Dave Carlson Talks KAATSU (Part 2)

Episode Description

Coach Dave Carlson gives daily shelter-in-place workouts to 15-16 year old freshmen and sophomores from Los Alamitos High School in Southern California. They all log in via their laptops or smartphones and are able to hear and see each other and their coach online.

All high schools are closed and all sports practices and competitions are cancelled throughout Southern California in an attempt to limit the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) to the local population – a strategy that is becoming more and more widespread throughout the United States and many other countries.

Carlson gives his student-athletes a series of upper body sets, lower body sets, core sets, and a technical skill workout – virtually as they participate on their smartphones and laptops. The entire workout is enhanced with KAATSU equipment in order to make their workouts as effective and efficient as possible.

The students gather online in the early afternoon and have 5 minutes to catch up with together as they see everyone on the Google Meet platform. They laugh, share stories, and make each other smile.

The virtual shelter-in-place workouts start with stretching exercises. Then Carlson goes through a series of upper body sets to strengthen the forearms, biceps, triceps, deltoids and lats. The entire workouts are done with either their KAATSU arm bands or KAATSU leg bands on.

He also does some core work including balancing exercises and lower body exercises including squats and lunges with the KAATSU bands.

He even adds in technical skills sets that teach the fundamentals of shooting a water polo ball. The students end the shelter-in-home workouts by themselves, laughing and enjoying each other’s company—virtually—with no end in sight as they adapt to their new normal.

Check out and order a KAATSU support system and keep in the fight.

Transcript

One girl, I forget which girl, saw the girl that was doing the KAATSU warm down. She said, you know so-and-so, she just grabbed the KAATSU band and she did that. I don’t think that’s a proper warm down. And I said, she got a better warm down than you did. And you swam for like 20 minutes over there. I was watching you. And so I said, why don’t you just try this? Try doing that. And we explained the medical rationale behind it. One club swimmer went over and did the flutter kick for 20 seconds after a swim, flutter kick with a skull 25 yard sprint, get out of the water, came back.

She did the pneumatic ones on her arms while she was sitting there, came back. I believe you were there and the swimmer came back and went, oh my gosh, my legs normally feel like jelly after that swim. And now I don’t feel like that. I feel like I’m ready to race again. Like my legs are ready to go right now. And other club swimmers were there and they said, well, can I try that? Yeah, there’s plenty of bands over there. You’re welcome to do it. So then another girl went and I said, well, how did that feel? And she said, well, this is weird. My legs usually feel fatigued after a race, but now I’m ready to swim my next race.

So sure enough, they’re all doing these warm downs. Our second and last swim meet before our swim season got cut short was at Long Beach Wilson. And at the Long Beach Wilson meet, I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t every single girl warming down with the KAATSU bands. And these are club swimmers that didn’t go through the water polo season. And first time they used in the water KAATSU. We’ve lifted with the KAATSU bands with the swim girls since the fall. But they never actually got a chance to use them in the water, and then we use them for the first time at the Long Beach Poly meet. And it took one meet to convert 17 year-round club swimmers into, “I would like to warm down using the KAATSU bands.” Yeah. And that’s very impressive, very impressive.

Statements made in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. For more information about KAATSU and KAATSU products, visit KAATSUglobal.com. That’s K-A-A-T-S-U-Global.com.

Wow, okay, that’s good. And just for the audience, what ages are you talking about here? ‘Cause you have a relatively young team. Yeah, so typically I call varsity high school 18 and under. It is 18 and under, and that’s the way that my team thinks. Technically, there are mostly 14, 15, and 16-year-olds on my team, and the minority are 16-year-olds. Yeah. And then you also use this in dry land training.

Yes. Yeah, and can you explain how you use it there? Before we actually did the water workout, I experimented with this in the weight room. And honestly, what sold me was talking to your military friends, talking to two of the Navy SEALs that use these. If they’re telling me that you can do this without weights, and these guys are veterans that have been deployed, those guys, they carry a lot of weight with them. When you hear a Navy SEAL go, if you put these on, you don’t necessarily have to lift weight. You know, I use it and I’m a Navy SEAL or a retired Navy SEAL. I go, “Okay, that’s good enough for me. I’ll try it.”

