The Healing Secret Hiding in Every Breath

Opening Brain Injury and Oxygen Overview 0:00

But what happens when you have a brain injury like that? What's going on? Why does your oxygen level decrease? And really, what's happening? Good question. So when you have a brain injury, whether it's ischemic stroke sort of thing, where it is a blatant reduction in blood flow and oxygen, or whether its another sort-of brain-injury, what happens is obviously the brain tries to protect itself and one of the things it does in the healing process is it generates inflammation. Welcome to Take Back My Brain with Lori Hammer, where real healing starts in the brain.

I'm Lori, a functional nutritionist and mom who's walked the path from anxiety and burnout to clarity and calm. Each week, we're going to dive into brain-based tools like amino acid therapy, gut health, fasting and faith to help you reclaim your energy, emotions and sense of self. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. So today, you want to stay to end because this is going to be a phenomenal interview because if you've heard of hyperbaric oxygen, and we're not going talk about that today. Stay tuned.

What if there's a simpler, more accessible way to flood yourselves with oxygen while moving your body? And you all know I am always talking about moving body for brain health.

Podcast Introduction and EWOT Guest Intro 1:24

That is exactly what exercise with oxygen therapy does. It's called EWOT. And today we had Brad Pitzley joining us and he's going to unpack exactly, what is that and how it can impact your body from head to toe. So Brad, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thank you for having me, Lori. Great to have you on. And you have an incredible, incredible like personal story. Like you had strange medical conditions, you were diagnosed with arthritis and malignant melanoma. By the way, I was diagnosed Like, I don't know what to say the secret, but you've discovered what oxygen and light therapy can do to the body.

And those are just basic foundations that God created in the beginning, oxygen, and lights, And we kind of forget about them. So I am so excited to dive into this, hear your story and talk about the life-changing things that are happening with oxygen therapy and red light. Awesome. I'm excited. to share. awesome. so I would love to hear how did this all get started for you? Yeah, I had weird medical things going on most of my life. I'd have like symptoms that would pop up. We'd go to the doctor, they'd give it a name.

There was no treatment for whatever the thing was and it would kind of go away. And then six months or a year later, something different. But generally I was in good health until about 15-ish years ago I started to develop autoimmune arthritis. Oh. Yeah, and that was obviously a really difficult diagnosis. They started to put me on a variety of drugs. The initial drugs didn't work. And then they put you on more powerful drugs, eventually we found stuff that worked. It would make me feel better for about six months.

We'd stop working. I'd find I was actually in worse health after it stopped working than before I got on it. They would double the dose. it would lift me up somewhat, probably not where I ever was before. Right. There's just kind of this stair step down. And I kept on that treadmill, I guess, until I got this diagnosis of melanoma. And the drugs I was on had a higher risk for cancer and specifically melanomas. Yeah. So that was kind of like a breaking point for me where I went back to my doctor and I said, what do I do?

Brad's Health Struggles and Lyme Diagnosis 4:00

Do I continue on the drug that possibly gave me cancer, and expect more cancer? Or do get off them and you know, live this disabling life of increased autoimmune arthritis. And he didn't have a really good answer for me. He was like, well, we'll just try another drug in the same class and cross our fingers, sort of attitude. I was, like oh, I don't like either of these paths. Neither one of them is going well. You know I had young children, and I'm a father, you, know. That story ends like they played Hollywood too.

Thank you. Yeah. Is there another movie? Is Nothing was working, diet, supplements, all sorts of different modalities. Eventually I got to a doctor and he said I want to test you for Lyme and I kind of laughed inside. I'm like I never was bit by a tick, I didn't have that bullseye rash, didn' have any Lyne. It was expensive for this test. Yeah, it is expensive. Yeah, it was like a $500 test. I was, like, I'll pay the $ 500 just so the doctor can get himself over this Lyme disease idea and we can on and figure out what the real thing was.

Well, they came back positive and I still didn't believe it. And I went back to him and was just like what's the chance of a false positive? And he goes, well, let me put it to you this way. You had the DNA of the Lyne bacteria in your urine. What do you think? Like, oh. It might be positive. Okay. I guess, I'll accept that. You know, by the time it was discovered though, mean I had so many problems. Brain fog, neurological things. Backs of my legs were super stiff. The best way I could describe it to people is they felt like they'd been beaten with a meat hammer.

