Ep. #275: Is Meditation as Great as Everyone Says? An Answer, According to 20 Studies

A meditation protocol is exercise to your mind, like a training protocol would be exercise to your body. A set of rules to roughly follow to get the desired effect.

Hey, Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics and it is that time of the week. Time again, time to talk about interesting things related to health and fitness, specifically this time around, we’re going to be talking meditation. This is something I have been asked about a lot over the last few years.

And honestly, I had put it off because while I had tried it myself and didn’t really notice any benefits. And so didn’t want to spend the time doing it. I was reluctant to write or speak about it. Because I knew that it was going to require a lot of research to do it justice. And while I enjoy doing research, I have a lot of other things on my plate these days.

And so this is something that kind of just sat on my list as a, as something to do. If I have a good hundred hours or so that I can really commit to doing the research and basically. Curtis Frank, who is the co founder and former lead researcher and writer of examine. com. And now the director of research and development at my supplement company, Legion Athletics beat me to it.

He wanted to do it actually, because it’s something again, that he has been personally interested in. And so he had fun with it and read a lot of research on it and is here to share his thoughts. Now, you’ve probably heard that meditation can do many wonderful things for your body, reduce stress and inflammation, help you live longer, think more clearly, and so on.

And you have probably wondered how true these claims are. something as simple as controlling your attention and focus for just a few minutes per day really have such profound benefits? And if so, what are the best and most effective ways of actually doing it? Should you do body focus meditation? Should you do open monitoring or maybe transcendental meditation or something else altogether?

Those are the questions that we are going to be exploring in today’s. And as I mentioned earlier, unfortunately, there really isn’t that much research available on meditation. But Curtis read through everything he could find that is relevant. And in this interview, he is going to break down his findings.

I found it interesting. I think you will too and especially if you have wondered if it’s worth carving out some time every day to do some meditation. If it can actually make a difference in your life. If you’ve wondered that then this episode is for you. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills.

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Let’s get to the show. Mr. Curtis Frank, back again, welcome my friend. Glad to be back. So this is I’m looking forward to this discussion because this is something I’ve been asked about a lot. I’d say probably it’s, I don’t know. I haven’t looked on Google trends. It seems like the last six months or so, maybe a year has been the meditation craze has been building definitely in the last six months.

I’ve been asked more and more about it. And I hadn’t done that much research. I tried a couple of things that didn’t really seem to be for me. Like it seemed like a waste of time for me. So I just dismissed it and was essentially. Putting off doing what you did because I knew that it was going to be a pain in the ass and I have too many things to do.

So I’m glad that you’re going to do my job for me to the best of my abilities. At least like it’s a pain in the ass on my end as well. Yeah. But see, I can just let somebody else have the pain in their ass and so that makes me happy. Yeah. And it is my job. Do you have ass pains in an academic that’s in the job descriptions, brain hemorrhoids.

All right. So we were talking about meditation and Curtis he put up an article over at the blog around legionathletics. com really well, researched, very informative. And so I asked if he would come on the podcast to explain what is essentially in the article, but also there’s some other interesting tangents that didn’t make it into the article and little rabbit holes we can go down.

And so we’re going to start at the top here and assume that you, Mr. Or Mrs. Listener pretty much don’t know anything about meditation. You’ve heard of it. Maybe it means what’s sitting there and, Reciting mantras to yourself or not, or just breathing or whatever. That’s, I think where we should start Curtis is when people say, that meditation is good for you.

What do they even mean? What is meditation? Okay. So meditation, it’s something you can define in multiple ways. Most because meditation does have a large historical background and links to religion, different sort of habits and trials all over the world. But basically, when it comes to the purpose of enhancing some aspect of cognition, meditation seems to be, like, its technical definition is a discourse intended to express its author’s reflections or to guide others in contemplation.

And if you’re like me, that doesn’t help at all in understanding what meditation is. Yeah. So that sounds like talking about stuff that you think about or help someone else think about things. First time I read that definition, I thought, so just reflecting on your day in the shower, would that be considered meditation?

According to the definition, it is, but the technical definition and the practice of meditation are different these days when we tend to think about meditation, we tend to think about how well, take a few steps back. I just want to preface that our mind exists as long as it exists. It does things similar to how our bodies exist.

