Siim Land Podcast- World’s #1 Biohack for Longevity

Episode Description

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast I’m your host Siim Land and today we have two guests from KAATSU Global Steven Munatones and John Doolittle. KAATSU is a form of blood flow moderation training that can mimic heavy weightlifting with lighter loads. It’s the most researched and advanced forms of blood flow restriction training in the world. You can use it for treating injuries, recovery from exercise and improving cardiovascular health.

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

Transcript

We’re seeing that people in their eighties, nineties and hundreds are functionally because of their muscle tone, strength, stamina, et cetera, are what they are in their 40s and 50s and 60s. And if you think about this anti-aging goal, isn’t that what we’re trying to achieve? Welcome to the Sim Land Podcast. I’m your host Sim Land, and today we have two guests from KAATSU Global, Stephen Munatones and John Doolittle. KAATSU is a form of blood flow moderation training that can mimic heavy weightlifting with lighter loads.

You’re basically tricking your body into thinking that it’s lifting heavy weights than it actually is. You can use it for treating injuries, recovery from exercise, and improving cardiovascular health. If you want to try out the KAATSU bands, then head over to KAATSU.com and use the code SIIM for a 10% discount. John, Steven, welcome back to the show. Hello. Nice to be back. Yeah. Hey, Siim. What a great honor to be back on your show. Thanks for inviting us. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, we did our first show maybe like two years or something like that ago. And yeah, I mean, yeah, I’m glad to have it back because KAATSU itself is one of the best, I think, let’s say anti-aging exercise routines, at least for the elderly folks out there. And yeah, I’m glad you know that it’s spreading and that people are still getting access to it.

And yeah, maybe we can start by both of you going through your journey of becoming involved with KAATSU and yeah, how did you discover it? What was your like some sort of activation point or like this? Yeah, what got you hooked with KAATSU? Yeah. Well, I’ll start off because I was introduced to Dr. Sato, the inventor of KAATSU, back in 2001.

So about 21, 22 years ago. And I visited his laboratory in Tokyo, just outside of Tokyo. And there was a long line of older people there. And I observed what he did with them. And then he did KAATSU on me. I was immediately hooked. I thought this was the greatest thing that I had felt. But I was thinking about actually my parents at the time.

When I asked them this question, I asked them, how can I learn about KAATSU? Obviously, I live in California. He lives in Tokyo. And he said, well, I’ll teach you. I’ve been waiting for someone like you to meet. And I said, well, why isn’t KAATSU known outside Japan? And he said, well, two reasons. I don’t speak Japanese and I don’t travel outside of Japan.

And I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” And then I asked him, “When I return home, I want to study KAATSU.” And then he smiled, and he says, “Well, the information is all up in my head.” And so at the time, early on, I visited Japan four to six times a year for 13 years. And some people say, “Well, why does it take you 13 years to learn KAATSU?” Well, at the time, there was nothing written in English.

Everything was in Japanese, and even the stuff in Japanese wasn’t what it is today. So it took many years. And as you know, if you want to become a very good sushi chef, you have to learn how to cook the rice and prepare the rice for many years before you get to actually be in the sushi bar. And same thing with KAATSU. And so during this 13-year period, I learned all about KAATSU.
He took me to the hospitals. He took me to see Olympic athletes. He showed me how he works with older people, with people with cerebral palsy, people who are bedridden. And every time I visited, I would take lots of notes, ask him questions. And in 2014, we launched the company. And then that’s when soon after that, I met John and the rest is history.

John. Do you want to explain your journey? Yeah. My journey’s much different than Steven’s. I got pretty beat up during my career. I spent 25 years in the SEAL teams. I retired out of the SEAL teams in 2017. Before I retired, I had an injury. It was a full-thickness tear supraspinatus. It’s a rotator cuff.

Exact same injury I had had when I was six years younger. And back then, it was an 11-month full recovery and rehab. So about that time, I’m working in the Humor Performance Program. I was the director for that program at US Special Operations Command, otherwise known as US SOCOM. So I had a lot of trainers and PTs, strength coaches, sports psychologists working under me.

So I messed up my shoulder and got the surgery done. And the guys told me, “You’ve got to go to SOCCN.” That’s Special Operations Command, Central Command. So that’s in Tampa, Florida. It was right across the street from where we were stationed. They said, “You got to go over to SOCCN, meet with the PTs there and try this thing called KAATSU.” And at that point, I actually had heard a little bit about it, but I didn’t know much about it.

I met the PTs over there. They had a KAATSU machine. They had one. It was like the size of a shoebox. And I was like, “What the hell is that?” And they told me. My only question was, is it going to help me get back to the fight faster? Is it going to help me recover faster?” And they said, “Yeah, we have a lot of good outcomes with rapid rehabilitation.

Just give it a shot.” So they used the standard shoulder rehab on me, but they used KAATSU. Long story longer, five and a half months. I was at full or what they call 95% strength, agility, power, and mobility. I was basically, in half the time, same surgery, similar rehab from six years earlier. So I was hooked. And that was in 2016.

I was getting ready to retire anyway and met Stephen about that time, and we started talking. And I said, “Hey, I’m looking for something to do after the SEAL teams.” And he said, “Well, we’d love to have you. And oh, by the way, if you’re traveling in the Pacific, why don’t you take your family and go meet Dr. Sato?” So we did that. And you know Steven, you had me. But when I met Dr. Sato, I was in.

And it was a great experience. And I’ve never looked back. And I really enjoy working with wounded, ill, and injured veterans with KAATSU, helping with neuropathic pain and things like that that we could talk about if you want. John, excuse me. I want to interrupt and remind you, to tell Siim about your daughter. I think when you first met Dr. Sato, it was very important and very telling to tell them about your daughter, Megan.

