If you ever watch a sporting event like the Olympics and you fantasize about being there and wonder what it would take for you to be there, let's back that up a step. What would it take if you were, I don't know, a quadriplegic? Well, that seems like an unbelievable path from here there. Well, let's find out how we can make that believable.
On today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, happy, strong body starting. Beat first is, you know, those things are your foundation. And we break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or to yoga or cross it or be an Olympian, all those other things and, you know, do them enjoy it, but you're going to efficiently and effectively wait. Say, enjoy it.
I know I did. That's a trick question because look, if you're not having fun, you're not going to want to keep it up anyway. So find something you enjoy. Bottom line, I'm Stephen Sashan from zerosues.com and I'm your host of the movement movement.
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Stephen, do me a favor. Tell people who you are and what you're doing here. Yeah. My name is Stephen Minutonis and I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called kotzhu, global.com.
And what we do is we actually sell rather simple but profound equipment and teach people exactly what you are advocating, how to move. Now when most people think about movement, we think about moving our feet, obviously, moving our arms, our trunk, et cetera, we view movement as internal movement. We view movement as internal to our body. So at every moment in our lives, every moment, there are hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of interactions in our brains, in our core, in our legs, et cetera.
Blood is flowing, metabolites are being produced, hormones are flowing, and that is what kotsu tries to emphasize and enhance. So in a word is kotsu means additional pressure. Some of your runners and other people may have heard of the word shiatsu. She is a Japanese word.
She means hand. Kotsu means pressure. Kotsu means additional pressure. So what we do is we put these bands on our arms or our legs and that applies additional pressure.
That's all the equipment does and then we let the body take over. We're headquartered in Southern California and we're in 49 countries now with our equipment and helping people from quadriplegics to Olympic medalists. There we go. So I was doing the path from quadriplegic to Olympic, which is one thing, but we're just talking about a range from quadriplegics to Olympic.
So let's talk a couple things. I don't know which one I want to do first, I've got a bunch. It's just a simple one for people who are hip to what you showed. And for anyone listening or watching, if you don't know what I'm talking about, we will explain it.
Let me just do the question with jargon first. How are the devices that you have different than any other form of blood flow restriction products? Yeah, it's actually quite simple. Our bands are narrow.
And actually when they're inflated, I don't have it on right now. When it's inflated, this inner bladder is at an oval shape. What that means is with every heartbeat, blood goes naturally into your limbs, your arms or your legs without impeding. There's no blood flow restriction.
The blood naturally flows out. Becoming back, it is slowed down every 30 seconds. What happens is the band is inflated, then it's compressed and it's like creating a small dam, very small dam. And being a slow, so the flow of blood from your hands or your feet back to your trunk is slightly slowed down.
And that means you have an abundance of blood in your hands or arms, feet or legs. And that replicates exercise. That replicates movement. That creates a variety of biochemical reactions in the body that are healing.
Interesting. It won't be mildly obnoxious when I say it this way. So fundamentally, what you describe is what the blood flow restriction for people who don't know is similar to what Stephen just mentioned. The idea being that if you are, imagine just putting a tourniquet around your upper arm, but not so tight that it cuts off the blood flow in both directions, tight enough that it is letting blood flow into your arm, but is restricting the return of the venous flow coming back.
And if you do that while you're doing, say biceps curls or tricep extensions, it seems to create a hormonal response. First of all, you can only use much lighter weights. The burn is really intense. If you're an exercise masochist, it's the greatest.
If you don't like the pain when you can't lift a weight that's like one pound, no matter how hard you try, you know, your thing. But very interesting. But what you're talking about is two things that are different than most of the blood flow restriction products that I know of. One is the inflatable part.
And I want you to talk about that. And the other is, if I'm hearing what you said correctly, you're not focused on using these while you're exercising. You've got a different idea of what to do with these and what the effect of benefit is. I'll get that quick.
Correct. I'll address your second issue first. And that is whether you're someone who is disabled or you've had a hip surgery, you've tripped as you're doing trail running, or you're an Olympic athlete who just finished the semi-final and is preparing for the final. In all of these cases, Katsu is best used while sitting down or lying down.