We can just move our hands around right now, just because we’re moving our hands around does not mean that our bodies are getting stronger. It doesn’t mean they’re getting weaker. They just are. But when we go exercise, we are putting a significant use stress on our body that in hopes that it will get stronger because of that.

And what we refer to as meditation these days are a collection of practices that could be seen as targeted exercise towards the mind. You focus your mind in a certain way in hopes that through this focus, your mind gets a beneficial trait added to it, or you just train an aspect of cognition better.

To sum it all up, when you hear about meditation these days, it’s like a meditation protocol is exercise to your mind, like a training protocol would be exercise to your body, a set of rules to roughly follow to get the desired effect. Interesting. And there are a few types of meditation, right?

There’s probably a lot more in like ancient texts that I have not even tried to read at this point in time. I need to like actually learn more languages for that, but in research, it tends to focus on three different types of meditation focus based open monitoring and transcendental, which sounds amazingly fancy focused attention is you have a cue or something you focus on and you focus on that one cue for a long period of time.

If you utilize your brain in such a manner to focus on one thing for 30 minutes, your brain will tend to adapt in ways that improve attention focus capacities. So for anyone who has ADHD, These focus based meditations may be up your alley. Open monitoring is related. You have a cue, something to focus on, but it’s more general.

And you focus on this general thing, but the specific topic of your focus, as long as it’s within that thing, changes. The best example of this is a book or mantra or something. You’re focusing on a chant, but the words you say change. Whereas in the first one, it might be like a breathing exercise.

You’re just focusing on one thing. Yeah, like you just focus on your diaphragm going in, out, then back in. Out and in for 30 minutes and the open monitoring, the one where your specific focus does flow like a river, if we’re going to get into analogies, that’s the one that tends to focus more on micromanagement and memory formation because you have to keep some things in the back of your mind as you’re focusing on other things, but it’s still sustained focus.

The last one, transcendental, it just avoids all cues. The first one was focusing on one thing. The other one with sustaining focus on multiple things. Transcendental is no cues whatsoever. So just allowing your mind to go wherever it goes? Not necessarily, because if your mind’s going wherever it goes, you will find that your mind is.

Instinctively looks out and seeks a cue to then build upon if you’ve ever heard a meditation where there’s like people just like crossing their legs going home for 30 minutes straight. That’s transcendental because the best way to practice transcendental is to get a meaningless term that serves as sort of white noise for your brain.

And you just do this for a while and benefits happen, I’ve never been to a transcendental. Meditation session in person. So it’s limited what I can say on it, but it’s basically using meaningless nothing in white noise to avoid all cues. That’s its own form of meditation. Okay. So what does the literature have to say in terms of benefits and effectiveness?

I do have to clarify when I said body focused attention, that’s actually a subset of focused attention because focused attention is you just focus on one thing for a long period of time. If there’s a religious devout follower in a church, just focusing on like a statue of Mary for 30 minutes.

That’s technically focused attention. But when you’re telling people to practice it, generally speaking, the easiest way for them to get an introduction to it is focusing on their body, focusing on their breathing or focusing on a specific muscle group. Why is it just sitting there and watching tv beneficial then?

Because that’s just focusing on a bunch of pictures and sounds that come at you. Why isn’t that, wouldn’t that be like an open monitoring type of thing? Technically speaking, yes, Because you’re focusing on the TV, but there’s multiple cues passing, but at the same time, it’s not interactive in any way.

When it comes to meditation, you need to be the one doing meditation. You need to be the one breathing. You need to be the one voluntarily going through things. To watch TV is like someone reading the book to you. Sure, the information is going through your head, but you’re not going out and seeking that information.

If that makes sense. Sure. And so in the, in that way, then reading a book might be more beneficial for your attention than listening to an audio book. Correct. And I think that’s actually one of the main reasons why parents are told to read to their kids and encourage reading rather than having them focus on TV because one of them is passive and the other is active.

But what about reading yourself versus listening? Reading yourself would be the active thing because you’re the one like opening the book, you’re the one moving your eyes would be the more meditative experience, to be honest, probably be chanting because you’re using your like, you’re using your body and your voice to say the words and in a way, you Conversations can also happen this if you’re able to focus on one particular topic, like we are right now for a prolonged period of time, but the specific thing that we’re mentioning is flowing.