So Siim, when I left the US Navy, I’d spent 25 years in the Navy. I did four years at the Air Force Academy. That’s a whole ‘nother story. But one of the things I wanted to do is I had two months of dead time between ending my military and starting with KAATSU. And my kids had never been to Ground Zero, and they had never done a true vacation where dad didn’t have a lot of things on his mind and on his plate.

So we went to New York City, saw the ground zero, and getting ready to do our first flight. They’re called Space Available Flights. We drove down to Dover after seeing Ground Zero. And Meg, my daughter, who’s now 15. At the time, she was eight or nine. She was doing some back handsprings on base in some grass.

So she did a back handspring, and she snapped the ulna bone right below the elbow, right before going on this big vacation and traveling around and going to see Dr. Sato. So they put a soft cast on her. We flew to California. They put a hard cast on. We meet Dr. Sato about 72 hours after she broke her arm.

And the first thing he says when he sees us with Meg, with a cast from her armpit all the way down to her wrist, getting ready to start an eight-week, incredible vacation, and she was so bummed. He looks right at back and he says, “Ah, KAATSU. We must do KAATSU.” And so without prolonging it too much, we did KAATSU just like he showed her. KAATSU cycles.

And during the cycles of pressure, he had Meg on just that one arm do isometric holds on her arm three times a day. We did that morning, day, and evening. Nothing really hard, just isometric holds. Six weeks later, we’re in Hawaii and we went to the hospital to get the cast off. And the docs take the cast off. And Siim, I’m not kidding you.

When she had the broken arm out of the cast up next to the other arm, this arm that was in the cast was actually bigger and more defined than the arm that had not been in a cast. Now, she didn’t have range of motion. That took you know weeks to get her all range of motion back. Zero atrophy. Zero. As a matter of fact, that arm was more defined and better developed than the arm that she had been using day in and day out.

But she only had done KAATSU on the broken arm. So fascinating story. And I have hundreds like that. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, like yeah, it’s a good comparison because I would imagine she didn’t work out the other arm either. Like She didn’t do exercise with the other arm, like lifting. Whereas with the cottage band, she experienced this resistance still by doing the contractions. So she experienced the muscle growth through training it. Yeah, well, that’s an amazing story.

And yeah, well, I personally first got to try, or I think, yeah, I might have heard about KAATSU before, but I tried it in 2018 at the Toronto Biohacker Summit, where I met you, John, there as well for the first time. And I tried it, you know and it was still like I didn’t do any actual lifting. I just had the KAATSU bands on, and I did invisible biceps curls and those kinds of things.

And it felt like super heavyweights because of that. And the pump was like crazy. And it felt like a very hard workout. And I did like a few push-ups maybe or something like that as well. And yeah, like I said, it was really tough. So that’s kind of the magic of the blood flow restriction training with KAATSU is that yeah, you train your body or the body perceives that it’s training like heavy loads, but it’s actually like super lights and you’re not really putting any heavy weights on your joints and stuff.

Correct. Exactly. In fact, what you’re doing and one of the things that you mentioned earlier was anti-aging. What you’re actually doing is you’re actually increasing the elasticity of your capillary veins and arteries. That’s really what you’re doing. And when I mentioned that I studied under Dr. Sato for 13 years, 10 of those years were with cardiologists.

So we would think that if you’re going to do KAATSU or any kind of BFR, you probably would do your research with exercise physiologists or coaches, trainers, someone who is in the physical training area. However, Dr. Sato knew that the real key of KAATSU was this longevity aspect, the anti-aging aspect, whether you’re 20 years old, 60 years old, or 80 years old.

And it was the fact that we were with the increased blood in your limbs, arms, or legs, that your capillaries and veins are actually becoming more elastic. That’s why when he went on his very, very deep dive into research, he worked with cardiologists, people who knew the vascular system and the heart, et cetera, because we were focused on the vascular tissue, although the effect of the muscles is absolutely there, but more fundamentally is that elasticity of the capillaries and veins and arteries, which leads to the anti-aging effects that we all know about.

Yeah, gotcha. How does the KAATSU bands work then? Can you explain them as well? How do you use them? What’s the yeah mechanism and…Okay. Okay. Well, John is going to put them on right now. I actually have a B1 set. You want me to put those on, Stephen? Yeah. Either one. Either one. Okay. So we have four bands, two for the arms and two for the legs.

And as John is putting it on, he’s putting it above his bicep, above his tricep, trying to maximize the amount of area where the blood can pool. And the whole object of these bands is the opposite of a tourniquet or blood pressure cuff. So when you take your blood pressure, you put the nurse or the doctor puts the blood pressure on, and it gets very tight, and blood is occluded or prevented from coming into the arm.

The way we structured the KAATSU bands, which took years of development, was to do the opposite. Even if it’s on, and even if it’s on tightly, blood arterial flow continues into the limb, but is slowed down coming back for 30 seconds at a time. So blood goes in normally, and it’s slowed down, not stopped, just slightly slowed down coming back.

When that happens, then the arm or the leg becomes engorged in blood. There’s more blood in the arm or leg than normal. If you look at your hand or your foot, you’ll see it become very pink, even a reddish color, because all the very, very small capillaries are being filled with blood. And when that happens, that is the catalyst. That is exactly what the equipment is designed to do.

Once you actually have your arm or your legs engorged in blood, then there is a number of different protocols that you would do either for training, building muscle, or rehabilitation if you break a bone, like John’s daughter did, or recovery from a hard workout or maybe even a competition. So the first step is to make sure there’s a lot of blood in the arms or legs momentarily for 30 seconds, and then the bands release, 30 seconds on, bands release, 30 seconds on, bands release.