And so I took the girls into the weight room and we did arm workout and the arm workout was about seven minutes. I timed it. It came out to like seven minutes. And then we did a leg workout, and I want to say the leg workout was about 10 minutes. So we would pair up like Navy SEALs, I like to use swim buddies. So everybody has a swim buddy, which is a lifting partner. So one person spots and one person lifts, and you move together wherever you go. So I’d have four girls at one station, which would be a squat rack, and then they’d move off in an area for lunges. We’re working on squats and lunges are the two exercises we’re doing. So at the squat rack, there’s one girl that’s doing the squats, and then the second girl is just there to encourage her and to spot her technique. At the other station behind them, another pair of swim buddies. One is doing lunges and the other one is there to encourage them and get them through it and to spot their technique.

And so on the first day we did the squats, girls went to go grab the weight and start grabbing plates to put on. And I said, no, no, no, we’re not going to use any plates. We’re just going to do the squats just with the bar. And we don’t even need the bar. We’re just using the bar because you’re used to having the bar on your back. But you don’t even have to use the bar if you don’t want to. ‘Cause we did have rookies that had never done it. I go, “Some of you guys that haven’t done squats yet, I just want to try this out with the KAATSU. Just do like the skiers. So instead of doing the squat with the bar, you’re just going to put your hands out. We’re going to do good technique.

You were the one that actually gave me the exercise. It said that if you do the oscillating squats where you squat and then you come up and you don’t come all the way up, you’re just constantly moving. So you move down a little bit below 90 degrees, 90 or a little bit below, and you move up maybe 45 degrees and you just constantly are going at about this pace. We did this for 30 seconds on, 15 seconds off to switch, and then 30 seconds on, then 15 seconds off. Well, if you do the math there, you’re doing 30 seconds of work and you have a minute rest.

We did that twice through, and then we rotated, and then you did the lunges. On the lunges, so I’m reading out the time, you would go 14 seconds oscillating lunge on your right leg, and then 14 second oscillating lunge on your left leg. Give or take maybe a second and a half a second how long it takes to switch. So I go 12, 13, 14, at 14, the girls that are doing lunges switch. The girls that are doing squats just power through it.

We went through once, and then we went through a second time, and then we went through a third time, and they told me that was the most difficult workout that they’ve ever done. And I looked at my watch and it was less than 10 minutes. And we stretched after. And we go through a band warm-up that I think one of the things that I forgot to mention is part of my, as a coach, in anything I do, I want to always make sure that I’m studying and getting better. So something that I do on a regular basis is I make my way to the collegiate practices. They let me go into the weight room. And two of the weight rooms that I got to spend some time in was the Cal men’s water polo team in their weight room and the USC men’s water polo team in their weight room. You know, you’re gonna need to know how to do squats, lunges, power cleans. And so one of the things that I picked up was the warm-up that the Cal team and the USC team are doing. They’re doing them with rubber bands. And so I picked some of these exercises and we use them to warm up. And it’s about an eight minute warm up with these rubber bands. And we started using actually the armbands at first while we’re doing the rubber bands stretching. And then we take those off, we put the legs on. For the leg workout, then we put the arm ones on again for the arm workout. But then we stretch at the end, and from the time the girls start warming up to the time we actually exit the weight room, including stretching, warm up. Lower body exercises, upper body exercises is 30 minutes. Wow, wow. I was spending an hour.

