opinion, it’s very uncomfortable. But it is another option if you’re a young, in shape individual.
Now, if you’re older, and this is Dr. Sato’s perspective, if you’re older, you definitely do not want, number one, constant pressure. And by older, I mean over 65 is kind of our magic number. If you’re older, you don’t want constant pressure. You certainly don’t want a rigid cuff. And our oldest client that we work with is she was 104 years old.
And it’s very, very gradual. I’ve been doing cycles this whole time talking with you guys. It’s very comfortable. I’m not exercising, so I’m not getting that lactate response, but I’m improving my circulation. I’m improving vascular elasticity by just simply stretching and relaxing vascular tissue.
But yeah, the ones you’re wearing Fernando, you can untether and you can go into water with those, but you cannot do any of the very valuable cycles, the Jiyatsu of KAATSU. That is just one very small thing that KAATSU does, that constant pressure. The more valuable thing that KAATSU does is that constant release and then a little bit higher pressure and a release and a little higher pressure over and over again.
Do you guys want to talk about recovery? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. Okay. And after we talk about recovery, John, if we can, if you can answer the question, does this help with muscle, like growing muscles? And you don’t have to answer. Absolutely. That’s with the muscle hypertrophy. That’s the growing of muscles with very low weight.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it doesn’t matter how old you are, because that lady, the 104-year-old, she was bedridden. She had severe dementia. When Dr. Satos started doing KAATSU Honor, they did an MRI cross-section of both quadriceps muscles. And after four months of KAATSU, a couple times a week, they didn’t even do it on her that often, but they did regular KAATSU on her.
After four months, when they remeasured that MRA cross section, you didn’t even need to measure it. You could see in one picture, it was like this, the next picture, it was like this. Taken, not right after doing it, taken in the morning, you know, homeostasis, nothing, just absolutely incredible. And she was 104 years old. And the videos we have of her being out of bed, exercising, doing quarter squats with KAATSU.
I mean, it’s just beautiful at 104 years old. But you could never do that with those rigid cuffs. It’d be too dangerous. So recovery. If every household in the US had one of those, this tool that they could share with the family, what would happen, say, five years in the future in healthcare?
Well, we know that A1C numbers do go down with regular use of KAATSU. We have a study out of Japan showing that. Just that alone could be a game changer for type two diabetes. So that’s one piece. But just think about, when you’re talking about a type two diabetic, the biggest issue is compliance, right?
Getting them to agree to do any kind of exercise is often very hard. Getting them to try and change their diet very hard. But if you can tell somebody, “Hey, look, all I want you, I don’t want you to change anything. If all you want to do is you want to watch your soap opera in the afternoon, all I’m asking you to do is put this on every day while you’re doing your email, while you’re doing your Instagram, while you’re watching your soap opera, and let this thing run cycles in an automated fashion over and over again while you’re sitting on your couch.
Just that alone would make a measurable impact. You’d see sarcopenia, big changes with sarcopenia, which means you would see the older population in the country lose some of that frailty issue that a lot of people struggle with just by simply gaining lean muscle mass and gaining lean tissue in their body and creating, you know, if you can have muscle on, you know, if you can have muscle and strength with your legs to help prevent a trip or fall and you’re 90 years old, that’s huge.
That’s a big deal. It’s going to help you because, you know, once you break your hip, you know, for a lot of people in their eighties and nineties, it’s all downhill from there. So everyone listening and watching should get at least one to give to their parents if they have their parents alive as a way of a gift to have parents start creating new lean muscle mass. Yeah, I would agree.
I mean, that’d be great. That’d be great for everybody. But I’ll tell you as a guy with my parents in their eighties and they use KAATSU every day, they swear by it. It kind of becomes addictive. Where are your parents? Bring them on the show. Come on. Oh man, that would be great. That would be great. My mom had two total knee replacements and used KAATSU as prehab before the surgery and as rehab after the surgery and was skiing three months after the last surgery, downhill skiing.
I got great video of her three months after her surgery. And how young is she? How young is she? She was 79 at the time. Yeah. And three months after the knee surgery, she’s skiing. And not just knee surgery, total knee replacement. Titanium, you know, cut off the bottom of your femur and the top of the tibia plateau and put in titanium and metal. Yeah, and John, just your story.
So can you speak a little bit to the whole functionality of the rehab, how that works and what KAATSU is actually doing to speed up the recovery for people in rehabilitation. And then you also said in recovery also, because they kind of kind of go together to a degree. But if you could explain that whole process and why KAATSU works so great with that, it’d be great for our team. Yeah, yeah. So the orthopedic rehab piece, when I say recovery, I’m talking about recovery after intense work or hard work.
So a way to flush metabolic waste out of the tissue. But on the orthopedic rehab, yeah, it’s great because there’ll be these existing rehab movements that you’re expected to do that your PT will walk you through. And you add KAATSU to those movements. And then what happens? Let’s just say it’s a, you know, like this is a typical movement.