And it acts so the vascular tissue becomes more and more elastic, and your hand or your foot becomes more and more pink or even a reddish color. Gotcha. How do you feel, John? So Siim, I have two devices here. This one, I believe you’re very familiar with. This is the C3 device. Remember I said they used to be the size of shoeboxes when I got introduced to them? This is a ruggedized version and much smaller, very light, and it hook clips to your belt.

I have it set up right now for one limb just to demonstrate that this is an armband and this is the device. And then you can pick cycle mode. And once it’s running, you’ll see that we create pressure. And as soon as it comes to the pressure we’re looking at, the countdown starts from 30s. You see it counting down? There’s 20 more seconds.

And each time it does a cycle, it will completely release the pressure after those 30 seconds. And the next pressure will be 10 millimeters mercury higher. So we stair step. And then what we did differently with this device is you can do multiple sets of cycles. So you can set it to go and it’ll run for a half hour if that’s what you want to do. And I like that for I’ll run it even when I’m not working out, if I’m just doing emails or doing work around the kitchen, dishes, folding clothes, doing yard work.

I’ll run cycles while I do other things. Personally, that’s one of my favorite aspects is the efficiencies that you get here. Because you can trick the body, like you’re saying, trick the body into thinking it’s working much harder than it is. We’re creating metabolic stress, yet at the same time, we’re doing very light load, simple movements like sweeping leaves in the backyard. Now, I’ll take advantage of this to show you.

I’m wearing the Bluetooth version on my arm, and I have one right here. And I just want to show you what we have going on here. So this is all via a smartphone app. You can use a tablet, you can use Android, you can use Apple. And you can see, same thing. I’m at pressure and the countdown is going down from 30.

But what’s cool about this setup is you can totally customize it. So if you want, I don’t know, 47 seconds on and 13 seconds off, and you want one arm to be at a higher pressure because maybe you’re working on some atrophy issues with that arm and you want the other one at lesser pressure or vice versa. You can totally customize this setup, and then you capture the data. So coaches, trainers, providers.

Even if you want to share the information with friends and family and kind of have competitions all through a online app. So this is very new for us, brand new. So kind of exciting. We got some new things going on. Nice. Yeah. I also like that part that you can do. You can just walk even. Like I usually wear them while I’m walking on the treadmill in front of the computer and yeah, checking emails or something like that.

And the pressure on, pressure off still gives you like a good metabolic stress and still gives you a small workout. I personally feel a lot faster recovery from the actual workouts or weights. So I still do those as well. But on the rest days, I use the KAATSU band and that’s like active recovery that speeds up the recovery much faster. And yeah, because usually, if you like, let’s say, have two workout days in a row, you’re going to not be as strong and you’re going to not recover that fast either.

But if you do like, let’s say, on one day, you do like a heavy workout, and then on the second day after that, you use the KAATSU bands, then you’re just getting still the beneficial response, the training stimulus, but your active recovery mode in terms of the low intensity and the increased blood flow and those kind of things from the KAATSU bands. Yeah, go ahead. Exactly. What you’re doing is what we call double stacking.

So you’re trying to achieve something, putting KAARSU on top of that, and not impacting your original goal. And Siim, you’re a very active person, you work out, and KAATSU is very good for that. But imagine the convenience of KAATSU for people who are less motivated, who are older, who are injured, who don’t want to work out.

And KAATSU allows these people who maybe they had a knee surgery, or maybe they’re just not motivated. Maybe they are motivated, but maybe one day or a whole week, they’re just so tired from work. They just want to come home and watch TV or play on the computer. For that, what John was doing and what you do on your, quote, “off days” is simply use the bands as you do something very comfortable, very easy, and the effects are out of this world.

Yeah. What are some other benefits that you’ve seen in research with KAATSU, besides the capillaries? Well, so go ahead, John. I was just going to say, Siim, coming from the military world and the special operations world, I’d say easily 90% of my teammates that I stay in touch with are all struggling in some sense with their sleep cycles and circadian rhythm and getting their body into that parasympathetic state.

Something we’ve been working closely with the International Olympic Committee researchers, specifically the guys out of University of Brighton in the UK. Something they found during their initial research with KAATSU is when you do those cycles of pressure that we’re talking about, especially on the upper arms, when you do those cycles and they are measuring blood panels, hormonal markers, and they’re putting sleep trackers on guys, they’re seeing that parasympathetic state they’re seeing the athletes slide into that parasympathetic state faster, which means stage three and stage four sleep or recovery sleep is happening sooner during their sleep cycle, which is incredible when we’re talking about guys that are struggling with sleep.

And I’m not just talking to PTSD, TBI, and whatnot. I’m talking about flight dysrhythmia or another term for jet lag, people that are traveling multiple time zones. Interestingly, they even came up with a protocol for athletes traveling across time zones to include when they use it on the aircraft, at what part of the flight, and when they use it in the hotel room before going to sleep.
To me, I had no idea when I came into this company that this could even touch on something like that. But we have high-end evidence-based researchers looking at this. That’s something new and different that I do not think we talked about two years ago, last time we talked. Yeah. I don’t remember that either. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. So it’s like you know not as sympathetic and as stressful as like a weightlifting session or like hit cardio or something like that.

So it’s more like a parasympathetic. Yeah. And this comes all the way back to Dr. Sato’s focus on the elasticity of the vascular tissue, as opposed to a muscle-building biohack. A muscle-building biohack is easily replicable or repeatable if you simply lift weights or do push-ups or walk and you walk. You could do isometric holds, et cetera, where we are as a company right now, but where Dr. Sato already saw this 30 years ago was if you increase the elasticity of the vascular tissue, then potentially cognitive issues, issues in the core. So you have the bands on the arms and legs, but what happens to the core between the neck and the groin?