I was spending an hour and 20 minutes in the weight room for years. Been spending a brief, hard workout, maybe 50 minutes, 5-0. But doing actually less than 20 minutes of work and then having girls tell me, as we’re walking out of the weight room, last year, we were in the weight room for an hour and 20, I’ve never experienced anything this difficult before. This is the most difficult workout you have ever put us through. And just hearing that from them and just going, wow, I can get a great lifting session done in 30 minutes. And then I was getting feedback the next day from them on recovery. Like, how are your legs feeling? How are your arms feeling? And they said, you know, they’re sore, you know, like they normally are, but it’s a different type of sore. It’s hard to explain. Is it a better sore? Is it a worse sore? How do you feel? They go, it’s just not, it’s not a bad sore. It’s just like you can feel that it’s sore, but it’s different.

And I think you explained to me that the difference is that typical weight room workout, what a coach wants to do is you get in there, you lift weights, you tear muscle fibers. Tearing the muscle fibers, I believe you have told me, is signaled to have the growth hormone, which is released, go to that specific muscle, repair the muscle fibers, and then build muscle on top of that. So something that a typical coach wants to do is to break down in the weight room and tear muscle fibers in order to build up muscle there to get the growth hormone to go there and build up your muscles. And I believe with the KAATSU bands, since we’re not using any weights, that we’ve bypassed the tearing the muscle fibers. So when the growth hormone is released and it gets to those muscles, there’s no muscle fibers to repair. And so it just goes straight into building muscle. And the nice thing is the soreness that I would tell my athletes for over a decade is that, you know, it’s good that you’re sore the next day. It’s good when you leave the weight room. That’s muscle fibers teary. How is that a good thing? Well, the growth hormone goes there and it repairs muscle fibers, builds the muscle back up. Now we bypass the terry and the muscle fibers. And I just think that that is a, I mean, it just seems medically like it’s a great thing also. Yeah. And then you also use it before games, which is really quite innovative.

Can you explain how you use them before the games? Yeah, so one of the things that I’ve learned, especially as a male coaching girls, since I don’t think like them, is getting feedback, as much feedback as possible. And so it’s important for me when I’m trying something new to get honest feedback. Better, worse, how do you feel? Do you like this? Do you not like this? What’s good about it? What’s bad about it? And so I decided I would try this in the off season. And we decided to warm up with them on because it gets the blood flowing. And so we warmed up when we did the leg ones, and we tried leg ones one day. I did arm ones one day. And the girls told me when they did the armbands and they did a few sprints with the armbands, it felt like when they passed, they didn’t have to pass as long for their arms to feel warmed up, which is a good thing because you only have so much time to warm up before a game.

So when they’re telling me that when we wear the armbands, it feels good. When we start passing, it feels like my arm is already warmed up. Or it warms up faster, right? It feels warmed up right now, so I don’t have to pass as much. And then when we did the leg ones, they told me we really like doing the leg ones in the warm-up because our legs feel like they’re ready to go. They warm up so much faster, like our legs are ready to go. So every game, there’s not a game where we don’t use them. Even if we have a tournament, we have two games, I’ve experimented with that too.

So in other words, you’re getting to the pool, you’re using KAATSU in the warm-up, they’re playing a full game, they’ve got to rest in between, then you’re going back to KAATSU before the second game, during the full game, and then you’re warming down with them also? Yeah, that’s the next thing. I would have warmed down with them anyways after what I learned about them first. I don’t know necessarily. I tried warming up with them. The feedback from the girls is that they loved it. I don’t want to carry 20 of those KAATSU bands. So I wasn’t really happy that they wanted to actually warm up before the second game, but you know they said, yeah, can you bring leg bands in? We want to warm up before the second game. Even though we have 20 minutes, we want to warm up with the KAATSU bands on to get our legs ready to go. But after games warming down, sitting down with you and learning what is actually happening with the body, I was planning on using these KAATSUs to warm down. If I used them for anything and I had to pick one thing to use them for, I would use them warming down after a game. And so you can correct me if I say something that’s incorrect, but right after a game or right after any kind of tough exercise, like a swim, a swim race. You’ve got lactic acid that’s built up all inside your body. And so a typical thing that I’ve learned is you want to keep moving in order to allow the lactic acid to drain out of your muscles. ‘Cause the lactic acid is what causes muscle fatigue, and the lactic acid is, you don’t want lactic acid in your muscles. You want it out as soon as possible.

