Podcast from: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2017/02/what-is-the-halo-sport/ [0:00] Introduction [8:13] About Dr. Daniel Chao [10:08] What is tDCS? [10:40] The Cortex and What Does It Do [18:34] What is Happening During the “neuropriming” Session on a Physiological Level [22:07] When Shocking Your Brain Can Actually Be Safe [27:30 & 30:00] Whether Something Like This Can Be Used For General Cognitive Performance Such as Language Learning or Focus [32:25] How to Use tDCS Stimulation For Video Gaming and Playing Instruments [35:19] Blue Apron [36:59] Casper Mattress [39:59] How is Halo Different Than ‘do it yourself’ tDCS on Reddit Forums [45:25] The Pro Athletes Currently Using the Halo and What They Have Reported For Results [53:20] Whether or Not This Type of Brain Training is Considered Neurodoping by the World Anti-Doping Association [59:50] What Happens if You Wear Headgear Is Too Far Forward or Too Far Back [1:10:54] End of Podcast Ben: Hey. What's up it's Ben Greenfield. If you're a fan of strapping odd things to your head to make yourself be able to do things like learn music faster or acquire skills more efficiently, you’re going to dig today's episode, and now onto today's show where we're gonna move from the crotch up to the head. Let's do this. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show: “So there’s a raw amount of electrical output that is related to your brain that is literally the battery for your muscles. So when you lift weights and you’re training to lift more and more weight, you are also training your brain. It's not just about muscles.” “You know the way we do research is very different. We have people come into our lab and half of the people get real stimulation, the other half of the people get what we call sham stimulation. So it feels like the real thing but it actually doesn't work.” Ben: Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield and last week I posted to Instagram this photo of me dripping with sweat in my gym, bragging about what I called, in that particular post, the most dangerous piece of workout equipment that I own. And it was not some kind of a
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it both ways. I've heard it from people who say they feel neurologically, like from a brain
standpoint, neurologically more recovered the next day and they would have otherwise.
I've also heard something that people called readiness, right, like there's like a readiness
to go or that you could assign at different parts of your body. And they feel neurologically
more ready much earlier than their workout. So what would have taken 20 minutes to
kind of get into the flow neurologically, they feel right from the very beginning. I've also
heard it your way, Ben, where people say, “Listen, I worked out so hard the day before
that the next day there's a little bit of a hangover.” You know, that's good and bad like a
good hard intense workout is going to help with performance. But you know the next day
you gotta take it easy. Yeah, because we are human and we do break, and we need to take
care of ourselves and we need to limit our reps. So you know our whole mantra is around
making every rep, like every rep is precious.
Ben: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel: Like the human body is allowed a certain number of reps. You have a lifetime
number of reps, and that lifetime number of reps starts counting down the second you are
born. And it is up to you during your physical prime to make the most out of those reps.
Ben: That’s something that’s actually been on my mind a lot lately while I’ve been
working out. Maybe it’s just ‘cause I’m getting freaking old and I’m thinking about dying.
I don’t know, but I really want to maximize my time in the gym, so I use like not thinking
about breathing at all when I’d work out. I’d just breathe the way I breathe and I’d work
out, and now I make a concerted effort to make every breath count. So I do a ton now and
we've done some recent podcast on this, when I’m in the gym or exercising outdoors, a lot
of nasal breathing and a lot of breath hold training because I figure from out there
anyways, I might as well make every second count. That’s kinda like my logic with using
this halo like if I'm gonna be doing deadlifts I wanna make every rep count. So if I can
stack on either side of the bar 15 to 25 extra pounds, or I can recruit my hamstrings more
efficiently because I've done the motor cortex neuropriming beforehand, I'll take it. Like
I’ll take every extra rep and so for me it seems like it's perhaps going hand in hand with
increased age but I agree with you on that every rep counting thing.
Daniel: Can I just add to that?
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: One thought. So we have some users use halo sport as an efficiency tool rather
than a performance tool. So there's a group of athletes that are like, “I will do everything
for every last bit of performance and let's go after it. I wanna set records for myself or for
the world.” And that's awesome. There are other sports that you train to a certain aptitude
and then it's about saving your body. For example the military, like the military, I didn’t
know this but for special operations, you need to train for years before your first real day
on the job, and even then you're still kind of learning the craft. So it takes years to make
one Navy Seal for example, a one Green Beret. And it's in the military's best interest also
the best interests of the soldier to keep that job. So part of keeping the job is not having
your body break to the extent that they can make their training more efficient. So they
out less training load on the athlete and I’m talking about technical athlete’s now, military
personnel. That's a good thing. So I didn’t know this but there are many Navy Seals that
are in their young forties. So Navy Seal could be an active military for you know 20 some
odd years before they retire from active duty. And that's a good thing because these are
such highly trained individuals like let's keep them fresh for as long as possible so that
they could stay on the job. And then also for football. So football is so physical. When
you're on season, it's more about survival than performance, and yet you still have to train.
