Mitohormesis: Anti-Aging, Longevity & Disease Prevention

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Thanks so much for having me, Laura, for the second time. It’s always a pleasure.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. I wanted to have you back again because, I mean, quite honestly, I could probably do all the talks on the Summit, just talking to you and picking your brain because you are the mitochondria expert. But today I think we’re gonna talk about a really, really important topic, hormesis. I know it’s one of your most favorite things to talk about, and we cannot have a mitochondria summit without this very important topic. So thank you for doing this again. For those of you who don’t know Ari, you’re the founder of The Energy Blueprint system. It’s a comprehensive lifestyle and supplement program, which has helped more than two million people, and counting. That’s impressive. Like every time I see that, I’m like, “Two million people, that’s insane!” Well, you help them experience optimal health, better performance and more energy. You’re the bestselling author of “The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy,” and the host of the popular “The Energy Blueprint” podcast, which features the world’s leading natural health experts. We can find your podcast programs and supplement formulas at theenergyblueprint.com. And you have one more book that just came out. It is called…

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

“Eat for Energy.”

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

“Eat for Energy.” Yes. “Eat for Energy,” which is an excellent book. I’m actually reading it right now. It’s so good. It’s so easy to read. I love how you start each chapter with stories. Really, really good. All right. So…

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

I actually, to be quite honest, I needed help with the stories.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You did?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

We had a professional writer, who’s like, you know, a proper writer, not a science expert, but like a professional writer, who’s worked with many, many New York Times bestselling books and things like that, who helped with the story element. Because, quite frankly, I was actually in favor of leaving all that stuff out. I don’t like the fluff when I read books. I’m just like, “Gimme the science, gimme the evidence. “Gimme the ideas, give me the strategies, “give me the science to back it up.” I don’t really care about all the fluff. But evidently the publisher, Hay House, and their team trumps my opinions, where they basically said, “Hey, it’s not what you like when you read a book, “’cause you’re not the typical reader. “It’s what most people like. “And they wanna see your client stories.” So they made it into the book.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And it’s actually, I know you’re calling it fluff, but it’s not actually fluff. It’s proof that what you are teaching works. So people can see themselves. You’ll read it and say, “Oh, that’s me. I feel this way.”

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

I get it. I get it. And I get why most people like it. But when I read a book, I’m like, “Oh, here’s another story. Let me flip through this. “Where does the story end and we get to the science. “Okay, now I can read.”

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, it’s got all that for anybody who wants the science piece. So in this talk about hormesis today, it’s really important that we start the conversation by talking about what is the biggest cause of fatigue. Let’s start there. We’ll get into the hormesis piece, but let’s set us up for this conversation.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Okay. Well, I’m curious, has any other speaker on this summit talked in depth about hormesis?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Not to your depth. It’s been talked about a little bit. I have my own talk on this summit talking about hormesis. And of course I’ve learned over the years a lot about it from you. So it’s amazing to have my mentor here too, right?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Cool. So yeah, so that in itself is interesting, right? Because I would actually argue that hormesis is arguably the most important thing for mitochondrial health. And it’s something that most people in the natural health space and functional medicine experts either don’t even know about or don’t talk about. And you know, 10 years ago, when I started beating the drum on hormesis, I was looking at many of our friends and colleagues and I would mention that word “hormesis,” hormetic stress, and people would kind of cock their heads to the side and look at me like, what the hell is that? And nobody knew what it was. And I was looking at this huge body of literature that was basically making the case that hormesis is the single most important thing when it comes to disease prevention, longevity and energy, because the effects of it, the way that it works, center around our mitochondria. So when it comes to understanding fatigue, energy production, I like to break it down into two fundamental things, two fundamental factors that control how our body is regulating energy levels, whether we are producing lots of energy, like a typical young kid bouncing off the walls with energy, or whether we are chronically fatigued and have no energy to do anything. And those are number one, total body stress load, or allostatic load, which is basically a combination of all of the different stressors in your life. They could be nutritional stressors, everything from eating a poor diet with lots of processed foods, to nutritional deficiencies, to many other aspects of nutrition, to circadian rhythm and sleep disruptions, to psychological stress, to environmental toxicants, to light deficiencies and toxicities, to pathogens, you know, respiratory infections, for example. Everything goes into this bucket of total body allostatic load. And I believe in the first interview that we did, I talked a lot about this sort of dual role of mitochondria, as either energy generators or cellular defenders. So they’re either in energy mode or defense mode. We talked about that, right?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. And you talked about how that’s been a relatively new concept in the last 10 years. We used to think in the old days that all our mitochondria did was make energy, but now we know there’s a lot more to the story. So viewers, make sure you go back, if you didn’t see Ari’s talk on day one. Do you go back and listen to that because it really shed some amazing light on what your mitochondria are doing. And the other thing I wanted to say, Ari, is it’s interesting, so if you go to PubMed now, and you search in “hormesis,” it’s all over the place. There’s all kinds of articles and research on hormesis. So it’s interesting, 10 years ago, nothing. And now it’s one of the most, you know, widely looked at topics.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Right. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so brief summary of this dual role of mitochondria. Basically mitochondria have been taught to us as these mindless cellular energy generators. They take in carbs and fats. They pump out energy. In fact, they have a second role that’s just as important, which is in cellular defense. They’re basically environmental sensors that are constantly taking samples of the environment and asking the question, is it safe to produce energy? And the way they determine that is picking up the signals from these various stressors that I just mentioned. They can pick up the signals from every type of stressor imaginable, whether it’s a pesticide residue, or heavy metals, or psychological stress, or sleep deprivation, or nutrient deficiencies, or any other type of stressor you can imagine. And in response to picking up those stress signals, they’re turning down the dial on energy production and shifting resources towards cellular defense. So that total body stress load, or allostatic load, from all of those different sources of stressors is determining the degree to which your mitochondria are basically deciding whether they’re going to be in energy mode or defense mode. 