What happens when you have a cracked rib, a broken rib? What happens if you have cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis or other kinds of ailments? So this is where Dr. Sato saw 30 years ago where the research and the practical applications would go. And that’s exactly where we are now. We’re in this era where we are going beyond muscle building and really looking at the fundamentals of what the human anatomy, human physiology is doing.

And if you agree that the capillaries, veins, and arteries are becoming more elastic systemically from head to toe, then it makes sense that we can develop and we are developing and we have developed protocols to help things between your neck and your groin and above your neck. Are there other research directly in humans? Yeah, what’s the findings that have been found in clinical studies using the KAATSU bands? Yes, there are. For example, we simply put in one very fundamental study as we were learning this is we put the bands on the legs of elderly women. So we’re only engorging the limb from the hip down to the toe. However, we were measuring blood flow in the head.

Remember, these women are sitting down. They’re older. They’re not active young people. They’re sitting down and the bands are inflating and deflating, inflating and deflating. It makes sense, and we know that the capillary veins and arteries of their legs are being positively impacted. But what we wanted to show in this research was actually the cerebral flow in the head.

And that’s what we measured, and that’s what we documented, which came out in published research. And so the areas where we are delving into, again, now are stemming from the fact that, okay, if we are improving the blood circulation, what other things in the body can we impact? And we all know the human body was meant to move and not only physically move with your arms and legs pumping, but also more importantly, internally.

And we all have, let’s say, grandparents who maybe their hands and feet get very cold. Again, this is one issue with Siim, you’re very well aware of. You know Their capillaries and the elasticity of their capillaries and veins is decreasing. And so these are all areas where we are delving into, but we’re not doing specific research because now the research has documented this.

What we’re focusing on is applications. How can my grandmother, how can my grandfather or my parents remain as active and as limber and as strong as possible. Something as simple as opening a jar of jam or lifting a liter of milk and many other things.
Putting on makeup, combing their hair, washing their hair. These are the applications that we are now focused on because it’s real for these people. It’s real for those 60, 70, 80, and 90-year-olds. And this is where we’ve taken the research and now we’re applying it in practical applications for people of all ages. Gotcha. So muscle loss and sarcopenia would be greatly or the main benefit would be that probably.

And then cardiovascular benefits and stress management or stress reduction from that. Yes. And for example, John was part of this research was on amputees and paraplegics. And as we know, as you age, you know the probability of you having a problem with your hands, arms, feet, or legs is increasing.

So we wanted to show how beneficial KAATSU is for people who don’t have an arm or don’t have a leg. And so that research was just completed. It’s going to be published this year. And that’s where the amputees, without an arm or without a leg, would put the bands on as John did up high. Their phantom pain would either go away or be significantly reduced because they do have this what we call phantom pain.

They feel a pain, although their hand or their foot is not there. And also their muscle tone improves. You know When you don’t have the rest of your arm from your elbow down, it’s hard to exercise your bicep and tricep. But with KAATSU, you can do so. Same thing if you have a stroke or you have diabetes and they’ve unfortunately, let’s say, amputated a foot or even toes.
People become less mobile, less capable of walking, both physically and emotionally. And so what we do is we put the bands on their arms or the legs, wherever the amputated body part is. And we allow the person to, A, increase their blood circulation in that limb, and two, actually work the muscle that actually does remain. So that’s an example of a recent paper.

It will be published soon, already submitted, already accepted. And John was a major part of that because of his teammates in the military who, unfortunately, did lose an arm or a leg. And if I could just tap in on top of that, Steven, the phantom limb pain, but also peripheral neuropathy or neuropathic pain, some guys don’t have the phantom limb pain, but at the stump, they have significant neuropathic pain that does not let them go to sleep.

And what we’re finding with, I’ll say 80% of the guys that try this are able to wean off their pain meds, you know kind of their tranquilizers in order to get into some semblance of sleep. If we can eliminate that neuropathic pain, which is happening with 80% of the guys, that’s incredible. Now, why exactly that’s happening? I can’t tell you. I don’t know.

But I have talked with some neurosurgeons and brain neurosurgeons and guys that specialize in EEG reading of the brain and whatnot and pain pathways. Some of these guys have told me when you dilate tissue around an area that does not have the ability to exercise anymore, you’re able to wake up a lot of tissue, improve circulation, and help eliminate some of those pain pathways that the brain is kind of stuck in after the trauma of having a limb removed.

So same with the spinal cord injury, guys. There’s one guy I’m thinking of in particular. He was shot through the neck. So he’s a complete quadriplegic. But every night until every night before KAATSU, he would go on it was a type of sleep tranquilizing medicine so that his body could get to sleep because the neuropathic pain below his knees on both legs was incredible.

We did KAATSU on him, and you know it didn’t go away completely. But when a guy like that that’s a complete quad says, “Hey, the pain’s 80% gone.” And we’re not talking about a drug, and we’re not talking about something that’s invasive. I mean, nothing against our athlete population. I love them, and we absolutely can help the athletes. We could talk about the Olympics in Tokyo and all that. I see that as an incremental benefit.

When you take a guy that can’t sleep because of neuropathic pain and you make it 80% better, that’s an exponential change. That is really why I’m excited about being part of this company and taking it to the next level. Yeah, that’s super nice. Yeah. And I mean, you know John touched upon it.

And as you know, John’s a very humble man, but he does have a lot of colleagues who have traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, and other issues in their brain. And one of the things the research has just begun because researchers are understanding the implications of KAATSU, is they put a skull cap on the volunteers, the people who have these brain issues, and they measure their they do EEG measurements.