So what if we can make that training more efficient.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Let's think about training load and minimizing training load to maintain a
certain level of performance aptitude. So yeah, it's about getting the most out of every
rep. The most bit of performance out of every rep whether it be to a certain aptitude and
you're done or just really going for it.
Ben: Right. Yeah, that make sense and that actually leads to the other question I wanted
to ask you and that’s this like whole concept of like neuro doping, right? And I know like
the World Anti-Doping Association from what I understand, hasn't banned like Lasik eye
surgery or the use of neurofeedback or the use of tDCS or something like that, but
especially we mentioned e-sports a little bit ago which is turning into like a billion plus
dollar industry in terms of it being like the Superbowl of gaming. So there’s athletes like
neurodoping with Modafinil or Aderall for alertness prior to competitions like that and
then there's also of course, folks who as we just mentioned like Olympians who are using
this device. Do you think that this stuff is going to remain legal? I mean, have you guys
looked into that? Do you know if WADA is talking at all about starting to regulate the use
of these kinda devices?
Daniel: So let me answer that a couple different ways. So let’s answer it like very
formally as defined by WADA. So WADA has three criteria of which if you have two out
of the three then you are considered illegal. First criteria is you get something for free.
Second criteria is that it is unsafe for the athlete. Third criteria is that it is against the
spirit of the sport. Okay, so the first criteria, getting something for free, that's not us. You
can neuro stimulate all you want but if you don't train, nothing's going to happen.
Ben: Okay. So when you mean getting something for free, you mean like it’s not that if
an athlete received like a free device from you it would be considered doping?
Daniel: Oh, not economically free.
Ben: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.
Daniel: Yeah, like so…
Ben: You still need to engage in deliberate practice when you use this.
Daniel: Right. Like EPO, you get free red blood cells. Steroids, you get free lean body
mass. There's things that you get, like Modafinil, you get free attention and focus. You
get something for free like fortunately with neuropriming, you get nothing for free. You
still have to do the work like nothing happens unless you feed the brain training
repetitions. Okay, so that's number one. Number two is around safety and again I'll just
refer to the data like our data, the data in the published literature, everything points
towards a safe product. And then three, against spirit of the sport. This is kind of a grab
bag. There's a lot of subjectivity around this. I think it would be hard to argue that using
electricity in the brain would be against the spirit of any sport like electricity in the body.
Like people used muscle stimulators for recovery, and for rehab, and these kinds of things
like we've been using electricity in the body for decades. I think it would be very difficult
for anyone to argue that using electricity the way we're using it is anything different from
how we've been using it historically. So, that’s the WADA criteria.
Let's just have fun and talk about performance enhancement in general. It quickly
becomes a philosophical discussion which is, again, I think it's just a lot of fun. If you
think about performance enhancement, most performance enhancing products and
techniques are actually legal. Like lifting weights is performance enhancing, right? Like
a good night's sleep is performance enhancing.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Training at altitude is performance enhancing even some weirder things like
sleeping in hyperbaric chambers, and the Lebron James liquid nitrogen thing where you
rapidly cool your body. That's also legal.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: So there's actually more forms of legal performance enhancement than illegal.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: But where something becomes illegal is you know, I think WADA does a nice
job this kind of crystallizing that with their three criteria.
Ben: Yeah, so is it free, and what are the other two, one more time.
Daniel: Yeah, you get something for free from performance. Safety.
Ben: Right.
Daniel: And then the third thing is it's against the spirit of the sport.
Ben: Okay. Yeah, okay. Well, that make sense. I mean, it’s a whole different discussion,
everything from lasik to chryotherapy, to all these other means. I guess the question with
this is like if some athletes are able to get it because they can afford it does that somehow
make it unfair for athletes who maybe can't afford something like this or don't have access
to it? You'd like, does the inner city basketball player trying to make it in the NBA, are
they at a disadvantage because they can't get like you know lasik eye surgery for their free
throws and then tDCS for enhancing their dribbling skills prior to practice?
Daniel: Well. It’s a 750 dollar device. You know if you're an elite athlete, you should
have the funds to have access to a 750 dollar device. It doesn't matter what country you
come from like, any of the elite sports organizations that I've ever been to and attended
some that, talk to someone that are more cash strapped. Like 750 bucks is something you
could still afford.
Ben: And by the way. it’s actually 6:30 if you stay in until the end of the podcast, we’ll
give folks a discount code.
Daniel: Oh, right. There you go. There you go. And yeah, we do and we have certain
discount programs like buying at volume, get a discount. Those kind of things.