That could potentially be an open monitoring situation, but I haven’t looked at the specific literature on how just. Conversations fall under the meditation umbrella term that makes me think of what’s the, I can’t pronounce his last name chicks and mix a helly flow. And the different types of flow experiences that you can have.

And you can have flow experiences in interactions with other people. And that’s one of the examples given is you can reach that state. It seems in just speaking with someone. Yeah, but whenever I hear words like flow, it’s weird, because I come from a really scientific background, and whenever I hear these vague terminologies that are like broken down digestible tidbits for the reader, if I’m not the person who made those digestible tidbits, it’s hard for me to understand.

That’s actually a reason why meditation research is so hard because there are so many different nonsensical words thrown around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know that his work is in hard science. Of course, it’s very much a soft science, but I think if you have, you read the book, I have not, Oh, you might like it.

Actually, I think that there’s definitely something to be said for the research that he has done. I don’t think he’s completely incorrect. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll probably read the book in the next few weeks, just because I’m going to be looking to meditation over the course of the next two years. It does seem to have a lot of benefits that I need to look into more exercise for your brain.

Come on, it has to be good. So let’s just segue back into those benefits then. So on the focused attention, what did you find in your scouring for the most part? If you are bad at focusing on one particular thing like ADHD or ADD like symptoms and your mind always wanders, this can help with those symptoms.

What does that mean practically for somebody listening? Cause let’s say somebody’s Oh no, I don’t have ADHD. I’m not, that’s not me. But how might you self diagnose? What are maybe a couple examples? If this happens when you try to do this, or if you can’t do this, we don’t need to label anybody, anything who really cares, but it’s more just.

the point of you could stand to improve your ability to focus. So there are some things that you focus on that are rewarding when you focus on them. A video game, for example, and there are some things that when you focus on them, there is no inherent reward just reading a scientific study it, you need to do it every now and then, but there’s no inherent reward in focusing on it.

If you truly want. To focus on something for 20 minutes that in and of itself doesn’t have an inherent reward, and you can’t because your mind wanders, then you need to focus on your focus. But if you are able to just put things aside and focus on one thing for 20 minutes with, No distractions bothering you, then your focus is pretty good.

I like that. So then getting back to some of the benefits then that you’ve documented in the literature on focus, attention, exercises, then maybe set a couple examples of the exercises that produce those benefits. I didn’t get too much into the exercises because for the most part, breathing exercises are what people Talk about most and Tai Chi was also researched a lot because it’s a set of motions that you do and you have to focus on your body, which is the best cue for beginners getting to focus attention, their own physical bodies.

And of course it could help with the mind muscle connection, but I couldn’t find any literature on that. I don’t even know how literature would prove a mind muscle connection. If you’re a, if you’re a fitness marketer, you just make fake citations. Then you get a bunch of bodybuilders to start doing Tai Chi.

Yeah, pretty much, which would be honestly a hilarious visual. We could, it could be done. It could be done. Oh yeah, definitely. There’s even that a photo shoot of a bunch of Mr. Olympia contenders just farming in China. They just have like little baskets. They’re just picking up all these cabbages, carrying them.

And I didn’t see that. Oh, it was hilarious because you have these six foot five, just beef cakes getting outlifted by the grandma who lives at the farm. I know I’m Googling right now. Bodybuilder cabbages maybe. Okay. Let’s let’s keep it going and I’ll see if I can find it cause that sounds hilarious.

But yeah, so open monitoring. I. I mentioned the benefits briefly earlier how it’s memory and micromanagement based, but I didn’t specify that for transcendental meditation, the benefits are related to reducing anxiety and trauma related disorders. I don’t think we got to the benefits of focused. We were talking about Tai Chi and then, Oh, it’s mostly just attention.

Okay. So it is just mostly being able to control your attention better. That’s the major benefit. There are probably some other benefits. Because the three different types of meditation activate three different generalized brain regions. So there’s probably some sort of other benefits that could come from it.

But again, I just, I read probably like 50 to 100 studies on meditation. And that is just, I’m not even through the frosting. There’s just so much literature on meditation. And a lot of it is really poorly written. So it takes time to parse through. Not surprising. But for the most part, and just again, sum everything up really quickly, focused attention, focusing on one cue and just that helps develop focus based skills, open monitoring, focusing on in general, but shifting your focus from one thing to the next improves working memory and micromanagement, transcendental, avoiding all cues and just trying to white noise your mind.