And it’s early on, but we have more and more researchers wanting to participate because they see the effects of KAATSU. And I think, John, when you’re talking with Dr. Eric Wong and others, you understand very well when they do the KAATSU cycles and we measure and do EEG measurements, maybe tell Sim what we’re finding.

Oh, it’s incredible. This organization does what they call a magnetic EEG guided resonance therapy. So it’s a type of transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS. But Siim, as you know, TMS is set at a standard 10 Hertz. These guys have the ability to change the alpha wave frequency based on the patient’s intrinsic frequency, which I believe is usually between 7 and 13 hertz.

I might be a little off on that. But they find patients that are out of sync and they can very subtly with magnetic pulse energy get their alpha waves into parts of their brain that are out of sync, get them all moving together, which is incredible. When they use KAATSU before the treatment, and we’re at the very early stages of this, so I don’t want to overstate it, but they are seeing very positive initial data coming out of patients where they’ve done mert treatments without KAATSU and when they’ve done mert treatments just after doing KAATSU.

And that’s fascinating. It gets to that systemic response that Stephen was talking about. Better blood flow across the blood-brain barrier, even though what you might be doing is KAATSU cycles on your legs. So fascinating. We’re working very closely with, Wave Neuroscience is the name of the organization out of California. And so yeah, we’re doing a lot in the TBI, PTSD, and sleep world, which, again, didn’t ever see this coming when I joined five years ago, Steven.

Yeah. And you know something too, a lot of people around the world have pets, and whether it’s a dog, a cat, a horse, etc. And we’re even doing we’re now in the second wave of tests with animals, starting off with dogs. Dogs are quite popular around the world, especially in the United States, especially after we came out of this pandemic period where a lot of people bought pets.
And when they get injured, we were actually even putting our bands around the forelegs of the animals. So it’s not only humans, it’s mammals that we are actually helping because we know that the love that the owner has toward that pet quite often is just as real and just as important as if it was a child or someone else, especially for those who are living alone or other kind of things.
So we really are pushing forward as aggressive as we have because we see so many human needs. Yeah, yeah, of course. And yeah, I mean, like exercise and muscle stimulation in whatever form is kind of very critical for aging and longevity and just overall health. Like a lot of times people, you know of course there are accidents and injuries, which I think you know the KAATSU bands are perfect for.

But yeah, like even in the everyday life scenario, it’s like a good hack to get the person moving and get them faster results in terms of your muscle function and overall health. But yeah, you mentioned that that athletes as well. So yeah, besides the rehab, is there a way that the KAATSU bands can enhance performance? Yes.

One of the biggest areas that is actually well known in the sporting world is recovery. Again, often, especially here in the United States, we’re focused on getting the athlete faster, better, stronger, and therefore coaches were pushing the athletes very much. Overtraining is a real problem.

Where KAATSU can have a much bigger impact is actually on the recovery. So yes, athletes from swimming to running, rowing to bobsled are using KAATSU for the movements that they use in their sport, whether it’s throwing a shot put or throwing a javelin or riding a bicycle.

But the area in sports medicine that is really taking off now is what are the athletes doing before or after their practices and their workouts. And that’s where KAATSU is really, really on the cutting edge. So especially if you’re in a competition, let’s say at the Olympics or even your local high school competition where you’re going to do an event, maybe multiple events in one day.
And maybe you’re doing a weekend of activity. It could be in the game of soccer, volleyball, et cetera. And that downtime in between the competition and the next race or competition, in that area, KAATSU is really blowing the minds of coaches and athletes because as John put on, the pressure on, pressure off, pressure on, pressure off, actually really tremendously enhances the metabolic flush from the working muscles.

And so that recovery time is really used for recovery time on a muscular cellular level. And therefore, the athletes in workout, let’s say they have let’s say they do six workouts in a week. Well, each workout can be enhanced when you make that recovery time best and optimal.

So yes, we are using it for athletes in their actual sport, but where KAATSU is really seeing extraordinarily valuable now is in between the workouts or in between the competitions where we’re helping the athlete recover. So therefore, an athlete can come in on Monday, train at 100%, Tuesday, 100%, Wednesday at 100%, etc. Instead of training at 100%, getting tired, training up theoretically at 90%, 80%, 70% as they tire.

So that recovery aspect of KAATSU has really been something that athletes and coaches around the world have really asked us, how do we do this? And John, you’re meeting and talking to athletes, whether they’re tactical or competitive every day. And tell them a little bit more your experiences. I think it’s fascinating that you have a sport.

Some of these sports might have three all-out efforts in one day because it’ll be a quarterfinal, semifinal, and then at night, after a little rest, they’ll go and they’ll hit their big final. And I know the Olympics doesn’t work exactly like that. There’s a little more time. But still, we have so many athletes that they use KAATSU. And yes, they train with it. But the recovery piece is beautiful. So as soon as they finish the event, they slap the leg bands on.

Let’s say it’s a track athlete. They slap the leg bands on. They get prone, and they love this because they go right into their social media, you know give all their buddies their stats and stuff. And in the meantime, during the cycle phase, we’re dilating all that tissue. Perfusion is going up, right? Your cardiac output, your cardiac response to having the bands inflate. Your heart has to pump harder because remember, Siim, the blood’s always moving past the bands.

It’s just that it’s moving slower and your heart has to work a lot harder. And then we get that rapid, complete release. And now all that tissue is dilated open. The heart’s pumping harder. We got a much higher perfusion, and we get that flushing that Steven’s talking about. In the tactical athlete world, in the military, we would never be able to tell the military human performance programs that we don’t want the guys to go heavy.

They have to go heavy. They have to be able to carry weight. They have to be able to move weight. But they don’t have to do it nearly as often as what I grew up with in the military. When I grew up, we would go let’s just as an example, we would do a squat day in the gym. We’d go as heavy as we could to failure, max out. And then we wouldn’t use our legs again in that sense for another at least three days. The legs would be destroyed.