If you can’t see, I have my elbow at 90 degrees and I’m going from straight up to straight down in front of me. And if I had a Theraband, I would just be pulling a very, very light, like two or three pound resistance. That is a typical rehab protocol movement for rotator cuff repair. When you add KAATSU to that movement, that movement now becomes much harder.
So you’ll see the nitric oxide biomarker. If you did blood markers on somebody while they’re doing ortho rehab, you’ll see the NO numbers. Nitric oxide go up significantly. Right away, you’ll see VEGF, vascular endothelial growth factor. That’s a fertilizer for capillary beds. You’ll see that go up significantly.
All these hormonal responses that you see that can be mapped and measured with intense exercise, you can replicate those with very little to no weight, which is incredible. Because when your body’s creating all that metabolic response to heavy weight, but you’re not really pushing heavy weight, those all become, those all help with rapid healing and rapid rehabilitation.
And that’s why in the military, the world I came out of, the special operations community, that’s why, that’s the primary reason the guys are using this. It’s to help with rapid rehabilitation, getting the guys back in the fight as fast as possible. So for example, in clinic after surgery, they’ll use our clinical model, which I don’t have one here, but when they go on training trips and they go on deployments and they’re still not 100%, they actually take this with them.
They check it out from the PT office and they take it on deployment and they take it on training trips. ‘Cause it’s a great way to get after it with very little equipment. You don’t need much. If all you have is some Therabands and a TRX, that’s all you need. ‘Cause just body weight movement and very light resistance movement. Any kind of ortho rehab it’s going to help with.
We work a lot with residual limb issues. Anybody with an amputation that’s dealing with residual limb discomfort, pain, phantom limb pain, that sort of thing. As long as they have not had nerve ablation done, which is the burning of the nerve endings, as long as they have not had that done, we have very, very good outcomes with neuropathic pain and residual limb pain.
So like phantom limb pain, which that stuff’s crazy. I mean, one of my friends at, I can’t tell you the name of the command, but it’s one of this nation’s tier one commands. He has an above-the-knee amputation. He’s had it for 17 years. So for 17 years, he’s been on opioids and drinking himself to sleep at night.
When he was introduced to this, his residual limb discomfort and phantom limb pain, it didn’t go away, but it decreased by 80%, 80%, no drugs, noninvasive, phantom limb pain decreased by 80%. So he doesn’t drink himself to sleep anymore. He does KAATSU cycles on the amputation.
He wears it really high in the groin and the amputation is pretty high up, but he’s still about three inches above the stump. But that’s a whole ‘nother world with KAATSU, the neuropathic pain. The last thing that I think is kind of exciting in the athletic world is recovery.
We have a lot of Olympic governing bodies and countries that are using KAATSU as a recovery modality. And the idea is if you think of somebody that just, we had a lot in Tokyo, we had a lot of runners, sprinters, and middle distance. After the event, they would go lay on the massage table and do passive KAATSU cycles on their legs.
And the reason they would do that is during the pressure phase, when all that tissue is dilating and stretched open, perfusion goes up. The heart is beating harder to keep blood moving past the bands that are really tight. And then when the bands release, you have all these pathways open, perfusion’s up, and you get this almost a flushing sensation to help move that metabolic waste out of that tissue, out of those muscles that had just recently worked really hard.
So a lot of big names in the swimming world, track and field, and we’re trying to grow that. But the recovery piece is phenomenal. Wow, fascinating. Good stuff. So you’ve got the workout component, you’ve got the recovery component, you have the rehab component, and you have the safety component, because using this stuff, I would imagine it’s very, very difficult to hurt yourself while using KAATSU, since you’re working with either no weight or, you know, 20 or 30% of what your max would be in doing stuff.
When I do pull ups, I’m using a fricking medium size band to do pull-ups, which is probably like no weight. But man, it feels like it’s my body weight plus weight. Right. Right, right, right. That’s good. John, let’s say, if half of the world start using this thing, I’m thinking here.
Could this affect the way humans or the human body, say 500 years from now, heals itself because, you know, after a few generations, it understands that, you know, instead of having like a tool on the body to stimulate certain things, the cardiac, the way the heart is working or pumping blood, that then the body, 500 years from now, the human body, the new babies would be born with that new information.
I don’t know. That’s way out of my knowledge-based comfort zone, but I mean, I would like, I would like to think so. I don’t know. It would put you out of business, but I think it’ll be. Yeah, there you go. You know what? If that happens 50 generations down down the road, that’s good, man. I’m all about.
So we are, so Fernando, we are going to offer a coupon code for people that want to look into KAATSU. I will mention we didn’t cover it, but you saw we have the armbands. There’s also leg bands as John showed one. You don’t use all four bands at the same time. The kit’s going to come with two tubes purposefully. You use either the armbands or the leg bands, but not both at the same time for the reason that you don’t need to. And it’s not going to give you an exponential greater return than using the two.