Improve stress, anxiety, and trauma symptoms. And that’s not conclusive, but that’s the general gist of the three types of meditation. Interesting.

Hey, quickly before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. And then, so if somebody’s listening okay, so then which ones for me and are there any other examples of things that can be done that, maybe make sure, take, you could do breathing exercises or you could do Tai Chi or you could do I guess would be.

Mantra related stuff or just the cueless white noise, but how would they determine which one should I try? And how exactly should I go about it? Do I have options or should I just, is it if this thing doesn’t really work for you in this one way, it’s not for me. Truth be told, I do not think I have the expertise to say that right now.

I would probably just. Take what we’re hearing in this, discussion we’re having right now and just keep an open mind to meditation and there will be a certain point in the future where you think I need this particular benefit. Maybe I just want to be better micromanaging things. So you think the open monitoring and then talk to a.

Meditation practitioner, see what they say, or you do your own research and just realize the general concept of monitoring folks on one general thing, sustaining that focus, but shifting your attention throughout applies to many things in life. Because again, the meditations that we have right now are pretty much cheat sheets to do a certain thing with your mind, but you don’t need to do them.

As long as your mind gets the benefit. And any downsides that you came across with any of them, any potential downsides? No, I’m uncertain about transcendental because I just don’t truly understand what the hell’s going on in your mind when it comes to transcendental meditation. When it comes to the two focus types, there’s really no downside because you’re not forcing your brain to do anything against its will.

Yeah. You’re not like putting any like foreign compounds into your body. You’re not punching yourself in the head or anything. You’re just doing something with your mind. And as long as you have the ability to do that, eventually your brain will just curtail it. If you were going to hurt yourself with focus based attention, you’re Your brain will prevent that hurt by making you lose focus.

Makes sense. Oh yeah, there’s a lot of safety switches or whatever. Just a lot of ways that your body will make sure that the mere act of thinking is not going to hurt. Sure. That makes sense. What about brain training apps? That’s anything. It seems just brain stuff is very hot right now.

Neutropics are hot. Brain foods are hot. It’s just, it’s definitely a trend. And so of course, then brain training apps, these games that are supposed to, I actually haven’t looked into them. It’s not really interested myself, but I know what are the common marketing claims, improve your memory. Particularly your working memory.

I don’t know if they say raise IQ, that’d be not surprising. It is mark marketing in any space gets shady, but the idea is that it’s just going to, it’s going to make your mind sharper, work faster and just make you better. Yeah. That’s open monitoring. Because you’re focusing on the game as a major thing, but you’re micromanaging things within the game.

Furthermore, when it comes to brain training apps, they don’t even, it’s not like a video game in that sense, but they’re actually putting in cognitive tests that are best at training your mind in particular aspects. So it’s a combination of the whole meditative state, but also just. General testing. So brain training apps are, I like them to be honest.

Which ones have you used that you like? I haven’t personally used them. I like the concept of them because a lot of times when you tell someone to focus, they’re just going to get bored. But if you make it fun in a certain way, they’re going to be enticed to do it. It’s like the same difference between going to the gym and powerlifting when you hate lifting or going to the gym when you absolutely love lifting.

You’re going to do it a lot more in the second case. Yeah. Or even the difference between exercise and training, right? It’s more fun to go in there with a goal and know that you have a structured system that you’re working with and as opposed to just going there to move your limbs and burn some calories.

Yeah. And even if we’re going on the exercise analogy route, I like powerlifting because I just like lifting heavy shit for three to five reps. I don’t like CrossFit. It’s just not something that I like doing. I don’t like You know, flail around like a dead fish on land or on a bar. Come on, you can do kip ups.

Oh, yeah. Kip. And it just reminds me of that first pull of a fish out of water and I skip. But yeah because I don’t like doing that stuff, I’m not going to instinctively give it my all. So when you put meditation, some of that many people may not want into a fun and inviting. system, it’s going to make people want to do it.

So they basically want to make themselves smarter, both instinctually and practically. And that’s a great combo. Yeah, sure. A lot of different types of video games would be that open monitoring type of experience, obviously, but you were talking about when we were talking, when we were just going over what we wanted to discuss, you had mentioned something I had never heard of bullet hell, Games is bullet hell genre.