Every step was excruciating and there's like maybe two pairs of shoes that made it slightly tolerable. No energy, just so many, I mean, probably 87 different symptoms if I were to catalog them all. It was, it was kind of rough. Yeah, that sounds really rough, but, um, That doctor started talking to me about mitochondrial health and the role oxygen plays in that. And that he's kind the gentleman who helped bring me out of the, out that cascade, the downward spiral, if you will. And so when did you start using oxygen therapy?

I guess it would have been about 2016, so about a decade now ago. Wow, that's amazing. So what happened when you started using the oxygen? Well, the first thing is the context is nothing ever worked for me, right? So, I would be in these groups and talk to other people who had Lyme disease or autoimmune or anything. This is a thing and I'd go do the thing, and they'd be like, nothing. And then people would like in the LyME community, if you do a treatment that like kills LyMe, often it'll give you something that they call die-off, which just feels like you're really hung over.

And you need to detoxify. And so I was like excited to find anything that would cause die-off. Nothing ever would, you know, antibiotics didn't do it. In nothing did. So he had me start this. Um, I ended up starting doing oxygen and probably for the first three months, didn notice anything. I'll be honest. Now most of our. Most of our customers who do it, some of them will tell you they notice something on the first time, certainly within a few weeks sort of thing. I'm like on a very tail end, I am like this total non-responder to anything.

And about the third month I probably only noticed because I was like symptom cataloging and I said, holy cow, what happened to these 12 symptoms? They've been gone for a while, they didn't just blink out and blink back in. But I started to notice I got more energy and I was more clear headed. And some of the aches and pains and weird stuff started dissipate. Interesting. So did you start with the exergen oxygen therapy or did he start like hyperbaric or something else? I started with exercise of oxygen therapy right out of the gate.

The doctor recommended I do one of these two and either do exercise with oxygen, therapy, EWAT or do hyperbaric oxygen. And so of course I picked hyper barics. I'd heard of it. Right. And then I looked at the price tag and how much the time commitment and it just, it wasn't realistic for me. They wanted me to be in a chamber for an hour and a half a day, seven days a week. The price was going to 50 to $75,000. If I flew out to Florida to do it, if I did it here in Dallas, that was gonna be more expensive.

Starting EWOT Instead of Hyperbaric 9:00

And I was like. That's a lot of money on an experiment when every experiment failed. And I can't, you know, it's not just the hour and a half in the tube. It's driving to a doctor's office and back, pressurizing and depressurize in that chamber. Was it going to be like three hours? I was like, I Can't keep my job and spend three. You know? Art of commission each day, It is just not realistic. So that quickly got eliminated and I moved over and they started focusing on EWOT. That is amazing. Explain to people what E WOT is.

Yeah, so EWOD is stands for exercise with oxygen therapy and it's just like it sounds, you do exercise while you're breathing near pure oxygen. So what this looks like is you'd be doing like, let's say you'll do a 15-minute cardiovascular session and you have a mask on your face. I actually have my mask right here. You have one of these masks on you face? And you breathe, it's got a hose hooked up to it that you breath near pure oxygen, 93%. And so in hyperbaric oxygen just as a comparison, what happens is you get in a tube and they pressurize it and pump in this near-pure oxygen.

And all of that pressure forces more oxygen through your lungs and into your bloodstream. And of course, once the oxygen gets on the other end of your lung membrane, that pressure from the hyperbaric chamber isn't doing a whole lot. And what I mean by that is if you were to look at your blood pressure and you are in one of these hyperbolic chambers that has 2.3 atmospheres, so 2,3 times the amount of pressure as you feel at normal sea level, your pressure isn' going up 2.,3, thankfully, right? It's because the lung membranes holds that back.