Ben: Yeah, okay. I have a few other questions for you. Just a few practical questions
while I've got you on. First of all, why do I need to put water? It comes with a little spray
bottle to spray these little rubber electrodes. Why do I need to do that prior to using it?
Daniel: Yeah, so we still need a flow of ions to go. We need a bunch of positive ions to
go in one direction then on the other side we need a bunch of negative ions to go the other
way, and for that we need a solution.
Ben: Okay. Got it. So not just to solidify the connection.
Daniel: Right. We need a little bit of water. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but we need a
little bit of water to interact with your scalp so that we could have good electrical contact.
Ben: Okay and what if, because obviously the motor cortex is located on a specific part
of the head and when I open up the app it shows me where to place the actual headgear
like how to place it, and it even won't start the session until it's placed correctly, until it
solidifies the connection, but I mean what happens if you put this like too far forward or
too far back, are you like shocking areas of your brain you shouldn't be shocking or what's
gonna happen if something like that occurs? Like if I'm, well to give you an example, I
currently have a bicycle next to my gym and what I've been doing, when I use it prior to
workouts is I’ll hop on the bicycle and just wear it for 20 minutes while I’m doing my
cycling and warming up, and then I’ll hop off the bicycle and go do the hard stuff or the
complex tasks. But I wonder like you know when I stand on the bicycle or when I sit back
if like the headgear kinda moves forward or back a little bit like what's happening? Am I
risking something if it moves a little bit?
Daniel: Right. So we designed halo sport such that, with the understanding that there
could be some variability in the way people put on the set of headphones. So we've already
accounted for a centimeter of play either in the forward or backwards direction. So, and
we did a bunch of user testing on several hundreds people and we just ask them to put it
on. And greater than 95% got it right the first time. Where some people, we need to
educate some people especially some of the younger folks where just from a style
perspective they like to tilt it further back. That's not the way you wear halo sport.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: When you're standing up straight, the headset should be pretty much vertical.
And yeah, but for the most part people get it right the first time without any instruction.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: If you were to be really extreme about it, you would be missing the parts of your
brain that you need to stimulate for athletic training. You would be stimulating other
parts of your brain and there’d be really no downside. You just wouldn't get the upside.
Ben: Okay. Got it. So make sure that I really do have it placed over the motor cortex
when I use it.
Daniel: Right.
Ben: Alright. Got it. And then the other question that I had for you and this is just
something I found interesting was, before you developed this and help design it, you
developed this thing called a neuroPace, and from what I understand this is something
similar except it's actually like via a surgical procedure placed into the skull, is that
correct?
Daniel: Yeah. So my whole career is around using electricity as a therapeutic agent for
the brain. So our last project and this is where Bret and I, my now co-founder, actually
met so Bret and I go back like 15 years. We were both really employees at this company
called NeuroPace. So at NeuroPace we built basically a pacemaker for the brain. And
you're exactly right, Ben, it's an implanted product, so it's typically a 3-hour surgery where
a neurosurgeon delicately inserts electrodes into the brain with an electronic pulse
generator about the size of a small matchbox getting implanted in the skull. When
everything is kinda stitched up, its cosmetically transparent. You can't tell that anything's
been implanted so that's good. And also when everything gets stitched up, the equipment
under the skin has everything it needs to function autonomously. So it has its own battery,
it’s own computer chip, it’s own software, and it can function for three to five years on its
own. And what it does is it's constantly listening to the brain's electrical activity. Such
that if it senses an electrical signal suggestive of about to happen, it proactively delivers a
small electrical impulse to the brain to then normalize its activity. So you know, epilepsy
is a disease of seizures, they can happen basically any time, at unpredictable times, which
is problematic for the patient. It is a chronic disease. You typically get epilepsy when
you're very young and you live the rest of your life with it. It's a disease that's very difficult
to treat with drugs, unfortunately. So the opportunity to use a device to really help people
was something that we you know, I am really proud that we accomplished that at our last
company.
Ben: Yeah, that's interesting that you decided that for this particular thing. You’re not
gonna require Olympians to split open their skulls and implant a device to their heads.
Not quite a sale?
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. Well you know, that's actually one of the things that made us sad at
NeuroPace. Is that even some of our patients who are severely epileptic and were offered
this life changing technology, and you could see in their eyes that they can envision a new
life for themselves if they were to go through that surgery and yet they declined it because
they're too afraid of the surgery.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: So you know, what we want to deal with halo is really like get around that. Like
we saw an opportunity to build neuro stimulators that are specifically noninvasive. That
could be built into elegant wearable electronics.