Now, since we talked about that in the first interview, there’s a second big key to this puzzle. And this is the part that is not widely understood within the natural health and functional medicine community. The capacity of your body, your cells, to handle a certain amount of stress load, something I call the resilience threshold, is determined by your mitochondrial capacity, first and foremost. How big and strong are your mitochondria? And how many of them do you have in your cells? And this gets at a very important point that is not widely known, but it’s one of the most important factors in physiology when it comes to disease prevention, longevity and energy. And that is research has shown that every decade of life, typically for most people, corresponds to a decline in mitochondrial capacity, you can think of that as the number of mitochondria you have in your cells, of about 10%. Maybe doesn’t sound like much, but here’s another way of stating that. The typical 70-year-old person has lost 75% of their mitochondrial capacity compared to when they were a 20-year-old.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

When you put it that way, it’s profound.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So wait, are we stuck like that? Or can you get it back? Can you bring back your mitochondria?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

So that’s the good news. You can bring back your mitochondria. This process is dynamic. First let me explain this loss of mitochondrial capacity. So it’s been shown the typical 70-year-old has lost 50% of their mitochondria by number. And of the mitochondria that are left in the cell, they have only about 50% of their energy producing capacity. So if you do the math on that, you’ve lost 75%. Now, to put that in a different way, this is essentially like going from a Ferrari engine to like a moped engine. This is a big difference in your…

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You’re not even in the car class anymore. Now you’re on a moped.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Exactly. Okay. So this is a big difference in your cellular energy producing capacity. And the critically important thing to understand from this fundamental insight, before we get into the question you just asked, is it’s important to understand that, if that’s the case, if you’ve lost 75% of your engine at the cellular level, the solution cannot simply be the removal of stressors in your life, like you meditate to ease the psychological stress load, you improve your diet to get more nutrients in, lower the toxic burden to help detoxify your system, you go on detox protocols, you support the antioxidants defense system with glutathione and NAC and CoQ10 and acetyl-L-carnitine for your mitochondria and B vitamins and all these other kinds of things. None of those things fix the fact that your engine is still at 25% of capacity. And that is the core insight that is widely not understood within the natural health community.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Let me ask you this. If that’s all you’re doing, can you maintain the 25%? Maybe you’re just maintaining and not losing more function, but you’re not building back. Would that be a true statement?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Sure. And I’m not saying those things don’t have any benefit.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Uh-huh.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

But I’m saying they are of limited… Strategies to improve energy and also getting into anti-aging, longevity, disease prevention strategies, are of limited benefit if you do not address the fundamental factor that you’ve lost 75% of your cellular engine.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Because every tissue in the body, whether we’re talking about the brain, we’re talking about the heart, we’re talking about the intestines, we’re talking about our muscles, our hormone producing glands, our liver, almost everything relies almost exclusively on mitochondria for their energy to do the jobs they do. And to do their job well, whether it’s your thyroid producing thyroid hormone, or your liver helping to detoxify, or whatever it is, your muscles performing work, in order to do their job effectively, they have to have adequate energy supply. And if you’ve lost 75% of your energy supply, your energy producing capacity, it’s a guarantee they do not have adequate energy supply to do their job well.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. Got it.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