The KAATSU Cycle 2.0 is launched. After years of research, design modifications, software changes, user feedback, and utilization of metabolite testing results, the next generation KAATSU Cycle 2.0 is now available. It is more compact and quieter. It is more capable and more powerful than the first generation KAATSU Nano and KAATSU Master products. The KAATSU Cycle 2.0 enables exercise, recovery, and rehabilitation anywhere, anytime, by anyone. The Ultra Compact Ultra Light Durable Unit offers the KAATSU cycle and KAATSU master training modes and utilizes precise software controlled limb pressure for both your arms and legs. The KAATSU Cycle 2.0 includes four KAATSU airbands for both arms and legs. A rechargeable battery with a USB-C charger. The pneumatic elastic bands can be disconnected from the KAATSU Cycle 2.0 unit and are waterproof for use in the pool. Based on the original KAATSU know-how and U.S. patent number 9775619 compression and decompression control system and vascular strengthening method. The KAATSU Cycle 2.0 can do the following. It can tone muscle without weights. It’s convenient. It can be done anywhere, anytime, by anyone. It offers access to the KAATSU Performance Database. It offers six preset KAATSU cycle levels. It can efficiently and effectively improve speed, stamina and strength. The KAATSU Cycle 2.0 is an incredible time-saver. It can improve circulation. It enables faster recovery. It enables greater range of motion for those rehabilitating and recovering from injuries and surgeries. It is reimbursable with various CPT codes. And the KAATSU Cycle 2.0 offers customizable KAATSU pressures. KAATSU, profoundly simple and simply profound. Statements made in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. For more information about KAATSU and KAATSU products, visit KAATSUglobal. com. That’s K-A-A-T-S-U-Global.com.

Well, something that you brought to my attention, and I was like, I never really thought of that, is if you are doing exercise really fast, you’re doing something hard, then the capillaries are what bring the blood to the muscles. And the capillaries also, I believe, pull the lactic acid out, correct? Yeah, you got the big arteries, you got the veins, and then you got the very, very small capillaries, which are ubiquitous in the human body. They’re all over the place. We never think about them, but they’re all over the place. So there’s a lot of lactate in those capillary beds. So go ahead. So you had actually brought this up. So I thought, instead of when you’re warming down, your body is going slower and maybe the capillaries aren’t really as stimulated or as filled with blood going in because you’re going slow. And so then if the capillaries are not necessarily all stimulated as much, then that’s less lactic acid going out and you’re going slow.

So the way you explained it to me is they get in and you do some sort of exercise to build up the lactic acid, but you’re also getting all the blood engorged into the legs or the arms. Well then all of the capillaries are filled with blood and they’re connected to the muscles. And then as soon as you’re done, if you just pull the KAATSU band off, it’s kind of like a dam opening up. And with all those capillaries connecting to the muscles, now all of a sudden you have like the lactic acid just flushing out all at once. It sounded medically like it made sense. It just was hard to believe until I had the girls warm down the first time. And it was after a game. And I remember it was actually at Irvine when I had them do it. I think it was Irvine when I had him do it after a game. And they flutter kicked, moved off the wall, egg beater, went back to the wall and they flutter kicked. And then they went and then egg beater and they came up. And so you’re actually doing a workout to build the lactic acid up.

And then all of a sudden I just take off the bands and they take off the bands and they just got out of the water and they went and got dressed. I actually had coaches, I remember a coach asked me, what are you doing? They need to warm down. They just had a game. Now you’re having them work out. And then they didn’t even warm down after that. They got out. I remember saying that they actually had a better warm down than your team. I don’t understand, and what are those bands? I said, they just got rid of all their lactic acid. I remember asking one of the girls going to the locker room, I go, how do your legs feel? And they said, I never forget this. They feel refreshed. After a game, they’re flutter kicking and they’re moving out and they just played a game. And then I’m having them kick and it looks like, oh, Carlson’s working. I’m even harder now after the game. And then they get out and they pull the leg bands off. And with the lactic acid all flushing out, and I asked more than one girl, and they said, “Hey, my legs are ready to play the next game.” That was something that I chose to do.