What the guys are doing in the HP world now, in the human performance world, in the military, is they’re still working the guys out with heavy weight, but they’re doing much less of that maximum max weight effort. And they’re folding KAATSU in as a finisher. So they’re going heavy, you know 80%, one rep max, that typical thing. And then at the end of the workout, they slap the KAATSU bands on and they’ll go in constant mode so they can do multiple people at once and untether them.

So we can talk about that more if you want. But basically, they can easily have 10 guys with the leg bands on, and then they’ll do a finisher, which is just body weight. And the guys love it because that body weight is harder than any, it feels harder. Let me be clear. It feels harder than any of the 80% one-rep max they were doing during the workout. And what’s really cool is now we have especially in special operations.

We have older operators. In general, the special ops guys are 5 to 10 years older, depending which service you’re talking about. But they’ve been around longer. They have more chronic pain, arthritic issues, chronic pain from older injuries. And a lot of these guys are in some semblance of orthopedic rehab. So when they’re at home station, they have all the tools they need.

They have trainers, coaches, PTs, and that. They have all the equipment. But what we’re finding, a lot of commands are using this now. It’s really cool. When they’re going on a training trip or they’re going on a deployment, they go to the physical therapist and they check out this unit right here, the one you have. They check out the C3 unit with the leg bands and armbands, and they take it on deployment, or they take it on the training trip where there is very little equipment or no equipment.

And then they can still get that metabolic stress on the road in hotel rooms or on the roads on deployment without all the equipment. A couple of Therabands, maybe a TRX, and KAATSU. So we have a lot of the military units building these we call them flyaway kits, but interesting stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they’re perfect for travel and they’re pretty small as well. You can fit them in like a very easily.

Yeah, that’s how I imagine it’s also best to use them that you don’t go like this because it kind of makes more sense, actually, to go to complete failure as a finisher, like a complete pump offset with the KAATSU bands than with the regular weights. Because you know what I’ve seen in studies is also that the blood flow restriction bands and KAATSU bands, they actually cause less muscle damage.

Like You get more of these metabolic stress and accumulation of lactate and those kind of metabolites and blood into the muscle, but you cause less damage to it. So you actually recover faster from that there. So you know if you are, let’s say, the bodybuilder routine where you’re trying to like few last sets, maybe two last sets, you’re doing a lot of high reps and going to failure to get the maximum growth stimulus, then it actually makes more sense to do that with the KAATSU bands because, yeah, you’re avoiding this massive muscle damage that would come from that.

But you would get the same response. Exactly. That inflammation response, we can almost eliminate that if we do very, very low or no weight for these multi-joint movements. If you can eliminate the inflammation response, and this is why Dr. Sato is able to work out multiple times a day, same muscle group. He’ll put a bar. this is great. I’ve seen him do it. He’ll put a bar, empty bar. So 45 pounds or 20 kilos.

He’ll put an empty bar, and then he’ll do reps. And instead of adding weight, he’ll add pressure. It’s incredible. And by the end of it, you see him struggling just like a guy that puts 225 on the bar and goes to failure, but almost zero inflammation response. And he’s not tearing down muscle fiber. He can do it again you know six hours later if he wants no problem. That’s why he looks like he does at almost 75 years old now, right, Stephen?

Yes. And what is even more remarkable about Dr. Sato is if you look at his maximum or his power, he started out in his teenage years and early 20s as a powerlifter. Well, guess what? By the time he was 30, 40, 50, and 60, he was still lifting the same weight.
You know When we think of bodybuilders or powerlifters now, you’ve maxed out basically between 20 and 35 years old. But Dr. Sato has proven, we’ve done it him as an individual, but also in the laboratory with people as old as 104 years old, that their power output does not have to decrease with age.

And when you can take 104-year-old, increase her muscle mass, increase her strength, what this really means is that she’s not going to go into competition, but she’s going to be able to walk upstairs easily. She’s going to be able to walk downstairs easily. She’ll be able to open up jars of whatever she’s doing. She’ll be able to lift things up and put them on a cupboard.
So practical things can be achieved by people in their 80s, 90s, and 100s that were never considered possible. So the human potential as we get older is being dramatically shifted. It’s a huge paradigm shift in, Dr. Sato as a practical matter, but also in the laboratory, we’re seeing that people in their 80s, 90s, and 100s are functionally because of their muscle tone, strength, stamina, et cetera, are what they are in their 40s and 50s and 60s.

And if you think about this anti-aging goal, isn’t that what we’re trying to achieve? If you can freeze your human potential at the age of 40 and continue that 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, it is what I believe in. It is what Dr. Satos saw many, many years ago, and it’s what you and John were working for or towards every single day. Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome.

I also actually saw that the KAATSU bands can also increase stem cells. Is that correct? Yeah, in the stem cells, I’m leaving that in the hands of the stem cell experts because I would rather have third parties just like we left it in the hands of the vascular elasticity in the hands of cardiologists.

I was just at a convention in San Diego and the stem cell experts came to me and they were saying, “Oh, we love your product because of the effect that they measure and they see.” And so you know these are all new areas that we don’t profess to be experts in everything.

All we do is provide the tools and the know-how how to use KAATSU and then allow our stem cell experts, our cardiologists, our internists, our Olympic coaches to take the fundamentals that we share, and they start to expand. I mean, when I was with Dr. Sato the very first time in 2001, I did see a lot of older people, but I didn’t see anybody who was 104 years old.
And so the big issue is, as I was continuing with Dr. Sato, I did see people who are over 90, over 95, and over 100 years old. And so this idea of human potential is really being expanded through the integration of stem cell experts, of cardiologists, of cognitive development experts, et cetera.