Now let's say you are someone who's not motivated to exercise. Let's say you leave it a very sedentary life or let's say you're active, but you're at your desk for 12 hours a day. In all of these cases, we advocate in people use whether you're that Olympic athlete preparing for the Olympic final or that person who doesn't like to do much and they would rather just sit at their desk and eat Cheetos or, you know, Doritos and the drink of Coke or your person who is active and you just had some kind of injury. In all of these cases, you are sedentary and we're talking about the movement movement.
That is exactly what our bodies do at every moment in time. Every moment in time. We are just utilizing the body's natural system, natural mechanisms, modifying it slightly for 30 seconds, releasing pressure, release, pressure, release. And that is enough to elicit all kinds of biochemical reactions in the body.
So what kind of things in terms of those biophonic reactions, what are you seeing, how much research is behind that? You know, more specific. First of all, that's the other distinction with what you're doing other than using it while you're not moving is that on off thing. And I imagine between the, let's say, the pumping phenomenon that you're dealing with when you're impeding blood flow to a certain extent and then how that sort of releases, I can imagine since I haven't used this device how that could have a slightly euphoric induce or euphoria inducing effect.
I'm just having a flashback quite comically to when I had some wrist surgery and they put a turnip in my arm, filled be full of whatever the anesthetic was, couldn't feel a thing. I was watching the whole thing, which is really fun. But when they removed the turnipet, all of that anesthetic and just all the blood just flowed into my brain and I literally just shouted like a rebel yellow kind of thing in the ER because I got instantly so high so fast and it also just felt really good having all that blood coming back in and starting to move again. But anyway, that's the perceptual thing.
I'm also curious about the research science part. Yeah. So again, I'll address the latter first. So that's it.
I'll try to figure out how to ask these things in reverse next time. No, it's easier to go from the sort of layman's perspective and then we'll get to the scientific perspective. So the reason why you felt that euphoria is exactly why we do the pressure on pressure off every 30 seconds. It's not that massive dope, that massive increase in dopamine and adrenaline and you look at what you felt.
It just slightly tiny drops that were going along the way, just a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. And we always want to end up a katsu session with what we call the katsu smile. Now people aren't yelling like a rebel, but they aren't making a smile. And when you can make that Olympian, a disabled person, that person who leads a sedentary life to have a smile at the end of our session, we know that we have been successful.
Now how did we come to creating the equipment that looks like this, the protocols that we do and that actually goes way back to Dr. Sato, the founder of katsu. I won't go into the details, but for 20 years, he was in his laboratory, in himself, doing all kinds of self experimentation. And he came up with initially his goal was simply to get more muscle.
That was his goal. He was a power lifter in his youth. That was his chosen sport. So he was actually actively doing all kinds of exercises in order to be successful in his chosen sport that was powerlifting.
After he retired from the powerlifting portion of his life, the competition part, then he was into bodybuilding. So his initial purpose for doing katsu or finding out the mechanism of katsu is simply to build bigger biceps and triceps and traps and deltoids, et cetera. But along the way, he started to see different effects, his stamina increased, he was sleeping better and he would just intellectually curious why were these things happening. So around 1994, so we're talking 30 years ago, 1994 or so, he teamed up with a bunch of researchers at the University of Tokyo and they were exercise physiologists and they did a variety of testing and they were astounded that people, whether they were sitting down and doing Dr.
Satra's protocols or actively doing bicep curls or pushups, they were seeing unheard of results at the time. And as scientists, being scientists, they wanted to ask why was that Dr. Satra's time was simply taking his personal self experimentation with the people in his neighborhood. And he replicated those movements, those protocols, those equipment in the laboratory with the scientists.
And in 2000, they came out with a seminal paper in the Journal of Applied Physiology on BFR on Katsu. The reason why BFR was the acronym that was chosen in Dr. Satra and Dr. Ishii's paper that they submitted to the Journal of Applied Physiology, they actually used the word katsu, a Japanese word.
It's an actual Japanese word and the editors of the journal said, we can't use foreign words. Nobody knows what katsu is. So they came up with a term that initially vascular occlusion. And again, we're taking non-native speakers of English, trying to submit a scientific paper to a journal to native speakers of English and there was something was lost in translation.