Oh, I love them so much. They’re my favorite genre of games. A visual definitely work best. So anyone listening, if you put bullet hell into Google images, you’re probably going to see what looks like rectangles and a bunch of shiny fluorescent things in the rectangle. The general concept of bullet hell games is there’s you at the bottom of the screen and you die in one hit.

There’s your enemy. Who you have to hit for a minute straight, it’s just unfair. And you shoot like one projectile per second, your enemy shoots about, I don’t know, 5, 000 projectiles a second. It’s very visually straining. But at the same time, there are so many bullets on the screen that they’re usually in patterns.

So you have to look at the screen, see every individual projectile, and then you have to focus on pattern recognition and able to put them into groups and see how they move, predict where they move. It’s a type of video game that is also a cognitive test. And if you play any of these games, you will find that after about 20 minutes, your brain feels absolutely fried.

And the first day after you play these games, you sleep very well, and you actually see the bullets in your sleep. I know a lot of people get this when they play Tetris for the first time. Yeah, the Tetris effect, right? Yeah, like that comes from any cognitively yet visually straining task, and is best exemplified in video games.

But basically, I Played these games all throughout university and it actually really helped with my micromanagement pattern recognition and sustained focus the game. I played in particular. It’s called Toho. It’s like a Japanese game, but literally a run lasted for about 30 minutes and you had to remember patterns.

You had to remember where the bolts are coming from. You had to be able to avoid things on cue very visually straining and I could. Definitely say it was like a brain training app for me. And so that carried over in what ways? Cause okay, sustained focus. That’s pretty obvious how that can carry over into real life.

But how does the micromanagement and pattern recognition, how did you notice that in your day to day life outside of the game? Like why is that even practical or why does that matter? Whenever I was researching anything related to cellular structures or cytology, I would Research like five different topics, and then my brain would instinctively group them together based on similarities and beforehand.

I had to actively do this. I had to basically say, here’s one. Here’s another. How do they relate? But as I was reading, because I was so focused Use to pattern recognition. It just became significantly easier for me to connect the dots. Basically. That’s cool. Do you feel like those benefits have sustained?

Do you still play these games? I don’t play them as much these days, but the benefits do sustain themselves. As long as I do something that pokes at it. Yeah, sure. As long as you keep researching, you don’t have to, you could stop playing the games, but as long as you keep doing something that requires that.

Yeah, it’s like to use an exercise analogy because they’re the easiest to just understand if you spend four years of your life getting a 400 pound bench press and like you go to the gym each and every day to get that 400 pound bench press, then if you go to the gym, like once a week for the next decade, You could probably get that 400 pound bench press back pretty rapidly.

Yeah, once the benefits are there, as long as you just do a little bit of teasing every now and then and just remind yourself that the benefits are there, then they will for the most part stay. And what are your thoughts on let’s say reading, for example, could reading be considered a meditative exercise, like an open monitoring type, if you are really focused on what you are reading and not thinking about anything else.

Do you think you could get similar benefits from that, or even exercise to some degree where you spend a lot of your time? I’d say in my workouts, a lot of my time is definitely more body focused, right? It’s focused attention. Even if you’re just focusing on executing the lift or if it’s more of an accessory exercise, maybe you’re just focusing on the muscle and trying to.

Feel the muscle contract and so forth. I’m uncertain if you’re like on the exercise, at least I’m uncertain if you can apply to weightlifting specifically, but at the same time when you’re jogging, there is evidence that like when you’re jogging, you’re trying to seek out a rhythm, seek out a tune and then eventually you hit that zone state that could very well be focused meditation and You could argue that those benefits and meditative benefits are related, but I’m uncertain if weightlifting would qualify unless you just had some out of body religious experience because you squatted so much.

There’s always a possibility that it could happen. Transcendental squatting, bro. Yeah, you just like squad to the next plane of existence. You squat your astral body out. That’s a big hip drive. So what about reading? That’s a tough one because I’m not too much of a, I wasn’t too much of a reader in my childhood, but I do know that like reading is recommended for kids because it’s the whole active form of learning, but at the same time, maybe to be honest, I’ve never been pulled into a book.