So all the work Hyperbaric does is just getting more oxygen through your lungs. And exercise with oxygen therapy, we're kind of... I describe it as we're hijacking all the physiological changes that happen during exercise. So when you exercise, your body is basically has all these changes and allow it to intake more oxygen and distribute more of it. You're breathing faster and deeper through your lungs. Your lungs actually thin out so more Oxygen can diffuse through them. Your heart beats faster and deeper, your blood vessels dilate, all these changes.

So we're kind of just taking advantage of those and you're breathing near pure oxygen. And so in a 15 minute E-Watt session, you can take in as much oxygen as you would in like 90 minutes in the hardshell hyperbaric chamber. It's a massive amount of oxygen, it's like the same amount oxygen you'd use in basically a full day. Wow. Is there any downside to taking in that much, oxygen that pure, that quickly? There really isn't when you're doing EWAT. So there is something known as oxygen toxicity. Divers who are diving long time under high pressures under sea for a long, they can get, oxygen, toxicity, what happens in oxygen.

Toxicity is the oxygen it gets trapped inside your circulatory system and it can't get out. But when you're doing exercise with oxygen therapy, you cannot get oxygen toxicity for a couple of reasons. One is we, we fill this large thousand liter reservoir. And as I mentioned, it's about the same amount of oxygen you'd use in a day. Well, that's still not enough to get Oxygen toxicity when You're at normal pressures. Okay. And then second is, even if it were infinitely large, you still couldn't get oxygen toxicity because when you're exercising, You're producing a massive amount of carbon dioxide gas, your exhale gas.

And that actually creates pressure inside your circulatory system that forces the oxygen out. So it's a very safe therapy as long as you are healthy enough for exercise. I love it. Who does this benefit? Yeah, we have so many. So I started this company to help folks with chronic health conditions and we're helping people with so much chronic conditions because at the root of it, one of the things I discovered is anywhere in your body, you have inflammation. You have low oxygen, your oxygen starvation.

And anywhere you'd have oxygen and starvations, and you had inflammation, those two coexist everywhere there's inflammation and as you know, Lori, like everywhere, any chronic disease has inflammation at its root. So do we have folks using this? We have them using it for all sorts of brain health things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's post-concussion, post stroke. We had people using for, to help with cancer, To help auto-immunity, help chronic infections like Lyme disease or long COVID. and just so many other things.

And people are just using it for its anti-aging and wellness benefits as well. Hey friend, just a quick break to remind you, if calming your brain is the missing piece in your practice or in you home,

How EWOT Works and Why Itu2019s Safe 14:00

my Mind Thrive certification course teaches you exactly how to do that with targeted amino acid therapy. So it's real science, real results, no band-aids. Enrollment is now open. Link is in the show notes. Back to the Show. Well, before we got on here, I was telling you I've only had very limited experience with EWOT, but the one time that my daughter, we're post-concussion three years now and she still has some challenges, so her one eye looks like it has a cotton ball through it. When she sees, she's like, the middle looks a like cottonball.

We haven't been able to heal that up. And so we were at a friend's clinic and he's like, Hey, just try this EY, you know, try. This. So she got on the bike, she put on a mask and she did it for like 15 minutes. She got off. My eye has not felt or seen this good in the last three years. I love it. Just that deeper, would you call it saturation of oxygen? It is. was amazing, like a healing tool for her eye. Now, this is something we're going to, we were talking, I said I need to purchase one of these so we can do it at home because there isn't any place around us that has this and it's relatively affordable for sure.

So I'm super excited to have this conversation, but what happens when you have a brain injury like that? What's going on? Why does your oxygen level decrease and really what's happening? Good question. So when you have a brain injury, whether it's ischemic stroke sort of thing, where it is a blatant reduction in blood flow and oxygen, or whether its another sort-of brain-injury, what happens is obviously the brain tries to protect itself and one of the things it does in the healing process is it generates inflammation.

Now what happens in inflammation is there's actually some really interesting research that started EWA that's really relevant here, which is a gentleman named Manfred von Ardien back in the 60s and 70s. This guy's a really prolific inventor. He invented like the scanning electron microscope and he was involved with the commercialization of the original television sets in the 90s. So he started to focus on oxygen and he was looking at oxygen in exercise. And one of the things he found is as we get older, we lose the ability to utilize oxygen, about 1% a year for every year past the age of 25. Part of reason for that is the linings of our blood vessels they're lined with cells called endothelial cells.