And the doctors at the University of Tokyo knew that they were modifying the blood flow back, but the implications were that they were occluding the blood flow out. So right from the initial paper, there was a disconnect. Now that was a great paper. It identified human growth hormone, IGF-1, insulin growth factor, adrenaline and a variety of other reactions that the body naturally does through katsu.
And then from the year 2000, more and more papers were being developed. And the real key where we know all of the stuff that we know today about katsu was between 2004 and 2014. And because by 2004, Dr. Sato, Professor Ishii, et cetera, they understood that this mechanism of katsu was actually due to the vascular tissue within the body that was expanding and contracting.
That was the catalyst for muscle growth secretion of growth hormone secretion of IGF-1, nitric oxide, BDNF, et cetera. That was the catalyst. And so from 2001 to 2014, a 10-year period, they tested over 12,000 patients, including 2,000 people who had a cardiac event, so they had a heart attack, a stroke, et cetera, on katsu. And this team was entirely comprised of cardiologists because they were most excited about the ability to increase the elasticity of our vascular tissue.
That is the core. And that is the patent that is the whole purpose of the equipment to make the vascular tissue more elastic. So after that, in your period, then we started katsu global. Okay.
So I got, now I'm not going to do things in reverse. I can't remember what order I'm thinking these things in. But I'm going to start actually at the beginning. For people who think this sounds a little crazy, I'm going to put it in a weird context.
When I'm going to use BISEC curls as an example, when you're doing a BISEC curl and you get that pump that you're feeling, it's actually doing some vascular occlusion, basically because the muscle cells are swelling, they are applying pressure into the circulatory system and creating a similar effect. This is just either augmenting that or supplementing that or replacing that, depending on how you're using it. That's part one. Part two is that when that happens, just again, if you're just regularly lifting weights, it is creating these various responses, partly because your body's going, oh crap, we've got to do something about this.
But in a controlled way. And this is something I'm actually curious about. The vascular flexibility is very interesting. I used to really enjoy volunteering for scientific studies and getting paid some money to do crazy shit.
And here at the University of Colorado, the department is doing studies on aging. Almost every study they're doing has to do with vascular flexibility, both arterial and venus. And because this is something that typically gets worse over time, pardon the thunder behind us, gets worse over time, and they're looking for ways to help prevent that. And there's some that are very interesting, like using a particular kind of sugar molecule called trellis that seems to help with vascular flexibility.
But my question becomes, how are they checking this or measuring this, especially if you're only applying the pressure in a couple of very specific places, rather than something, let me ask a question differently. Are they seeing and is there something showing a systemic effect from doing the compression in specific locations? Yes. So the answer is yes.
And I'll explain the mechanism why. So increasing the vascular elasticity is goal number one. Goal number two is eliciting that hormonal response. So there are two goals that the cardiologist and doctors out that we're looking at.
Number one, the increase in the vascular test, that makes sense locally. Like with the band on, you engorge the limb and blood, there's more blood with every heartbeat, you've got this increase. That's step number one. Step number two is when you do movement and it could be minor movement.
It could be texting, it could be turning the pages of a book, very minor movement. That actually leads to a buildup of lactate. Now if we're doing pushups, if we're doing burpees, if we're running uphill, obviously the lactate levels increase greatly. If again, you're dealing with someone who's disabled, you just had a hip replacement, a knee replacement, or you just leave it as sanitary lifestyle, just do minor movement, handwriting, texting, typing on a computer.
As long as you do some movement, lactate levels will increase from the average standard adult of two millimoles of lactate to something higher. That elicits the hormonal response and the best and most effective way of generating that movement is by the upper arm and by the upper leg. No, it didn't hit me as I was thinking about this in the asking question. That, yeah, you're doing compression in your upper arm, your upper leg.
But clearly when you're restricting the return blood flow, that is putting more that is making the blood vessels have to expand. And so you're you are it's a passive stretching thing in a way. Yes, absolutely. Very interesting.
When I explain it to people, whether a physician or someone who's obviously as knowledge as you are of the human physiology, it all starts to make sense. Yeah. If I just put this band on and I show up in the gym, people are saying, and I'm not I'm not going through this explanation. They're like, what is this weirdo doing?