To get to the answer to your question. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s actually been shown that in lifelong athletes, people who continue to do sports, continue to do exercise into their seventies, they actually have the same mitochondrial capacity as a young adult. So they don’t lose 75% of their mitochondrial capacity. That’s the really good news here. And what this tells us is that this loss of mitochondria is not something that we’re destined to have as a result of this natural process of aging, where aging just destroys our mitochondria. It’s not like that. It actually is the case that our mitochondria are in very dynamic relationship to our lifestyles, and to our environment. And if they are being stimulated and challenged, they stay big and strong and robust, and you keep the same amount that you had when you were a young adult.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

However, if you don’t, if like most people you are not adequately and regularly stimulating and challenging your mitochondria, they atrophy, they shrivel and they shrink and they die off, just like if you put a muscle in a cast, if you break a bone, that muscle atrophies. The same exact thing happens at an internal level with the mitochondria.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. And I think what you’re about to say is the stimulation of the mitochondria does not happen from those other healthy lifestyle factors. So yes, meditation is important. Yes, eating healthy is important. Yes, moving your body is important. But it takes a little bit more than that to stimulate that mitochondria muscle. So I think that’s about what you’re about to tell us, right?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Exactly.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Exactly. One critical aspect to optimizing our health is that we need both. Most people in the modern world need to do two fundamental things to improve their health. They need to increase, this is gonna sound really counterintuitive, they need to increase the amount of good stress in their life. Spikes, transient spikes, of intense stressors of specific types to increase the stress load, the metabolic stress load, on their mitochondria.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

And they also need to intensely do the reverse of that. They need intense dips into recharging and recovering.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

And most people living in the modern world are terrible at both of them. They’re sort of flat-lining, where they’re in this middle ground of sort of this constant low-level stress. But stress is not good when it’s constant. And they don’t have adequate recovery. And they’re missing the spikes of the more intense kinds of stress that will actually stimulate mitochondrial growth and stimulate your body to keep your mitochondria. So we want this oscillation built into our life of spikes of hormetic stress, and dips into recharging and recovering our bodies very intensely as well.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You know what’s coming to mind? An influencer in the business world once told me that balance is not possible. And what I’m hearing you say right now is balance is actually critical.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Hmm.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So you have to have both. You have to have those intense good stressors, and those intense recovery periods.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Exactly. So just to circle back to what I was saying, you know, your first question was, what are the big factors that control fatigue? So you have this first bucket, total body stress load. Second bucket is, is what is the status inside of your cells, as far as how many mitochondria you have, how big and strong are they? That determines your resilience threshold, which is your cellular capacity to tolerate those various stressors in your life while maintaining health and high energy levels. And as soon as that threshold is exceeded, that’s when mitochondria shift out of energy mode into defense mode, and it’s where you start to get symptoms. The mitochondria start throwing off lots of reactive oxygen species, or free radicals. They start producing much less energy. And that drives disease processes and it drives fatigue. So ultimately what we’re talking about here is we want a combination of reducing total body stress load in tandem with building up our cellular engine, so we build up our resilience threshold, so that our body has more buffering capacity to handle stressors, because we can’t eliminate stress. Stress is ubiquitous in the modern world. We can’t eliminate it totally. So we build up our buffering capacity to allow our body to handle stress while maintaining health, homeostasis and high energy levels.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. So I know our viewers right now are going, “Tell me, tell me, tell me! What is it I have to do? “What is the hermetic stress?” We’re gonna get into that too in just a second. But what I’m hearing you say is that mitochondrial size and number actually relates to your body’s capacity to handle stress. So that is really critical. And it’s so interesting. And I agree with you this is so missing in the functional medicine world, because we do put a lot of emphasis on handling your stress and, you know, trauma release and really bringing that down. But what’s not focused on is the fact that your mitochondria has suffered and you still need to build that back up in order to handle… ‘Cause stress is still gonna happen, right? It’s impossible not to. Something else is coming. Something else is coming. It always is.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Exactly. And if I can add one more layer before we move on, just to what this stress is actually doing at the mitochondrial level. So one is it’s building the mitochondria bigger and stronger, and it’s also stimulating something called mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of more mitochondria from scratch. So on average, we have somewhere between 500 to 2000 mitochondria per cell. That loss of 75% of mitochondria with aging that typically happens to most people, means that if you previously had 2000 mitochondria per cell, now you’ve only got 500. So the goal is to build back in the other direction. Now the other important thing that it’s doing is those stressors, this is something we can talk about in much greater depth, if you want to do a deep dive here, but the quick treatment of it is these stressors, this again is counterintuitive, these stressors actually create a transient spike in free radicals, in oxidants, or reactive oxygen species, which we’re all taught are, “Oh, those are bad. We gotta avoid the oxidants. “We gotta take our antioxidants.” But actually, one of the primary mechanisms, arguably the most important mechanism of how hormetic stressors work to benefit our health, is by creating a transient spike in oxidants. And those oxidants serve as a signal at the mitochondrial level for mitochondria to grow bigger and stronger. So in the same way that if you lift a weight, you’re challenging that muscle and you’re stimulating it to grow bigger to adapt to that stress, reactive oxygen species do the same thing at the mitochondrial level. It’s also been shown that if you, for example, take antioxidant supplements in tandem with doing exercise, that you reduce or eliminate the benefits of exercise.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, no!