And these endophelio cells, they become inflamed as well. Your capillaries are thinner than a human hair. They're really tiny. These are the end runs of your circulatory system where the blood and the oxygen and nutrients get delivered to the tissues, including the brain. Now, when these things start to swell, the actually swell shut where no red blood cells can get by. Oh, interesting. Okay. So, red blood cells are actually larger than the capillaries themselves in a healthy human being. They always are.

And the only way they're able to get into these capillaries is they deform. they kind of fold up like a taco to fit inside these capabilities. But two things happen with this inflammation. One, the endothelial cells swell shut, so they no longer have room. and the redblood cells themselves become more rigid with inflammation, So they can no can longer fold-up. So now all of these cells downstream go the fancy science term as they go hypoxic, which means they're oxygen starved. Right. So, now they don't get oxygen.

Luckily, our body has two ways to produce energy. One is aerobic respiration using oxygen, the other is anaerobic where it can produce the energy without oxygen so the cells become anaeroic. And when your cells become anaerobic, the first problem with that is an anaeroic cell produces 20 times less energy than an aerobic cell. So it's a massive decrease in energy. Now, if you're the cell and you just lost 95% of your energy source, you are in like survival mode. So you stop taking out the trash and detoxifying, and that's a bigger problem because anaerobic respiration produces a massive amount of metabolic waste compared to aerobic respirations.

So lactic acid, metabolic wastes are building up inside the cell wall. You stop doing even some of your core functions well. you're just kind of trying to get by. And you no longer have the energy to repair. regenerate, et cetera. You're just trying to survive. And so when we have injuries in the, so we already have this inflammation in our circulatory system. Then you have an insult or an injury, and particularly in brain, because the brain uses 20% of all of our oxygen. It's about 2% our mass and 20 percent of oxygen utilization.

So it's an incredibly oxygen hungry organ. And very oxygen dependent. So now you have an injury, it's causing inflammation that's adding to all of this circulatory issues and it is causing a lack of oxygen delivery.

Brain Injury, Inflammation, and Oxygen Delivery 19:30

Lack of Oxygen delivery is creating toxins building up inside the cell walls. They're not working as well. they're Not able to regenerate and repair. And they're just trying to get by. And so now you've got this injured and damaged tissue and it can't even think about fixing itself. It's just, trying, you know, it's trying just to make it through the day, so to speak. So it becomes kind of this self-reinforcing thing because these cells that are in the survival mode are also producing all these acids and metabolic waste which are causing more damage, which is causing inflammation.

Now what von Arden discovered in the 1960s and 70s, which is really the birth of EWOT, was that when you had folks do even just a few sessions, like your daughter noticed, it creates this profoundly anti-inflammatory impact on the circulatory system. So now your capillaries reopen up and now the red blood cells are able to start getting through there. But it also does something else that's really kind of cool. So our blood is made up of several components, white blood cells, red blood cell, which are the primary oxygen carrying vehicle.

And then there's blood plasma. Blood plasma is like this clearish brown liquid. It's mostly water and it's what the red and white cells ride on. Okay. Is this the stuff you donate when you're poor in college? What's that? It is. And we don't want to know what you did with that money. We don' want know, but just know that I did it. So the blood plasma, it carries all your nutrients and other things besides oxygen. But it normally doesn't carry very much oxygen and maybe carries like two or 3% of all the oxygen you have in your blood.

When you breathe a massive amount of oxygen like you're doing in EWAT, there's something called the Henry's law, which basically states that gases that normally couldn't go into solution into this blood plasma under normal circumstances, under these special circumstances can saturate this plasma. So now we've increased the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood, but it's even greater than that because blood plasma is like a thousand times thinner than a red blood cells. We talked about these choked off capillaries.

Even before we have that anti-inflammatory effect, we can get plasma through those small openings and to all those cells because we're still delivering food and nutrients to them, just not oxygen. But now we're delivering with those food nutrients, oxygen that's in the plasma. And so we immediately re-oxygenate them and then we create this anti-inflammatory effect. So when you're not doing EWOT, you are still delivering oxygen to these cells. It's like bringing them back online. Wow. Tell the audience what kind of success stories you have with specific brain injury kind things.