Like this makes no sense whatsoever. If I'm lifting a two pound dumbbell and I'm sweating and my muscle and my little muscles are bulging a little bit, they're like, it doesn't make any sense. But when we explain what the mechanism of the body and where, for example, you have a cast on your arm. So you now you have your cast on your arm.
All you need to do is a little bit of movement and you've eliminated the muscle atrophy. Interesting. So well, that's an intriguing thing for eliminating atrophy during without any movement. Are you so given?
I'm just going to be asking questions about certain effects. Where to go on this one? So one of the other things that affects people as we get older is started penis. So we start losing muscle mass.
So is there anything that this is doing, let's say above and beyond lifting weights that may impact that? So our oldest user worldwide is a woman, 104 years old. We demonstrated very clearly through imagery of her thigh that we increased her thigh, her quadricep and her hamstring by 22% doing katsu. Our oldest user in the United States is a 95 year old woman on the island of Kowai.
Now these are 104 year old 95, my own father is 88, my mother is 86. These are not the people you're going to see in Gold's Gym or 24 hour fitness. They are the people though that want to maintain their quality of life. They want to be able to go to the supermarket.
They want to be able to lift up a gallon of milk. They want to be able to walk up and down the stairs. And so for those people, they're not going to lift weights. But as long as they do some, what we call micro movements, they are eliciting or they're generating that lactate, right?
The signal is sent up through the central nervous system to their brain and that it is enough that is sufficient to serve as a catalyst for secretion of growth hormone. You and I would be killing it with bicep curls. My father at 88, the 95 year old from Hawaii, 104 year old from Tokyo, they're not about to grab some weights, but they're going to be wiping their countertop after a meal. They are going to be brushing their hair.
They are going to be brushing their teeth. So they can do put the bands on while they do this movement. Even holding a book is a form of isometric, is it isometric hold? You're holding a book, turning the page, holding the book, turning the page as the bands are on, they whether they're 88 or 104, they're feeling a pump.
Yeah, yeah. What's interesting to me is that there's sort of dueling theories in the quote anti-aging world and I say quote anti-aging world because so much of this is completely hypothetical. It's like if we haven't taken two 50 year olds who are identical twins, but one on whatever the protocol for anti-aging is and the other doesn't get it and the first one lives 120, the other dies at 65, not because it gets hit by a bus, then we don't really know some of these things. But we do know that growth hormone increased IGF-1, increased anabolic hormones like testosterone, for example, can be problematic when people get older.
If you're just increasing them, increasing the baseline, for example, if you just got higher IGF-1 levels, let's use that, and that's insulin growth factor one. But what we're talking about here in this conversation is sort of a temporary increase in those things rather than a sort of baseline increase. And I imagine that that's better for aging in the same way that there's a lot of research going on about Rapa Mysen, which reduces the effect of certain anabolic activities in the body, which seems to improve longevity, but it also reduces your ability to do a muscle mass. So what people are doing now is cycling that on and off, you know, a couple of day on, all these off, et cetera, this feels like a similar kind of thing where you're just getting, you're cycling on and off this increase in HGH and IGF-1, for example.
Yes. You know, when I first was spent those 10 years with researchers at the University of Togas, with the Cardiologists and with Dr. Sato since early 2000, they're very gentle people. They look at things.
They look at the vascular tissue. They look at secretion of hormones in a very, very long term, gentle manner. And this is why when you use the katsu band, the pressure that you start with is very, very low, very, very gentle. And many of the Americans, when we put it on, whether it's a Navy Seal or just an active 45-year-old, they put on the band and go, the first thing they say, I would say 25% of people say, I don't feel anything.
And I say, good. We don't want you to, I don't want you to feel the pain or the discomfort that you might have been expecting by some guy, because you've seen on YouTube, some guy lifting heavy weights. We want your vascular tissue. You want your whole system to start off at a very, very gentle pressure and just gradually increase for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, take it off the next day, you do it again.
So that regularity of our bodies, all of our systems are on a cyclical mantle anyway. The Japanese knew enough that if we added it gently in a regular manner, then over time, that would lead to a very helpful lifespan, as opposed to, okay, we're going to do this for a week. You're not going to use it anymore. And suddenly you're healthy.