And I know for the average person like me, if this was last year and I never met you and I didn’t know what KAATSU bands were, and I saw somebody doing a hard kick set after a game and then getting out without swimming to cool down, I would think that that’s strange. But knowing the medical rationale behind it, this is how I’m warming down from now on. This is how my team is going to warm down. Yeah. Wow, I think that’s a great place to end.

I mean, you taught us about the efficiency of your workouts has improved how you’re preparing the girls before a game, during tournaments, and now, you know, feeling refreshed after four quarters of a hard game and apparently a hard warm down. I mean, that really speaks to the science. I did want to add in one other thing because I am also the swim coach. And at Los Alamidos High School, our girls’ swim team is ridiculous.

We’ve got really high-end club swimmers that go off to swim in college, that swim in the Division One CIF finals every year. We generally finish in the top 10 at the CIF Division One championships. So this swim season was cut short, but we carried 20 swimmers on varsity this year. 17 of the 20 are year-round club swimmers and the other three were varsity water polo players. Only three varsity water pole players made the varsity swim team.

Well, the swim team, we work out together three days a week and they go and they can swim with their different clubs. And then we’ve had as many as seven different clubs represented in one year. And so something typical after an event, they can swim the warm down that they usually swim year round at a swim meet. Our first swim meet this year was against Long Beach Polly. And one of the girls that is on the varsity water polo team after her event grabbed the KAATSU aqua bands, got in the water and flutter kicked and then kicked off the wall and did a flutter kick with a skull, get out and then take them off.

And you know I had brought this up to the club swimmers and one girl, I forget which girl saw the girl that was doing the KAATSU warm down and said, you know, so-and-so, she just grabbed the KAATSU band and she did that. I don’t think that’s a proper warm down. And I said, she got a better warm down than you did. And you swam for like 20 minutes over there I was watching you. And so I said, why don’t you just try this? Try doing that and we explained the medical rationale behind it. But one club swimmer went over and did the flutter kick for 20 seconds after a swim, flutter kick with a skull, 25 yard sprint, get out of the water, came back. She did the pneumatic ones on her arms while she was sitting there, came back. I believe you were there and the swimmer came back and went, oh my gosh, my legs normally feel like jelly after that swim. And now I don’t feel like that. I feel like I’m ready to race again. Like my legs are ready to go right now. And other club swimmers were there and they said, well, can I try that? Yeah, there’s plenty of bands over there. You’re welcome to do it. So then another girl went and I said, well, how did that feel? And she said, well, this is weird. My legs usually feel fatigued after a race, but now I’m ready to do my next race.

So sure enough, they’re all doing these warm downs. Our second and last swim meet before our swim season got cut short was at Long Beach Wilson. And at the Long Beach Wilson meet, I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t every single girl warming down with the KAATSU bands. And these are club swimmers that didn’t go through the water polo season and first time they used in the water KAATSU. We’ve lifted with the KAATSU bands with the swim girls since the fall. But they never actually got a chance to use them in the water. And then we use them for the first time at the Long Beach Poly meet.

And it took one meet to convert 17 year-round club swimmers into, “I would like to warm down using the KAATSU bands.” Yeah. That’s very impressive, very impressive. Anything else you’d like to add? I mean, you covered a great bit here. And I think, you know, a lot of people, seeing is believing. The coaches around you in Southern California are now believing the things that you’ve, the really innovative things that you’ve started. But is there any other tricks, secrets?