You know, one of my favorite brain injury ones was a gentleman who had concussions and he, He came to us and he had had concussions and was a tax preparer. He would describe how in the afternoons he would become very foggy, he couldn't think straight, and would get angry, which is pretty typical of some of these brain injuries. And he'd lose control of his emotions and they would kind of flare. So it was very difficult for a job like that, high cognitive load obviously. And so the first time he did it, he, did a session and then he called and said, Hey, that was amazing.

He's like, after my first session, I felt clear headed for the time, for, the rest of the day. he's, like he didn't do it the next day and he said he kind of fell back to baseline. And the, day after he was back and his great afternoon, but over a series of just a few sessions, He was like. It got to the point where it would last me two days. And like, I felt great in between sessions. So I wasn't having any, you know, and then my favorite story of his was he said like he was a couple of weeks in and he had a, he, uh, He was in Texas and had to go out to Florida for a business.

conference and he, um, he told me this story, how he was like looking around for an oxygen bar, trying to make sure he got oxygen. Cause he's a freaked about the idea that he might flip backwards sort of thing. Now oxygen bars not going to give you the same sort benefits, but his was pretty profound and pretty quick. I don't know why I couldn't have had that quick of a response, I wish, but I also, my brain fog was, like I know this intimately, because I was there like, My brainfog was horrible.

I like was abusing caffeine as much as I could. It was like that small window where I can get enough caffeine, where my head got above the clouds. A sip later, and I'm in jittery land and useless. But that small window was like, I lived for those like 10 minutes of clarity, so to speak, when I could get them on certain days. And it was so hard. I was in these meetings and I just couldn't listen to what people were saying. They'd ask me a question and then I'd, you know, was trying to like fumble around and say something that I didn't, that sounded cogent.

But I mean, it's amazing how much it can help. If you're, I mean, and there's a lot of research actually on EWAT for like memory and cognitive performance. So it's not just, you know, as things we've heard, there actually is more good research because E-Wat's beyond being used for. wellness benefits, it's also used for sports performance benefits and a lot of, uh, like the U S Olympic teams and others have used them and done a bunch of research on sports, performance and memory and decision-making and all that sort of stuff.

So really helps there. We've had folks who are using it with, for Alzheimer's, some really good stories I've seen there. There's a really well-known doctor, Dr. Bredesen, and he's got what he calls the recode protocol, which stands for reversing cognitive decline. And they've started to incorporate EWOT in the last few years into that program. They've done some measurements. I know one of the doctors there did some like blood measurements to look at, you know, blood markers before and after, and that was pretty interesting as well.

Yeah. Have you seen a profound difference with like anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD kind of things? Yeah, we've certainly with, ADHD with focusing, I've heard some of that. More impact I have heard on depression and anxiety definitely. So, at the root of it, When you're in a depressive state, you kind of in, uh, a low energy state. Right. Like by its nature. And so the reverse is actually true when you, when can bring more energy into the body. It just, it makes you feel more alive and makes, and I've seen it in so many folks.

I know like, yeah, I knew personally, II dealt with a lot of that in the depths of kind. when I was really sick too, so. Right. And I would assume that it really boosts your immune system. So if you're struggling from Lyme disease or Epstein-Barr or post-COVID or all those kinds of things, that would be beneficial as well. In multiple ways it is, yes. It boosts the immune system a few different ways directly. And then of course, a lot of these infectious agents can't live in an oxygen-rich environment.

Lyme is one of those where it literally creates oxygen depletion wherever it's living in the body. So when you restore oxygenation, because what happens is low oxygen drives inflammation, inflammation drives damage, damaged tissue is easier to infect. And the immune system's weaker where all that inflammation is going on and it's busy trying to repair the damage. And so these infectious agents can live in those environments. So when you kind of change the terrain, you actually make it inhospitable.