But when people speak of being pulled into a book, they speak of something very similar to that jogging zone or the author they mentioned earlier talking about flow states. It sounds very similar. So there could potentially be some meditative benefits there, but I do not know enough on the topic of reading to explain why.

I guess, again, going back Chick chicks, mix a helly, however you pronounce his last name. Going back to that book, I think that you, take work, for example, if you can definitely get into that, at least that flow state and work where you lose track of time, you’re a hundred percent focused on what you’re doing.

I think of that as well. And that is, one of the things I personally enjoy about work is when you get to that point, when you have no distractions and you’re a hundred percent concentrated on what you’re doing and Feels like it starts moving quickly and so forth. There’s so many things on meditation that I just do not know yet, and I probably haven’t even given too many answers in this conversation.

But at the very least, if I can make you want to seek out meditation as a listener, I win it, it’s a competition. Now I win . To summarize even some of the stuff that you put in the article, so it’s if you are looking to improve balance and physical performance, then maybe some body focused or single.

Target attentive meditation would make sense. If you want to improve memory, open monitoring or mindfulness could help. If you want to improve handling social situations, you had written that open monitoring, mindfulness seems to be the one to go with there. And there are a few others. If you want to.

Share, any other thoughts on them? Obviously, improving intention is the open monitoring is probably the way to go there. And then you had mentioned here, reducing trauma, anxiety or PTSD. There’s some evidence that transcendental can help with that. And general stress and otherwise healthy people as well.

Like the whole relaxing yourself. Relax, reduce anxiety, reduce trauma, just being better able to cope with things. That’s all transcendental. And I have to defer to some actual meditation practitioner for that one because I have no idea where to begin in recommending people do transcendental. I should also mention a lot of, Listeners may find this interesting.

When we speak of the benefits of transcendental, there is a lot of similarity between the benefits of hallucinogens. And it is thought that transcendental meditation and hallucinogens act on similar functions in the brain. It’s the hallucinogens or the shortcut, possibly. Potentially, because hallucinogens themselves reduce stress, significantly reduce Instances of trauma and then would just increase overall well being if not abused, obviously, but it seems that transcendental meditation is like the exercise for these particular benefits, whereas hallucinogens are the steroids to this benefit, and I don’t really know what that benefit is like the actual function in the brain that these links these two still don’t know, but They are definitely linked in some way.

Yeah. And you have both in the case of meditation and hallucinogenic drugs. You have the people that, the religious experience that people report in both cases. So there’s, it would make sense that there’s something similar going on. Yeah. Actually, there’s one, like one last thing that I was just, when I lost focus about two minutes back, it was because I was doing this.

I was just trying to think of a way to do like open monitoring your body. And what I was doing cause just raise your hand for a second. You know how your hands there, but you don’t really feel anything inside your hand if you tense it up so that you’re like hyper sensitive to every like bone and joint in your hand.

Get that to a point where you’re holding it for a minute or so, and then try to roll that into a forearm flex, then up into the arm, then into the back, try to roll a flex throughout your entire body. I’ve been doing that for the past few days and it’s helping my mind muscle connection a bit.

I’m hypersensitive. My hands right now. It’s freaky. Quick. Do something fun with your hands now. Not that. I gave a thumbs up, but at the same time no one can prove it. That makes me think of where did I hear something I think is when I was researching for an article on sleep there may be a fancy name for it, but basically it’s where it, I guess it’s an open monitoring type of Yeah, I guess I’ll worry that or it’s a shifting.

Nah, it has to be open monitoring. We’re like, you’re, you start by focusing intently on like your big toe. And then you move to, and you do that for, I don’t know, 20 seconds. Then you move to your little toe or move to your next big toe on your other foot. I don’t remember exactly. It has to be.

Probably exactly what I’m trying to do right now. It’s a process. And apparently it helps insomniacs. If it has helped in some people who have trouble falling asleep in particular you just move up your body until you are unconscious that I know it’s safe, but it sounds dangerous when you phrase like that.

Yeah, just keep on going towards your head until you pass out. It’s safe, I swear. You’re supposed to be ready to go unconscious. But so just try when you’re driving, basically. Oh, totally focus on the big toe. Actually hit the clutch. Okay, great. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much everything we had on our outline.