I don’t use stuff that doesn’t work. I basically am somebody that tests things out, tries something out. If it works, I go with it. And I’m skeptical about everything, and I honestly was skeptical about KAATSU. Just sounded too good to be true. When you told me not to go to the gym for two weeks, I thought you were crazy. I just didn’t think it would work. And then even hearing the military guys, even them saying it, it’s just like, I have to see it to believe it. I’m not going to believe it until I actually do it. Then you let me borrow the KAATSU unit for two weeks. And you said, I guarantee this will work. I started using the KAATSU unit, I saw immediate results. The other thing too is with injury, with recovery, is in my personal life, I had a back injury that I got in an automobile accident, and I’d been going to the chiropractor three days a week, a long time. And I haven’t gone to the chiropractor since January. I started to go less and less. I got to January. I haven’t gone to the chiropractor once.

And so on top of me using it for strength training, positioning training, as far as overall body well-being, my back feels so much better using this because of the healing hormones that get released every time you use this. And after about three weeks in, I was so sold on this. I was so fired up. I was learning so much from you because I was picking your brain every chance I get. I’d ask you, explain to me this, explain to me this, ’cause I want to explain this to people. And at some point, I think you said that I knew I’m an expert in KAATSU because I’ve learned so much from you and I’ve listened so much that you know KAATSU about as well as anybody else out there on how this works, including some of the medical people that you work with, just because of how much I’ve picked your brain about it, which is when I think I asked if I can somehow have a job with KAATSU. Since then, you’ve had me be a distributor in Southern California for you. And it’s something that’s really nice because I think everybody should have one.

And before I even began becoming a distributor, I was basically telling everybody that would listen to me like my mom had arthritis. She doesn’t use her arthritis medicine anymore. She got rid of the arthritis medicine and all she does is KAATSU. My assistant coach Jim Sprague, he was bedridden for months with a leg injury. And the little physical therapy that he was getting once a week, there was no way the atrophy was building up faster than the little lady could do the physical therapy. I mean, he was never going to get out of bed. And I was determined. I brought a KAATSU unit over to him and he felt it on day one. Fast forward months later and you ask anybody in his family and they think that this thing is a magical instrument. He’s actually walking again. All he did was the KAATSU like two or three times a day and he’s to the point where he’s walking again with a walker. So anyways, I just think if you’re a swimmer, a water pole player, if you’re an athlete, if you’re old, if you’re young, this product is something that everybody should have, whether you’re an athlete or you’re a parent of an athlete or you’re a child of an athlete.

Well, thank you very much. This is very enlightening and I wish you well and all your athletes for the next swimming and water polo season. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.

Introducing the KAATSU Cycle 2.0. KAATSU is the ultimate biohack for health, rehabilitation and recovery. Train bilaterally and untethered from the unit. Tone muscle without weights, lessening the risk of injury to joints and muscles. Improve speed, stamina and strength. Exercise, recover, and rehabilitate anytime, anywhere. Increase range of motion and promote improved circulation. Accelerate training when time is of the essence. These are just a few of the benefits of the new KAATSU Cycle 2.0. Invented in 1966 by Dr. Yoshiaki Sato of Tokyo, Japan, and protected by 47 patents. KAATSU, next-generation equipment and protocols have a unique and unprecedented safety track record with over 20 million individual KAATSU sessions in 48 countries around the globe. Backed by over 50 years of expertise, KAATSU Global is excited to introduce the latest advancement in health and wellness, the KAATSU Cycle 2.0. Fitting in the palm of your hand or in your pocket, the KAATSU Cycle 2.0 is the most advanced, most portable, easiest to use compression device in the world in combination with a precise algorithm controlled limb pressure KAATSU’s narrow elastic bands yield to muscle contractions, providing safe and effective exercise and rehabilitation for users of all ages and from all walks of life, from Olympic champions to disabled individuals. KAATSU users have a full range of motion, providing complete control and the opportunity for a wide variety of movements and training. From elite athletes and soldiers to aging baby boomers and busy executives, KAATSU Cycle 2.0 is the next generation training and rehabilitation device used around the world. KAATSU is used by the United States Department of Defense, as well as the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. KAATSU, profoundly simple and simply profound. Statements made in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. For more information about KAATSU and KAATSU products, visit KAATSUglobal.com. That’s K-A-A-T-S-U-Global.com.