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

So researchers many years ago thought, you know, “We have all this data showing exercise “reduces rates of disease and extends longevity, “reduces brain disease and heart disease “and all these other diseases and cancers and so on. “But the problem with exercise “is that it creates all these free radicals. “And therefore if only we can just take antioxidants “to eliminate those free radicals that we get from exercise, “we can get all the benefits of exercise without the harm.” And what they found when they did those studies is that by supplementing antioxidants, they negated the benefits of exercise.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, my gosh. That is horrible news. So what does one do with antioxidant supplements then? Is there a time and a place that it is good to take them?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Okay. So that’s a bigger, more complex question. Before we get there, let me just wrap this up, okay. So this hormetic stress, by creating this transient spike in free radicals is stimulating, again, the mitochondria to grow bigger and stronger, stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis. And it’s also doing something very important. It stimulates something called the ARE, the antioxidant response element inside of mitochondria. And this is our internal antioxidant and detoxification defense system. And this includes powerful antioxidants like glutathione and catalase and superoxide dismutase. So by engaging in hormetic stressors, we are not only building physically the mitochondria, that engine, we’re building it bigger and stronger, but we are also building the antioxidant and detoxification defense system inside of mitochondria so that it can have its own reserves to handle exposure to oxidants. And that mechanism is vastly more important as far as neutralizing oxidants at the cellular level than is taking external antioxidant pills. And we know that because we have lots and lots of research showing taking antioxidant pills, like vitamin C and vitamin E and vitamin A and things like that are, in most studies, not linked at all, or very weakly linked, with disease prevention and longevity extension. Whereas hormetic stressors, which build up the internal antioxidant defense system are very strongly linked with huge effect sizes, as far as disease prevention and longevity lifespan extension. Does that make sense?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It does. Is now the time to start talking about some of those hormetic stressors? Have we set the stage?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Please. Yes. Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. What are the biggest ones? How do we do it? How long do you do it? This is really important information right here. So everybody get your pens out, if you haven’t already, you wanna write this down.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Okay. So the most obvious hormetic stressor that people are familiar with is of course exercise. Exercise is really its own category unto itself. There are many different subtypes of exercise. So we have resistance exercise, weight training, we have high intensity interval training, or sprint interval training, and we have endurance exercise, which is lower intensity for longer duration in a steady state. So all of these different types of exercise actually have their own unique fingerprint essentially of the specific adaptations they’re stimulating in your body. And they’re all good, but they do things in different ways. I don’t know how deep of a dive we should go into exercise, but there have been studies where they’ve looked at both in trained, meaning people who are very fit and used to doing lots of exercise, and untrained individuals, as far as which specific types of exercise were able to stimulate the most robust increases in markers of mitochondrial growth and biogenesis. I would say in general, maybe a very quick summary of that is in untrained individuals, it doesn’t really matter. Any type of exercise will stimulate increases in mitochondrial biogenesis and growth. And the more highly trained you are, the more that you might require novel training methods to create further stimuli. And there’s also some evidence to suggest maybe high intensity interval training and sprint interval training have a unique benefit in that regard, potentially amplified when doing it in a fasted state or combining it with certain phytochemicals and things like that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So, I’d just venture to say that most people viewing this summit are probably not professional athletes and highly trained individuals. They’re probably more in the untrained category, would you say?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Possibly, I mean, you might have a lot of very health conscious people who are listening to this who are already eating very healthy, already exercising multiple times a week.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So what would be, just real quick, what would be “trained” in your, I mean, you have a whole background in physical training as well. So how many times and hours a week would you consider somebody to be trained versus not? ‘Cause this is a big question to me, ’cause I always wonder, like what really makes somebody, when do they cross that threshold of being athletic versus not?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

I don’t think there’s any consensus answer to that question. I think it’s largely semantics. And it’s probably defined differently in different studies. You know, different research groups are saying, “Oh, you know, this group does at least “two bouts of exercise a week for half an hour. “Therefore they’re the trained group.”

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, wow!