Ben: Yeah. Cool. I mean it's kind of sexy looking. I mean honestly, you know, and I'll
put a photo of it in the show notes if you guys wanna see it, but I mean it's literally just
like a cool piece of headgear and honestly when I travel with it what I found is because it
has that audio cable that allows you to connect it to an MP3 player or a phone while you
have the head gear on, I can double up and use it as like a sound blocking device when
I’m on an airplane, etcetera, and just have like one less thing to pack. So I just take the
electrodes off and I put the headgear on and just listen to music through it. So if anything
else it’s just like a really a kinda sorta spendy pair of headphones if you decide you don't
want to do the tDCS. You’ve always got that option.
Daniel: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, man.
Ben: Yeah. No worries. Just in case tDCS doesn't work out for you, you guys can get to
the headphone business.
Daniel: (chuckles) Well, we actually did put a lot of effort into the sound, and the sound
is actually better than Beats like you can compare the audio spectrum from ours.
Ben: Yeah. So if you’re listening in and you wanna get this, and you own Beats, you can
just like throw your pair of Dr. Dre Beats on Craigslist and get a couple hundred extra
bucks to put towards this thing. I own it and I know when I do these broadcasts, you guys
all wonder like, “How does Ben use all these different biohacking devices?” And honestly,
it's not hard really, like I have like my little infrared device that I just throw on at night. I
keep it on my bed stand when I'm reading at night before bed and I run that for about 20
minutes. And then when I'm writing in my fiction book, I do my neurofeedback for about
30 minutes a day and, again, just kind of double timing my writing and my neurofeedback.
And then for this, for the halo, like I mentioned, I just while I’m doing my warm up that
I'd be doing anyways, I throw this thing on and do my neuropriming with it or I wear it in
the car when my wife and I are driving to tennis and it's pretty easy to implement this
kind of stuff into your life once you figure out how to make biohacking a habit.
And the only risk you take is of course funny looks that you might get from people when
you're driving down the street with laser light stuck up your nose or some tDCS device
chuck in your head, and by the way, the last thing we should mention I think, Doctor Chao,
is it's like a light tingling sensation. I think I've been using the word shock. It's not like
you're racing a Tough Mudder and flipping out, and going into seizures on the floor
because you're getting a true shock. It's like a tingly. It’s like somebody is giving you a
little scalp massage up on your motor cortex.
Daniel: Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, it's a pretty mild sensation.
Ben: Just a clarification. It's not necessarily designed for masochists in that sense.
However masochist in the sense that if want to push yourself hard, this thing works, skill
acquisition a lot of really interesting research that you guys are putting on your website,
Doctor Chao. From explosiveness to power, to write a force development, to muscle fiber
recruitment. So this thing really does have some cool studies behind it. I'm using it. I
really think it's a game changer in terms of getting through a hard workout, and one other
thing I wanted to mention to folks is that after a long day for me like a cognitively
demanding day when it's hard for me to push myself through hard workout, this is like
my new trick, my new hack is I put this on and it actually, because it reduces the rating of
perceived exertion, it makes that hard work out that I normally would substitute for like
you know, an easy walk in the sunshine ‘cause it allows me to get through like the tougher
training session and get a little bit more fitness into my body on the day.
So cool, cool thing that you developed, Doctor Chao, and I want to thank you for coming
on the show and sharing this with us tonight. Also, for those of you who wanna get the
discount, I’ll fill you in on how you get that. You can go to the show notes over at
bengreenfieldfitness.com/halosport. I’ll put a link to the halo and you wind up on their
website, and when you do you get 120 dollars off. So dropped it from 750 down to 630.
It's free 2-day US shipping, so you’ll get it just about right after you order it for free if you
live around the US. There's no interest financing, if you want to split this up and pay like
100 bucks a month for 6 months and get it that way, cool way to spread out the cost if you
need to go easy on the cash flow and then there's a 30-day money back guarantee on it
too. So if you decide it doesn't actually make you play the ukulele better, you can just send
it back. And so it’s a cool deal. So that's all over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/halosport
That's where the show notes are or if you just want to cut straight to the chase, just go to
bengreenfieldfitness.com/halo and you can grab one for yourself. Doctor Chao, I wanna
thank you for coming on the show today.
Daniel: No, thanks, man. I really enjoyed it. It’s been great, yeah, thank you.
Ben: Awesome. Well folks, until next time, I'm Ben greenfield along with Doctor Chao
from Halo Sport signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com . Have a healthy week.
Last week, I posted to Instagram the “most dangerous piece of workout equipment I own”. And no, it was not a mace, or a unicycle, or a parachute or any other risky exercise device.
Instead, it was a simple piece of headgear that looks like a nice set of earphones.
But within that headgear is embedded one of the devices known to modern exercise science
when it comes to doing things like making a hard, voluminous workout feel shockingly simple