Nice. Yeah. I guess there needs to be more specific research done about that. But yeah, I mean, even then, I think all the other benefits that you get from the muscle and the cardiovascular benefits. And yeah, they’ve reduced muscle damage. Those things are already super amazing in terms of what you’re actually doing. You’re not really needing to go to the gym.

You’re not tearing down your body that much. And yeah, you’re kind of avoiding this wear and tear that may occur with regular exercise as well. How do you, let’s say, use it? So what kind of exercises can you do with the bands? Because I would imagine you can’t do all the traditional gym movements. So what can you do?

You can’t train the back, for example, or you can’t train the shoulders directly, right? Absolutely. Go ahead, John. I was just going to lean back into what we were talking about earlier with that systemic response. Just because you have the leg bands on, it does not mean because remember, they’re not tourniquets. We’re still having blood moving in and out of the limb. So there’s a lactate response if you’re using let’s just say you’re really working your quads.

Well, that lactate response is a systemic response. Granted, it’s not going to be as intense in your middle back. But if you build up the lactate in your legs and then you move immediately to back, you’re still getting a very good response. And actually, if you leave the leg bands on and work the back, it gets intense pretty quick. It’s good, Siim. I know you work out all the time. It’s good to experiment with it.

Do some things where you’re taking your legs pretty far along with KAATSU like you normally do, and then roll right into a back extension or a core movement or planks or whatever you’re working on. And you’ll be surprised at how much harder it feels when the legs are at that state. Okay. I got to try it. Yeah.

Another thing that’s important to understand is when you have the bands on and you take the bands off, it’s within a 10 or 15-minute period where HGH is maximized. So the maximum amount of HGH isn’t actually produced as you’re doing KAATSU. There’s actually a slight delay.

So how is that actually practical in an athletic performance world or a strength training world? So we always recommend if there is an athlete who is working on a specific move, maybe it’s a runner or maybe it’s a swimmer who’s working on their starts. Maybe it’s a hurdler who’s working on jumping over the hurdles, or maybe it’s actually a young man working on a bench press.
What they can do is use KAATSU in their workout, then take off their bands. In that next 10 to 15 minutes, we believe that the KAATSU continuum, it continues. So in that 10 to 15-minute period, really work on whatever movement that you want to do. At that moment in time, the HGH and the hormonal response is maximized.

And so it makes sense if you’re an athlete or you wanted to improve yourself in some way to actually do that movement as the HGH, beta endorphins, et cetera, are being maximized. So even though the bands are off, the effects of KAATSU continues for a period of time.

And so therefore, let’s say we have athletes who are, let’s say, trying to be getting a college scholarship, or trying to get on a national team, or trying to get a new contract. What we recommend there is do KAATSU in their warm-up, take off the bands, and then in front of the coach or whoever is making a decision about their future, do the exercise as their HGH, beta endorphins, et cetera, are being maximized.

And so we don’t simply believe that KAATSU is only when you have the bands on. It continues after the bands are off. That’s interesting, yeah. That’s cool. So yeah, like you can take them off and still do some other movements and get some responses from that. Right. Go for the one-rep max, for example. You know the bands on, do the workout, the KAATSU workout, take the bands off, hydrate a little bit, rest a little bit, and then go for your one rep max.

We’ve seen that time and time again. And emotionally, psychologically, they say, “How can that happen?” I just maxed out with KAATSU. But then they take the bands off, rest a little bit, drink a little water, you know shake their muscles out, and then go for the one-rep max. And all of a sudden, they said, “Well, 10 minutes ago, I was exhausted.” But because we’ve got a biochemical reaction in the body that’s allowing your performance to actually get even higher.

Sam, my son’s a basketball player, or he was. He’s now a freshman in college. But as a senior in high school, we brought his basketball team over. We had them all do their typical warm-up and do three vertical leaps. Basketball players, they know their vertical leap within a millimeter, basically. So we have them warm up, three jumps as high as you can, measured a vertical leap. Then we have them do KAATSU cycles.

They all do KAATSU cycles and just mobility work, light stretching, maybe some air squats, whatever they want, basically. As long as they’re doing the KAATSU cycles on their legs, and we would do that for 5 to 10 minutes, depending which kid because it wasn’t all exact it wasn’t an exact science. But then we take all the bands off of them and have them all do three jumps again. So when we did this before they went to states, all of the kids had a higher average except one.

And the one kid had a problem with his shoes. So I can’t say 100%, but they all jump higher. And that’s just one anecdotal. I think there were 10 kids over that day. But there’s something there. There’s something there. So yes, it’s a recovery tool. Yes, it’s a training tool. Yes, it’s a neuropathic pain. But it’s a warm-up tool, too.

Especially if you’re getting ready to do and this gets to what you were saying, Steven, if you’re going for a one-rep max on a deadlift or squat, or if you’re going for a max effort on pull-ups, do KAATSU cycles beforehand, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Yeah.

I mean, that actually makes sense because let’s say without the KAATSU bands, you go for, let’s say, not the one rep max, or let’s say you lift, I don’t know, 95% of your max, then the 90% afterwards will feel lighter because you wear at a 95% before and you are wearing the heavier load. So the lighter load feels that much lighter, psychologically as well as physiologically also more prepared to lift that.

So with the KAATSU bands, maybe like if you do get the metabolites going and you release the hormones, so your body perceives that it actually lifted like super heavyweight. Like, yeah, your body thinks that it lifted 100% or something, then you take them off. You haven’t caused any actual muscle damage, or you still have plenty of glycogen and stuff as well, then yeah, like the one rep max that you’re actually going with with the actual weight, the barbell, then that could, yeah, feel lighter just by doing that.
So I mean, yeah, we need to do some more studies. But yeah, that’s maybe my explanation that it could be like that. Yeah. All right. Well, maybe let’s say how do people use it? So is there any workout routine that they should follow? Or is it just every day do a few cycles of that? Or is there any structure that people could follow?