I love that. I loved that so much. And it's just oxygen, right? Exactly. Right. So how long did you have to go before you're like, oh yeah, this stuff is making a huge difference in my life? Because you know, you are the fringe people, that takes so many more. Yeah. Unfortunately, I don't take much pride in that. Right. We don' want you to be that way, but that's just kind of the way it is. Yeah, yeah. I am definitely that I said for me, it probably took three months to notice some of that was probably, also kind block a lot of it out in order.

EWOT Success Stories for Brain Fog and Cognition 28:30

Like I was in a survival mode where it's like, couldn't pay attention and ride the roller coaster up and down on each symptom. And I just had to kind March 4th, but by three months, it was a very noticeable difference in my change. And then by a year, I remember when I went back in to check in with the doctor, he was shocked at how different I was. He didn't ask me a word before he said, wow, you're looking better. It was that noticeable. His next question was, are you working on your mitochondrial health?

And I said yes, and he's like, what tools are using? And when I described the oxygen he started, he asked if I would start making him for his patients at that moment. He was like, that's how impactful my change was to him. And that was actually the birth of the company. So within a year I noticed, you know, and then the interesting thing is I notice beyond just like recovery from sickness. general wellness and improvements in my wellbeing continued into like my third year. Sure. That's kind of shocking to me because imagine you're like sedentary and you decided to just start exercising.

And you do the same exercise a few times a week. You'd figure by the time you get to three and six months, you kind a plateau, right? Like your body's used to it. Yeah. It's so, it's, so much different with this. and it was like kind shocking that like I kept, I'm like, Holy cow. I've, You know, like. just kept getting better and better so to speak beyond what I would call my baseline to like a level that I wouldn't have expected to recover to. Well, and I think people don't really understand that.

Like you were so committed and so consistent with, you know, your healing modalities and sometimes it takes a really long time for the body to respond. And so you go through and your company's called, 1,000 roads. You're going through those thousand roads and you're like, what the? Why is nothing working for me? And it's just being super consistent. You know, and you haven't tried everything, right? Let's go back to the basics and we're going to talk about red light therapy here shortly too. Like light, therapy and oxygen therapy, getting in the sunshine and hydration and salt, basic amino acids, all those kinds of things.

Sometimes it just takes your body a long time to really respond and repair. It can't detox until it feels safe enough to detox. You can release things or go to the next level until you feel safe at the level that you're at. That's one of the biggest things. Dedication to your health, it's a long-term thing. I feel better at 52 than I did at 42. Like I'm just so consistent with my health. You can't let up, you know? You're absolutely right. Yeah. It, it is. And I think like one of the things that drew me to these modalities, what I always described, like when I was sick with Lyme, You were trying all these different things, and I would say the hardest part about, one the hard parts about having Lyne is what, I refer to as the ceremonies.

Every night I'm hunting the pills for tomorrow. and then you're spending this much time doing an Epson cell bath or in a sauna and each one, of them seemed reasonable. But then you stacked it and you found you're spending four and six out. And it's like, how can I like literally, I can't, even if I could do all this, there's no time left for me. By the end of the day I feel better and then I go to sleep and I start over again. Yeah, and then you just kind of throw your hands up and you say, you know what, I can't do it.

I'm just giving up sort of thing. And I saw that so much and I've felt that myself many a time, but what was good about this is like, EWAT is something you can do in your home, 15 minutes a day. To your point, it does a variety of things. It improves your immune system. it improves you energy level, like not just, your alertness energy level but like in a cellular level which means all your systems can do their their job at a you know better. It improves your detoxification actually oxygen is critical for detoxication that's rarely talked about actually 80% of our detoxifications happens through our lungs.

And the rest of it requires oxygen to break down and oxidize complex chemicals into something simpler our elimination organs can handle. And so it was like one of those that was a no-brainer for me because I could find time to do it. It was 15 minutes is something you can find. That's the problem. I think hyperbaric is really good for certain folks in certain situations, but it's more of a heroic thing. You can go do it for a week or a month or month and a half, But can you really spend 60 to 90 minutes in a hyperbolic chamber consistently over time?