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

As an example. And maybe another research group says, “Does at least half an hour a day of exercise.” Who knows? But untrained is easy. You know, doesn’t engage in any sort of moderate, moderately intense or vigorous exercise on a regular basis. They’re, you know, relatively sedentary people not engaging in any exercise program, who maybe just do some walking here and there, but beyond that don’t do much.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

So yeah. So I would say, you know, maybe just to go on to the next topic, and then we can circle back if you want to do a deeper dive here. For people who are already doing some types of regular exercise, well actually I’ll say two things. If you’re not already doing any exercise, doing something is great. So find whatever type of exercise you will actually do consistently. That’s step one. If you’re already there, you’re doing some type of consistent exercise, try to incorporate a different type, number one. So if you’re doing weight training, try to also engage in some steady state or some high intensity interval training. If you’re doing high intensity interval training style group fitness classes, maybe try also doing some steady state or doing some more resistance training. And number two, probably the bigger thing, is that in order to create a hormetic effect, it’s critically important to understand that you have to be pushing the boundary of what your body is currently capable of. You have to challenge yourself. And if you’re not crossing into that territory where you are uncomfortable and it’s really hard for you, then you’re not creating a stimulus for adaptation. So you want to be doing that on a regular basis. And that applies across the board to every type of hormesis.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That’s such a good pearl. Everybody can gauge their own level of discomfort in exercise.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yes. So some of the other types of hormetic stress. Breath work. Breath holding is a wonderful form of hormetic stress. And it’s called hypoxia hormesis. There’s various ways of doing it. You could step into a low oxygen chamber. It’s a very expensive way of doing it. Or you can do breath holds, which are free. And I have a program about this called “Breathing for Energy.” It’s one of my absolute favorite ways of doing hormetic stress, particularly for people with chronic fatigue or chronic fatigue syndrome, because it tends to be a much better place to start than exercise is as far as a hormetic stress, because you’re stimulating a lot of these mitochondrial adaptations without actually exhausting your pool of energy, like exercise does. Exercise uses a huge amount of energy, whereas breath holding does not. So that’s something we can circle back to. Thermal stress. Sauna and hot baths. And cold. Cold baths. Ice baths have become popular in recent years. Both types of stressors are wonderful for mitochondrial health and profound benefits for both. I’m a huge fan of sauna in particular for people with chronic fatigue. Fasting and intermittent nutrient cycling is another great approach to hormetic stress. And there’s certain kinds of chemicals that act as hormetic stressors. And there’s a whole class of hormetic stressors called xenohormesis, which are phytochemicals, from plants, that act on the same pathways as hormetic stressors. And there’s also some other types, like light. For example, UV light, red and near-infrared light, also act as hormetic stressors. So that’s a brief overview of kind of the different types.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. So let’s pick a couple of these to dig into. But before we dig into ’em, can you explain how, so you’ve just given us a whole bunch of information, so how do we use that to rebuild our mitochondria? Where do we start? And let’s pick some to dig into. And I really wanna dig into your breathing one because I know you have this excellent “Breathing for Energy,” and I really wanna highlight that on this talk as well.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yes. So, there’s an individualization component that makes this a little bit difficult to answer. But let me start with sort of what the ideal is, and then we’ll come back to where one might need to start that’s far away from the ideal if their body can’t yet handle that. Okay, so the ideal is that you’re regularly incorporating almost every category of hormetic stressor that I just mentioned.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Every one? Oh, my gosh!

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Almost every one. Now some of this is easier than it might seem like if you are engaging in the right things. I’ll give you an example. I go surfing in the morning some days when the surf is good.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Cold!