Yeah, it depends, you know because we work with professional athletes and Olympians all the way up to people in their 80s, 90s, and over 100, it’s impossible for us to say, “You should do this,” because we have a 20-year-old who is very focused on competition, and we have an 80-year-old who just wants to walk upstairs and down to the park. But what is common amongst everybody is to do the pressure on, pressure off, pressure on, pressure off.

How they actually move their body depends on their lifestyle and their athletic goals. We recommend if you’re at a competitive athlete, the best thing you can do is do the KAATSU cycles, as John suggested, to warm up, then actually use your bands in the movement that you want to do in your sport.

So if that’s a basketball player shooting or jumping up to grab a rebound, if that is a track athlete who’s working on the sprint at the end of their 1,500 meter race or 5,000 meter race, then use the bands in the actual action that you’re doing. It could be a golfer, it could be someone doing archery, whatever it is.

Use the bands in the actual movement that you’re doing, take off the bands, and then continue, repeat your activity, whatever that is, if you’re in the athletic realm. So not necessarily, you don’t have to use it in the gym. You can use it in the gym. But if I had 10 minutes to use for a competitive athlete, I would be using my bands in the actual movement that they do in their sport.
If it is someone who is older, who simply wants to focus on anti-aging, strength gains, weight loss, more balance, then I would focus simply on the movements that they are weakened. So if it is a person with a lower limb, some kind of leg injury of some sort, I would put the bands on a little bit tighter on the leg that is injured or weaker, and simply walk.

If a person wanted to work on their core, either their stomach, their abdominals, or their lower back, they could put the bands on their legs and simply stand on one leg. They will have some sort of difficulty, rest, stand on one leg again, or very simple. Instead of doing planks or crunches or sit-ups, they can walk around their house with a book on their head, with bands on their legs.
So we have many, many different protocols on how to do. And what we often do, what I spend every day doing, what John does every day, is people buy the bands for, let’s say, one purpose. Maybe they were injured. Now they’re healthy. And now they come back to us and say, “Well, I’m healthy now. I want to gain muscle,” or, “I want to run a marathon,” or, “I would like to be able to touch my toes.” And in all these cases, we have thousands of different protocols that we share with people on a daily basis to match whatever goal that they have.

All I would say is the older, the weaker that you are, the more benefit KAATSU will have for you. Of course, it’s very good for the very elite athletes. But like John said, we can take an Olympic gold medalist or a top professional athlete and increase their benefit just a little bit. For them, that’s very valuable.

However, when we have someone who is weak or disabled or not motivated to do any exercise, for those people, the increase is very great. So you know we like people who don’t like exercise. We like people who are somehow impacted physically because the benefit that KAATSU has for those people is very large.

Yeah, yeah. I agree. Even if you’re completely sedentary or let’s say mobilized or whatever the case is, even then just wearing the cuffs and getting the cycles on and off, then that already would have a massive improvement for you. So yeah, you don’t even need to lift anything to get benefits. Or even if you’re like an athlete and you still wear them with just the on and off cycles, then even then you would get some benefits for recovery side.

So yeah, you know there’s level studies and degrees, but yeah, like even just using it on any case, you would see, yeah, great improvements, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. And then this might be a rabbit hole, but I think it’s worth mentioning. The wound care uses are fabulous. I’ve personally experienced that, and I’ve seen others experience it. Especially if the wound is distal of the bands somewhere on the arm or leg.

During that release phase, you have all this new oxygenated blood coming in. And then during the pressure phase, we’re slowing that oxygenated blood around that acute injury, that wound, that cut, that suture, or even if we’re talking about connective tissue, right? Because now we’re talking about all the way down to capillaries, and capillaries are everywhere in our body, right?
So if you can take oxygenated blood and slow it down and increase that partial pressure of O2 around the wound, even just for 30 seconds, and then release the pressure, let new blood come in, and then slow it down again and do that over and over and over without even having to move. So now think of a type two diabetic. The biggest issue with those guys is getting them to do anything.

But if we can have them lay on their couch and watch their favorite TV show and do KAATSU cycles on their legs, if they’re having a lower extremity wound care issue or something that’s not healing, this is a way to improve circulation to that wound. It’s a great tool for that as well. Yeah. That’s amazing. So yeah, I’m a huge fan and a huge user of the KAATSU bands as well.
And yeah, definitely, I see a use case for everyone, virtually everyone, no matter the level of fitness as well as age, everyone can use it. And yeah, well, it was great talking with you guys again. Where can people find more information about KAATSU? Yeah, www.KAATSU.com. John has it on his t-shirt or his shirt there. It’s K-A-A-T-S-U.

Ka is a word in Japanese that means additional. And atsu, a-t-s-u, is a Japanese word that means pressure. So it’s additional pressure. And that’s exactly what the bands do, and the effects are profound. So www.KAATSU, K-A-A-T-S-U.com. And thank you very much for this time and opportunity to share a little bit about KAATSU with you. Of course. And yeah, if people want to try it out, then they can get a 10% discount with code siim. And yeah, we’ll put the links in the show notes as well. And yeah, it was my pleasure. And I’m glad to talk with you guys. And yeah, let’s stay in touch. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Sim. Great seeing you again. Thank you. Likewise. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you want to support this podcast, then check out our sponsors and leave our review on iTunes or Spotify.

My name is Siim, stay tuned for the next episode, stay empowered.