EWOT for Mood, Immunity, and Chronic Illness 33:30

That is a difficult hill for most of us to climb. And that's same with a lot of protocols. I couldn't agree with you more that it does become difficult with time to manage all of the ceremonies, as they call them. Yeah, for sure. So with Ewok, can you use it on a bike and a rowing machine? How do you do it best? Yeah. Basically, I recommend that folks use any piece of exercise equipment. Treadmill. that they prefer best, because as I said, if you're gonna, we want you to do it for the long haul.

We want to you do a few times a week, three to five times week in perpetuity, quite frankly. And most folks, they get through a year of it, and they're like, I'll never stop this. It's just the benefits are for amount of time. I would never wanna stop it. But. Does the exercise have to be at a certain level, or can you sit there and just use EY? I mean. Great question. You know those little pedals for old people? Yep. What level of exercise do you have to have? That's a great question. We have folks who expand the spectrum.

Obviously, we've got these folks that are using performance maximization. Then we have 80-year-old folks with Alzheimer's and balance issues. It will modulate to you. One of the cool things is, Let's just say you were exercising today and then you put on the mask. The first, the very first benefit you notice from EWA is the exercise gets immediately easier. You can do more with less perceived effort when you're breathing the oxygen. So a lot of folks who don't think they can stuff, find they could do with the Oxygen mask on.

But we have folks that will start slow walking on a treadmill, stretching in calisthenics, using, like you are talking about those little under desk pedal bikes. even jumping on a rebounder, and then it will quickly also help you improve your athletic endurance faster than just the exercise alone would. And so as your endurance improves and your capabilities improve, it's naturally easier to do more. We just tell folks the goal is to start where you're at and let the EWAT help increase your endurance and do it more over time.

Love it. I love it, I loved it and so you also incorporate red light therapy. So let's dive into that. If you're watching on YouTube, you know, his head's like glowing with red lights. And I have my redlight on all the time. You know laser therapy, red-light therapy and oxygen. It's all so healing and it's just all such basic stuff. Tell me why you love red Light therapy? Well, EWA and Red Light Therapy work wonderful together. They both target mitochondrial health at their basis. Before you go on, would you put a red light panel while you're doing your exercise and doing the EWAT?

Can you do that? You can do. What we normally have folks do is do IWA and then immediately after do red light and Alex. Alex explains to you why there's a good reason for it. It's pretty cool. So we talked a little bit about the science of oxygen utilization. And as we get older, we lose the ability to utilize oxygen. But then we go to IWA and it helps reestablish more youthful oxygenation and we're using that blood plasma to increase oxygen carrying capabilities of the blood. So now, what we've done is we re-established oxygenations to a bunch of our cells and, we got an excess supply of oxygen right when we get done with IWAs.

Now what red light does, the benefits of redlight come from it stimulating the mitochondria, which are the little organelles inside our cells that use oxygen to produce energy. So first we. do EWOD to create a massive supply of oxygen inside of our circulatory system. And then we use red light, which what it does is it stimulates the mitochondria to increase oxygen demand. So when red and near infrared light hit our cells and our mitochondria, it causes through a cascade of fancy terms to effectively cause the mitochondrion

Consistency, Home Use, and Exercise Options 37:30

to pull in more oxygen and produce more energy. So when you read about benefits of red light therapy, whether it be cognitive benefits or skin and collagen benefits, or bone and healing benefits. They all come from the same place. They're programming our cells to produce more energy from mitochondria by increasing oxygen demand. First, we start with oxygen, demand, and we increase the oxygen supply in the system. And then immediately after we do red light and that increases the Oxygen demand so now we're taking more of that oxygen and converting it into energy so that our Cells have more Energy to repair, reproduce, etc.

That's amazing. That just like, that's on steroids. Yeah. It's really cool. And it's, they partner so well, because as you think about it, EWOD's from what I call from the inside out. You start breathing from your circulatory system out to your, your cells, and then red lights from outside in, so it also causes some vasodilation, blood vessels getting bigger and some increase in circulation. So you get done with EWOT, you already have higher circulation and it maintains higher circulations for a longer period of time.