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

I’m exposing myself to cold water. I’m exposing myself to sunlight. And I’m doing exercise. And I’m doing breath holds. All in the same activity.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, that’s impressive, Ari. Everybody should pick up surfing.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Indeed. And there’s more actually there too, but outside the scope of this talk. But I’m also getting light in my eyes, setting my circadian rhythm, which has an impact on mitochondrial function, many neurotransmitters and hormones. And I’m playing. I’m having fun, which is also something that’s important for energy. So, but yeah, you can find ways of stacking these together. So for example, let’s say you want to get a tub to do cold baths, as an example. Well, you can pair that with breathing exercises. I wouldn’t submerge your head, if you’re doing breath holds in water. I don’t wanna recommend that because there’s an inherent danger in that. But just as an example. You can do that. You can pair them together in the sense of like breath holds for 10 minutes, then get in your ice tub, while you’re outdoors getting light in your eyes, for example, or getting sun on your skin, if maybe it’s closer to the middle of the day, and then you’re getting some of those wavelengths of sun. Maybe you’re in a fasted state. Maybe you’re doing another… Another way of doing breath holds, another variation on the theme we can talk about is actually pairing it with physical activity. So you can do breath holds either in a stationary state, just sitting still, or laying still, or you can do them while moving or while exercising, and they create slightly different effects. So they can be stacked together, is my point, in a way that’s more time-efficient, then you can accomplish let’s say three different types of hormetic stress all in the span of 15 or 20 minutes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I got a good stack. So if you live in an urban area and you can have access to a health center or some kind of health spa, we have them in San Diego where they have cryo chambers, infrared saunas, red light therapy. And so I would go in and I would cryo/red light/sauna. Boom. Boom. Boom. Done. Three hormetic processes all complete within 40 minutes, and on with my day.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Exactly, exactly.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That’s how I do it.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yeah, that’s the way to do it. Basically that’s the ideal, is we’re looking at incorporating at least, let’s say, five or six of these categories of hormetic stress built into our lives on an ongoing basis in a systematic way where we are also paying attention to what is our personal dose that’s appropriate for us, what’s our Goldilocks zone, which differs dramatically between individuals. Somebody with debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome might only be able to tolerate two minutes of exercise before they’re wiped out. And somebody else might be able to tolerate hours of exercise in a given day, right? I sometimes go surf for two hours, I might rock climb, I might lift weights all on the same day. I might go ride bikes with my kids all on the same day. And I might do three or four hours of exercise, either moderate to intense exercise in the same day. My body can handle that because I’ve built up the capacity. So individualizing that, what does that look like? So somebody who is chronically ill or chronically fatigued has to start slow and start small. You start with one type of hormetic stress. And the types of hormetic stress that I favor the most for people with chronic fatigue are breath holding, intermittent hypoxia, in other words. Hypoxia is low oxygen levels in the blood. So by holding our breath, we are creating a transient low oxygen state in our body. And sauna. So those are my two absolute favorites. In part, as I mentioned before, we are not exhausting our pool of energy in our body as we’re doing it, but we’re creating a really strong stimulus for adaptations. Now, breathing in particular, and I highly recommend people sign up for my “Breathing for Energy” webinar where I go over all of this research in greater depth.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Where do we find it, Ari? We’ll talk about it again, but where is it located? Do you have a URL?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

You’ll have a link to it. Maybe you can link below this page or something like that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Got it. I wasn’t sure if you had a link that you could quote. We will make sure the link is on this speaker page. So people will have access to it.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Thank you. So we could talk for an hour just on breathing alone, but as far as this hypoxic training, breath hold training, it’s stimulating many, many different types of adaptations in our system. And again, I mentioned with exercise, there’s this sort of unique fingerprint of adaptation, depending on what type of hormetic stress you’re doing. And with breathing, you get a really unique beneficial fingerprint of adaptations that this type of hormetic stress is stimulating, in different ways from other hormetic stressors. So one is that it’s very cardiovascular and pulmonary lung-centric. And research has actually shown this, we’re stimulating structural changes in the interface between the alveoli, the little sacks of air in the lungs and where they meet the capillaries, the blood vessels. And this is where gasses are exchanged. This is where CO2 is dropped off in the lungs, where oxygen is dropped off into the blood, where it can then be delivered to the cells. So the actual physical interface between the lungs and the blood is changing to help facilitate more efficient gas exchange at that level, ultimately helping oxygen be delivered to your cells more efficiently. In addition, it’s doing the same thing at the interface of the capillaries and the cell, to get more oxygen into the cells. 

And it’s doing the same thing at the mitochondrial level, we are stimulating structural adaptations in the mitochondria themselves so that they can more efficiently consume oxygen and use it to produce energy. At the same time, you’re also bulletproofing your mitochondria against hypoxic states, against low oxygen states. So you’re building up that internal ARE, antioxidant response element. So that, that buffering capacity to deal with oxidative stress is now increased at the mitochondrial level. So we’re stimulating all of those things and we’re building up the physical engine of our mitochondria. At the same time, there’s research showing that this type of training can actually increase, it increases your work capacity. So your capacity to do exercise even without doing exercise. But if you subject people to this type of breath hold training and then you have them do a pretest on a bicycle, on a stationary bike, called an ergometer in research, and then you do eight weeks of breath hold training. Eight weeks later, they’ve increased their capacity, how long they can ride that bike for at a certain intensity by 27% just by doing breath holds.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Wow.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Now, in addition, it increases heart capacity, blood flow capacity, how much blood the heart is pumping with each pump by about 15%. And it increases lung capacity by 40% in untrained people. So if you take untrained people, you subject them to just breath hold practices. You get these massive alterations, adaptations in many different layers of the body, from your heart, to your lungs, to your mitochondria. And all of them are profoundly beneficial for helping your body produce more energy and have more stamina.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is such supportive information. I mean, I feel like you could be doing breath hold while you’re sitting working at your desk. Even if you had to stack, you know, your day that way. Like, okay, I’ve got these hours and hours of work to do, and I’m gonna be sitting here. I can do breathing exercises. Anybody can do it. That’s the amazing thing.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Absolutely. And it’s free.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. I love free. We love free. For the record, you can do hot and cold for free too.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Hot showers, cold showers, ocean, lakes.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yeah. You can. Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, you need to get the temperatures right to get in that Goldilocks zone. So initially if somebody’s untrained and if somebody’s not had any exposure to hormetic stressors in many, many years, then very mild, gentle states of cold, gentle states of heat, gentle states of exercise, gentle breath holding, things like that, will all provide an adequate stimulus. But the more that you regularly engage in these practices, the more that you’ll have to get dialed in with the right dosage to push you into discomfort and challenge your mitochondria to grow stronger.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So good. So good.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