Again, I think this kind of approach needed that Japanese very long-term, gentle approach, whether we all know going to Sushi Bar, you got to wash the rice and you got to learn how to wash that rice for years and years and years before you get to cut one slice of fish. Yeah. So, again, I got a handful of thoughts. So talk to me.
We want to do a specific case first. So for someone, for example, who has chronic fatigue syndrome and finds exercise difficult because it's too stressful, I imagine this is something that they could do that would be beneficial in giving them essentially some similar benefits without putting them in a situation that is taxing them too much. Correct. And there's all kinds of people who have MS, multiple sclerosis.
There are some people who have carpal tunnel syndrome, different afflictions, different conditions where for some period of time or for chronic fatigue, for long periods of time, they can't do something or even if they wanted to. So we put on the bands and this is where the movement movement really dovetails with katsu. We've got so much movement anyway in our body and with these bands and the pressure on, pressure off, the compression, the decompression, that is actually enhancing what the body is doing anyway. And that is leading especially for people who, you know, we have burn victims.
We have people who have a compound fracture. We have amputees, you know, especially in the military. We've got these, you know, unfortunately, you know, just great tactical athletes. I mean, these men can run, they can lift, they can jump, they do all these things.
Suddenly they're hit by something and they've lost the leg, they've lost an arm, et cetera. We can still allow their residual limb, their stump, if you will, to function, to move even though they're not holding a barbell, even though they're not doing resistance training. And so that's where katsu, that's where the Japanese Dr. Sato and his colleagues saw in the future.
And I have to, I didn't explain this at the beginning. When I joined Dr. Sato and his group, katsu was part of the 22nd century project of Japan. That was in the year 2000, 2001, the Japanese government asked private industry and the government agencies look forward 100 years in the future.
What technologies, what modalities, what protocols do we need to develop now so we can make the Japanese population as strong and resilient in the year 2100. Somewhere out there, yeah. Yeah. And so with katsu, and we, people visit us from the different government agencies showed us the demographics of the Japanese population.
That's the most rapidly aging population in the world. And they said, you know, in 40 years the population is going to go by half. Right. It's going to drop by half.
So what, who's going to be left, who's going to be the workers, who's going to be the blue collar workers, white collar workers, et cetera. And katsu was part of that entire equation, again, in this pretty interesting thought process of what do we need to do now to be as healthy as possible 100 years in the future? Well, because I have to say something like this, the thing that human beings are best at is forgetting how stupid we are about predicting the future. So you know, no one predicted the internet the way it is, let it own at all.
No one predicted, I mean, you know, watch any old sci-fi movie. It's pretty funny. But I mean, it's an interesting thought experiment. But I would argue that the thing, the thing that we, the only thing we know is that we have no idea what's going to happen in 100 years other than most of the things that will be commonly used for whatever are completely inconceivable now.
I mean, if we just for the fun of it, if we actually crack the code on nuclear fusion, we're effectively, we have free energy for the rest of our life, you know, that's going to change everything. In fact, the entirety of Star Trek is based on the idea of free energy. That just changes the world. But I think it's a very cool thought experiment nonetheless.
And I like the idea of it. Let me kind of go this way for the different kinds of people who may be listening slash watching, whether they're athletes or non athletes or former athletes or in a wheelchair or whatever the situation, how does one find the appropriate protocol to use and how does that protocol change over time? Yeah. So including like, you know, the bodybuilding thing, somebody wants that goal versus someone who is just immobile versus whatever's in it or an athlete who's looking to deal with recovery.
Again, how do we pick the, or how do they find the appropriate protocol and again, how does that evolve with every time? So when we, the individual buys the Katsu equipment, it comes with actually a too massive amount of information. It's just like a huge book. It's 273 pages.
And it goes through all the different protocols, whether you're a disabled person all the way to if you're a collegiate athlete looking to increase their vertical lead, for example. And we simply give the specific protocols to achieve a specific purpose. Now, most people, especially as we age, let's take, let's take a 65 year old who used to be a collegiate athlete or a high school athlete, et cetera. And he over the last, I know 40 years, starting to leave his centenary life.
Now he retires and he's got a bad back, a bad knee and his shoulder hurts. What can he do? And so what they do is we offer a variety of services for those people, give us a very, give us your goals. And we give to you the specific, very specific protocols that you can use using the equipment to achieve your specific goals.