And it's helping drive more of that oxygen and that blood plasma deeper where it needs to go into the circulatory system and the tissues. I love it, I loved it. So red light therapy, so there's red, there is infrared, also other sorts of light spectrums. But what's going to be the best one for somebody who wants to use it like three to four times a week for what we've been talking about? Well, I recommend a combination of both. And here's the reason why. The reason red light and near infrared light therapy is necessary is because it's something we're starved of.

If we go back to away from modern times, we spent a lot of time outdoors where the sun provided those spectrum for us. And when we moved indoors with artificial lighting, we purposefully screen out red and near infrared light spectrum. The reason is, is they're not very energy efficient. Near infrared is experienced by the body as heat. No one wants to heat the room up with the light. Whereas the blue lights and the yellow lights make it easier to read and see things. So. For the striving for energy efficiency, we've cut the spectrum out and we spend all this time indoors being, you know, being starved of red and near infrared.

So part of it's about reestablishing that natural balance that, that we were given. Now the difference between red in near-infrared is really what they target. The difference is, really targeting depth.

Red Light Therapy and Mitochondrial Support 40:30

Light generally tends to focus more on the skin and subskin levels. Near infrared will target deeper tissues. It will go deeper into the brain and the organs and everything else. But obviously when you pair them together, you're getting both of those benefits. You're extending the oxygen utilization benefits to all the cells in our body so that we can be at our best. That is awesome. Man, this is such a great conversation. So tell the folks what you have available for them. Sure. So we sell EWAT systems.

We sell two different systems, they both produce the same benefits. Really, one is about faster, making machine ready for use faster. It's generally the one you pick if you've got multiple users. it has a longer life because the machine itself runs for half as much time for each time you use it. But both of them will give you the exact same benefits. Really, we started the company on trying to make these technologies affordable for people so they could experience them in their homes. And then we also sell red light panels.

We have three different ones. we have two panels that are generally for full body. So they cover a large swath a year of your skin and your surface area. You're getting systemic benefits. It's targeting a lot, a larger amount of tissue at once. And, then, we sell a smaller panel. which is really for spot treatment so if you're just interested for instance in brain health and that was it you didn't care about the other stuff you could use it for that or if he had a joint that hurt you can use that for etc.

Okay that's awesome. Now finish telling the listeners about your recovery like you look amazing and you feel good right now so how did it all end up for you? You know it was It's been pretty amazing. Like I said, probably a year in I felt a lot better. By two years, I was back to myself. And by three years I shocked that I better than I really could have ever imagined being. I had an aha moment a few years ago. I was running this business at the time. And I'm like, how did I get here?

Products, Recovery, and Closing Remarks 43:00

faking it to make it at work. I didn't have the energy to get through a day. And it's kind of your point about feeling better today than you did 10 years ago. Every year since then when someone makes a joke at your birthday or whatever, it was like, oh, how does it feel? I'm like better than it did when I was 35. Yeah, like aging is amazing. You're like I would tell folks I am aging in reverse in the sense that my capabilities are so much better then they were then. I guess the message I would tell to your listeners, anyone who's dealing with health challenges is, you know, maintain hope.

There is an opportunity, if you can be hopeful and curious and looking for something that will help you, You can get there. Our body is amazing. It's got amazing capabilities to heal. Was in an incredibly difficult, low, lonely spot when I was at my lowest. And I, you know, I would have gotten 40% of the way to where I am today at that point would've been a miracle to me, to be quite honest with you. Um, but today I have my health back, You know? I no longer have issues that functionally affect me in any way, shape or form, really.

That's amazing. God is so good, right? Amen. The body can do amazing things if we just remove those interferences and give it what it needs. And oxygen and red light therapy is key to what the body needs in every aspect. So Brad, thank you. Thank you so much for being on here. All of Brad's information will be in the show notes, so make sure you click on all his links and follow him. You know, check out his EWAT, his infrared, all of those, or his redlight therapy and all those things. We really, really appreciate you, Brad.

Thanks for coming on today and sharing. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone else for listening. I appreciate each and every one of you. God bless you and I will see you in the next episode. And if you're ready to start your own healing journey, explore our courses and our coaching programs at lorihammer.com backslash store. So until next time, remember you cannot medicate away a nutrient deficiency and healing your brain isn't just possible, it's powerful.