As an example, on that point, in my “Breathing for Energy” program, I have a full seven levels of breath hold practices that take people from 10-15 second breath holds, and for some people that’s literally their maximal capacity, if you’re very chronically ill, chronically fatigued for many years, all the way up to beyond three minute breath holds.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Isn’t that insane? I mean, all of us think if you’re not breathing for three minutes, that’s brain damage zone. And you actually can do it, if you have practiced this.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yes, you can. And there’s another way to level things up even further, I briefly mentioned this earlier, which is you can start to combine breath hold practices with physical movement. It doesn’t need to be really aggressive exercise, ’cause then you won’t be able to hold your breath for more than five or ten seconds. But if you start playing with low to moderate states of intensity on physical movement, this could be things like yoga, or it could be other mobility practices, it could be walking, it could be, I don’t recommend swimming just by virtue of breath holding and water don’t mix well, as far as risk, unless somebody’s watching you, and other low intensity states of exercise, and you start to combine them together. Now someone like me, my maximal breath hold time stationary might be three and a half minutes. 

But if I combine it with moderate intensity activity, maybe I can hold only hold for 20 to 40 seconds. And that is giving a different stimulus and a unique stimulus actually to the working muscles. So for example, if I’m walking uphill, I’m stimulating certain muscles to work hard doing that, or if I’m on my surfboard and I’m swimming, I’m stimulating my paddling muscles and you can literally feel it. You can feel those muscles go into the hypoxic state where they go into this low oxygen state and they start, you can feel them burning as a result of being deprived of oxygen. You can feel that lactic acid production. And that too is another method of training. It’s actually been tested in numerous studies, for example, in elite swimmers, where they either have the swimmers do the standard swimming program, or the same swimming program but combined with breath holds. And they find many different unique adaptations when you integrate the breath holds into the training. You increase lactate threshold, and you actually improve your times as a result of increasing your lactate threshold beyond what the people who did the standard training program without the breath hold. So yeah, a variety of ways that you can approach this and get unique benefits with it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. I can’t wait to do this, this “Breathing for Energy” class with you, Ari. It’s gonna be really amazing. So you can count me in to be there.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Awesome.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So for everyone viewing, we’ll make sure that you have the link, so you can do it. And I’m laughing right now inside because I’m feeling really good about myself right now because every physical trainer I’ve ever worked with, or every exercise class I’ve ever gone to, I constantly get told from the trainer or the facilitator, “Laura, breathe! You’re not breathing. “You’re holding your breath.” And I think I’m a natural breath holder when I’m working out and now I’m thinking, “Well, that was helping me.”

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Well. Yeah, that’s somewhat of a different thing. You know, there’s also something called, I think it’s called “email apnea,” where some people just working at their desk on a computer will have a tendency to sometimes hold their breath.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I do that. I do that!

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Unfortunately, it’s not quite the same thing. You’re not gonna get the same benefits, actually.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Darn!

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

By doing it throughout the day and like not breathing properly, you’re actually just, all you’re really doing is just kinda putting your physiology into a chronic stress state.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. So this brings up a point. There is a technique, and there is a proper way to do this, and a way not to do this. So definitely go to the “Breathing for Energy” class. And I guess I don’t get kudos like I thought I did. So we’re in the last moments of this interview. As always, we could go on and on. I could interview you over and over and over again, Ari. You’re just so good at helping people understand this information in such an intelligent and easy, and, “Wait. And next. And next. Tell me more. Tell me more.” You just have this knack of guiding us down this perfectly guided road to the next thing. So thank you. It’s so refreshing to have you here on the summit. I wanna bring us back to one thing, just so we have a closed loop on this. And it was that comment that I asked about antioxidants. If you can give us the Cliff Notes version of if it’s okay for people to keep taking their vitamin C and vitamin A and those antioxidants where we just kind of left that little thing dangling there.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Okay. Well, promise me you’ll ask me one more question after this.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Because I would love to give you a really emphatic answer, but the truth is this is a very complex and nuanced area. And people might be disappointed in my answer. It’s complex in the sense that many of these different compounds, which are labeled “antioxidants,” some of them don’t even function in vivo. They function in vitro, in a Petri dish, as antioxidants. Some of them don’t function as antioxidants in the human body. Some of them actually function as pro-oxidants. For example, I mentioned this category of xenohormesis, phytochemicals, things like EGCG from turmeric, epicatechin, curcumin, sulforaphane, many, many compounds like that. Resveratrol, things like that. Many of these things are commonly referred to as antioxidants. But in vivo, they actually function as pro-oxidants, as hormetic stressors. They stimulate hormetic pathways. And for that reason, some of these compounds are called exercise mimetics because they literally stimulate some of the same hormetic pathways as exercise. 