Correct, John? I mean, I don’t want to step on your toes, but that was a question I had when I get my kit and I go, hey, I’ve only got two tubes, but I’ve got four bands. What do I do? Yeah, we have some people out there. I won’t mention any names, Ben Greenfield, who are using all four limbs untethered at the same time. But you know what? In all honesty, Ben is young, he’s fit, he’s in incredible shape. He can handle that.
But I mean, what happens when we have a 75-year-old that tries to put all four? I mean, you know, it’s just a recipe for disaster. So we really try to emphasize just both armbands or both leg bands. And the only exception to that would be, Steven, actually, you had the plug. Do you have your device? You had the plug in yours. Yeah, I was getting ready to mention that because if you’ve got, if you’re rehabilitating a certain part of the body, you may only want to use one of the bands.
And in that scenario, it comes with this little plug that I will show to our studio audience. So those of you that there’s two holes where the tubes plug in, but there’s a little plug that you can put in. You can see that. Yep. Yep. Put that into one of these holes here. So then you only have the one tube in.. in front of your chest, in front of your chest. There you go. There you go. Yeah, but closer to the camera.
There we go. Yeah. Like that. Yep. That’s perfect. To be coming out this side, but not this side. This side’s plugged purposefully for rehabbing one specific part of the body, let’s say, right, John? I mean, exactly, exactly. So if you have, let’s say you have a wound that you’re trying to heal, or let’s say you have connective tissue damage in an ankle or whatnot.
If there’s an acute injury, we would suggest only using the KAATSU band on that limb so that your body’s reaction to the VEGF, NO, all these hormonal responses, your body’s reaction is focused on that limb, the limb that’s injured. And that’s why we included the plug so you could do a single, single limb. Yeah, especially if you’re injured.
Yeah. Awesome. Well, this has been great, guys. Amazing. I have so many more questions that I wanted to ask and we running out of time here. Respect everyone’s time. Thanks, Captain John, for what you’re doing, what you’re bringing to the world. And thanks, Stephen, for, you know, inviting Captain John to come and talk with us today. Right on.
Fernando, I really appreciate you letting me come on. And Steven, thank you very much for the invite. I’m looking forward to our next coffee, brother. Yeah, let’s set that up. I’m going to get a hold of you. It’s over because I got a couple of intros for you too. That’d be great. Awesome. And remember, we have the coupon code super connector with a K, S-U-P-E-R- K-O-N-N-E-C-T-O-R. We’ll give you 10% off KAATSU Kit. We’ll have that information in the show notes. Thanks for providing that for our listeners and viewers, John.
Really appreciate it. And no problem. With that, you know until the next episode, any last words of wisdom you’d like to share, John, with our audience? Just that when it comes to this stuff, there is a pain. How could I say? I had a lot of spinal. I had a parachute accident in 1999. I have a lot of spinal issues coming from that. What I will say is since I started working for KAATSU and doing it religiously every single day, I’ve never had that pain response spike like it was six, seven years ago. So is that all from KAATSU? No, probably not. I think I’m eating a little better. I’m sleeping a little better.
And I don’t have the stress of the deployments and the unpredictability in my life of being in the SEAL teams. But there’s definitely a neuropathic pain component. And when you talk to the amputees who see phantom limb pain dissipate and are able to come off some of their opioids and now start thinking about the veteran population, the first responder population, the suicide epidemic that we’re dealing with and all the drugs that are associated with that.
That’s really where my passion is for this is to really help those people come out of, get out of some of their pain. I know it worked for me. It’s working for a lot of my teammates. If you’re dealing with pain, this is something to try. Beautiful. I love it. It’s good encouragement. There is, there are a ton of people dealing with pain. I talk to you all the time and it blows my mind how they even get through life. I mean, I went through a ton of pain by my accident.
But, you know, even since then, I just, I couldn’t imagine dealing with that chronically your whole life, which a lot of people, you know, people get in a car accident at five miles an hour and their back’s ruined and they have pain the rest of their life. I mean, it’s an ungodly neuropathy, like you talked about, the diabetic foot pain and neuropathy that people get, just all kind of stuff, even, you know, skin disorders with pain. And I mean, all kind of, it’s incredible what people are dealing with a lot from the toxicity we’re taking on the environment, but also from little things that just add up and cascade throughout people’s lives that they never really get to the root cause and they hit it from the other end with painkillers that does nothing for them except get them addicted to something and then lead them into, you know, further depression.
So I’m really grateful for having the KAATSU device using it. I wouldn’t say religiously, but after this podcast, I’m more and more pumped up to use it religiously just for all the. And it’s simple. You can use it in your home. You don’t have to go to the gym necessarily. I’ve got a great little setup here now with bands and a pull up bar that I go out there and do a 20 minute deal and I’m done. I run the cycles in my house. So thank you for that. Awesome. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, John. Thank you, everyone, for listening to me in, comment, share, like, subscribe. Till next time, bye for now.