So peoples who are listening, if you want to read about this and check out some of the research that Curtis has read and cited all over the article, head over to legionathletics. com. And if you search for meditation, you may find it in the top of the blog feed, but by the time you get there, you may not, it may have been pushed down by many other great articles.

So just search for meditation and it’ll come up. And you can also find a lot of other Curtis’s, a lot of other of Curtis’s musings and researchings on the blog. So if you look at the blog feed and you’ll find some of his stuff in there, if you click on his name, then you can see everything he has written and a lot of good things there.

And a lot of Quirky humor. You’re a quirky man and it makes it fun. Yeah. I was about to say, I don’t know if that’s good or bad. No, it’s good. That’s not a left handed compliment. I personally find it hilarious because I grew up on the internet. So I appreciate things that are just oddball.

Now for the people listening, we have a game where I’ve challenged Curtis to make his openings as Strange as possible where you come in thinking you’re about to read about one thing and then three lines in, you’re like, what the fuck am I actually reading? What is this? That’s like a high school creative writing class.

But so Curtis is getting more and more creative with his intros, which is great because when it comes to blog writing, actually your job is to get them to read the first line. And the first line’s job is you get them to read the second line. And so if you can work in some off the wall shenanigans in the beginning of articles, you’re going to keep people reading.

At this point, there are probably some listeners who go, eh, whatever, meditation, big whoop, and all that. So I found one study that I just find incredible because It just found 16 long term practitioners of transcendental meditation. These are the guys who for 16 years sat in a dark room going om for a while.

And this study basically, I think it, yes, fMRI. Put them in fMRI machines and said, do some meditation. Each one of them was, able to at will redirect blood flow to their prefrontal cortex. They redirected their own brain’s blood flow at will. That makes me think of Wim Hof and some of the weird shit he can do.

Yeah, like that’s what meditation could potentially do. I don’t know how it’s doing this, but it is. And we have fMRI data to prove it. So all you have to do is 20 years of chanting for who knows how many hours a day. So just get on that. Oh yeah, totally. But if these benefits apply to like video gaming, then I’m already a god.

Would you say you’re a generous god though? Oh god, no. Can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. I’m the god of pyramid schemes. Oh good. Pyramid schemes. It is the supplement industry, so that is at first glance, that’s like the prima facie evidence, right? So what, fMRIs or pyramid schemes?

Pyramid schemes. Oh, yeah. Oh, you work in the supplement space. Oh, so you scam people. It’s a fair assumption, but yeah. It is a fair assumption, which sucks. Yeah, no shit. But actually, no. And let me provide an overwhelming amount of evidence to prove otherwise, because that’s what it takes. And I remember I was talking with somebody who like their family, so I can diss them despite technically them also being customer but they wanted a vegetable supplement.

So I gave them Genesis and they’re like, I want 5 grams of spirulina. I’m like, here you go. 5 They’re like, great. They have it. It would taste like spirulina. Yeah, yes, that’s right. That’s the point. There’s but I want something that doesn’t taste like spirulina. That’s you’re not going to get spirulina then.

Can I have that? You No, it might just have five milligrams, yeah. It actually made me bitter, like to they need to try the acai berry because the new flavor, they’ll like that. That’s actually a big, that’s actually a big, oh, there’s a new flavor. Yeah.

Yeah. We released a new flavor. YeahI berry. People love it. Like it’s, it basically has just, it just instantly doubled Genesis sales. Like flavors are a magical mystery. It actually makes no sense. Adding flavors just means you sell more stuff. It doesn’t mean that you cannibalize sales at some point you have to, but we have not reached that point with any of our products.

It really just seems yeah, more flavors equals more money. As long as it tastes good that’s the downside of buying like, I think it was eight things in Genesis at once. I’m still going through them, so I won’t have the acai flavor for a while. Unless I want to waste it, which I don’t.

You are entitled to. Whatever you want, man. So we can, you can send you some us e mail. Let’s send me the entire warehouse. Don’t careful what you wish for. That’s a lot. I just might get it. That’s just, that’s a lot of things, man. All right. Now we have officially.

To generate it into just a mumble fuckery. We’ll cut it off here, but yes, I hope everybody enjoyed the talk. And Curtis will be back for something else. We don’t know what yet, but we’ll figure out something fun to chat about. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful.

And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out. It also increases its search visibility.

So And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at Mike at muscle for life.

com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by, seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in.

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