So, you know, the first part of the answer is that many people who think of certain compounds as antioxidants, they’re just simply wrong. And those compounds aren’t actually antioxidants. Some things are true antioxidants. Probably the most well established of which is something like taking glutathione, taking vitamin E for example. However, there is a proper range, there’s a proper dosage. And going back to when we were talking about this earlier in this discussion, one of the things that I was emphasizing is that this paradigm of “oxidants bad, antioxidants good” is simply wrong. It’s way overly simplistic. And I illustrated that when I gave you the example of using antioxidant supplements, pairing it with exercise as a hormetic stressor. And by taking those antioxidant supplements, you’re actually doing something that’s counterproductive in that context. So one piece of advice that I have for people is don’t take any antioxidant supplements, whether it’s vitamin E, C, glutathione, NAC, CoQ10, any other antioxidant supplements that could feasibly be in that category, don’t use them within two hours of doing hormetic stressors.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. That is a huge tip.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

And two hours is some logical speculation. This hasn’t been tested precisely yet in the research where they’ve gone, you know, and they tested 15 minutes, versus half an hour, versus an hour, versus three hours. Like we don’t have that research yet. But two hours is a rough estimation of the time I think is necessary for the hormetic stress to stimulate the adaptation and get that effect without negating it by taking the antioxidants. And then keep in mind that what I said earlier, that building up your internal antioxidant defense system is actually much more important than using external antioxidant supplements. So yes, there’s a time and a place where it may be appropriate in certain contexts. Somebody’s got an infection, acute or chronic. Somebody’s got mold illness and it’s sapped their internal antioxidant reserves. Things of that nature, chronic complex illness. There’s absolutely an appropriate context where one might want to use many different types of exogenous antioxidants. But in the healthy state, it’s much more important to build up your internal antioxidant defense system than to chronically be popping antioxidant pills.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That was a perfect answer. Thank you. Okay. So one more question. As we wrap up here, you know, there’s an entire summit for people to watch. There’s a lot of experts on here. And there’s a lot of incredible information. Can you leave our viewers with some hope and some words of wisdom from you, and then finally tell us where we can find all your other work.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Yeah. You know, I mentioned briefly that this process of atrophy of the mitochondria is similar to muscle atrophy when we break a bone. You get a cast on. Eight weeks later, you get the cast off, and you look down at your arm and it’s half the size as the other one. Those muscles shrank in just a few weeks from not being used. And the same process is happening at the mitochondria level. But the good news is, just as a few weeks of using those muscles after you get the cast off, causes them to rebuild and go back to normal, the same thing can happen internally at the mitochondrial level. And that is a function of the degree to which you integrate these hormetic stressors in your life. So it is literally possible to go from that moped engine back to a Ferrari engine, maybe not quite to, you know, to be perfectly honest, maybe you’re not gonna be quite…

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

An old Ferrari!

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Quite as energetic as you were as a 16-year-old.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

A vintage Ferrari, a vintage Ferrari.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Vintage Ferrari, there you go. But you can make, you know, 80%, 90% of the progress in that direction through being consistent with applying these hormetic stressors systematically in the appropriate dosage in your life.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I love it. And where can we find you, Ari?

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Opt in for my “Breathing for Energy” webinar. That’s the best place to go from here. Particularly if you’re struggling with chronic fatigue, go sign up for that. The systematic breath holding practices are the single fastest and most powerful type of hormetic stressor that I have found specifically for helping people with chronic fatigue improve their energy levels rapidly. So I really can’t recommend more strongly for people with chronic fatigue to get on a breath holding regimen that’s systematic, that takes you level-by-level and week-by-week, into higher levels of breath holds.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. That’s where we’re gonna be, then. We’ll have the link below this interview. And I’ll be there, so come join me at Ari’s “Breathing for Energy” class. Thanks, Ari. Thank you again for always just being here, steady and strong, teaching us all about energy and mitochondria.

Ari Whitten, PhD Candidate, CES, PES

Thanks so much for having me. It’s absolutely a pleasure.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You take good care now. Bye!