Some goals, maybe it's the old college athlete who's 65, maybe he was a triple jumper in college or high school. Maybe he can't touch his toes now. And he simply goes, I want to be able to tie my shoes. Okay, let's achieve flexibility.
Well, you know what, I can't leave my shoulder and I've got no bicep, I've got a dad bod. Okay, let's start building up your upper body. Let's start building up your lower body. Let's say your own child is now a cross country runner and you simply want to go out there and start running to support your child's effort.
So we take the person using katsu with, let's say they have three separate goals. We say, you can't do all at once. But what is your number one goal? Let's achieve that.
What's your number two goal? Let's achieve that. Let's achieve that with very specific protocols that they can follow and that we provide. I'm going to do two things.
In one fell swoop, I'm going to ask you to be a little more specific if you can. And I'm going to use me as the case study because it's my podcast. I can do whatever I want. So, so as a 61 year old sprinter is who basically at this age, I can't recover as fast as I want to get as much training as I want.
And I'm trying to do everything I can to say as strong and fast as I can or slow down, slowing down for as long as I can. So if those are my goals, the extent that I've given them with enough clarity, what happens and what's that protocol? What might that protocol look like? So we go back and we say, okay, we know your age.
We know your goal. Can you be a little more specific? For example, do you participate in master's track events? I am an all American masters, a master's all Americans sprinter.
So yes, I do. Okay. So is you then we get more specific on is your event 100 200 100 meter out to where it's a meter indoor? Okay.
Where is your weakness and where your strength? Is it the start? Is it acceleration? Is it?
It's it's holding on you have from actuality. Okay. It's written during her speed. Okay.
So if you wanted to drop, let's say three tenths of a second, getting your start would be a start and then acceleration phase. I'm saying poop on the start simply because I've trained a handful of Olympians and I get them for the first two steps out of the blocks after that. You're headed. Okay.
I got to get started. Yeah. Okay. So it's the latter half of the race.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then you get to the track, use the cuts of device and use a cut cycle.
So it's pressure on pressure off. You can do that while you're stretching or while you're doing your easy job, et cetera. What we want to do is when you start, let's say your core workout, we want you to be as a vascular elastic as possible as possible. The moment that you say in your mind, now my workout begins because most athletes to be honest, yes, workout will start at 8 a.m.
But you know, I've been around a lot of track athletes, you know, you're you're joking around. You're not mentally going to be on the track yet. You're in the field. So you want to be as vascular as optimized as possible.
Now in this process, we know through our testing that when you take off the bands, you have between 12 and 15 minutes when those hormones are maximized. So let's say you're working on the last 30 meters of your 60 meter run. What we would like you to do or what we recommend that you do is be using the katsu in the period of your preparation, warm up your early drills, et cetera. When you get to the portion of your training where you're working on that sustained velocity that let's second half the race, roughly 12 to 15 minutes before that you take off the bands because we view katsu is this is equipment, but the mechanism of your body will continue.
So let's say you've done all this prep work and it's now from 8 to 8 30 and you know you're going to be hitting it hard from 8 45 to 9 o'clock. Ideally, you're using the katsu until until 8 30 ish take off the bands, you know, a hydrate stretch a little more if you want. And then in that in that 15 minute window, you are harmonally optimized in all the measures that we have. It's a great time for you to be working on the things that you want to be working on best.
After you've pushed yourself, you've finished your workout, you know, you're telling off what if it's a hot day throw back on the bands in order to remove as much lactate that it built up as possible as quickly as possible. So the next day, let's say that was a Monday. So on Tuesday, you can hit it hard again at the age of 61. Interesting.
So I have I'm trying to figure out how inappropriate I can be. This is we're talking about whole body viagra. And so yeah, I mean, in fact, for people who don't know, for sprinters, it was a very very, very well kept secret for a while. They were using biagoras a performance dancing drug because it's a vasodilator.
And in fact, Justin Gatling got busted for that. There was a guy named Val Barnwell who got busted for that. Actually, he didn't get busted for that. He got busted for something else.
But part of his argument when he was saying that he either a got didn't do anything, b someone doped him, c what do you care what I do with my body, d are you telling me I can't use a biogad or please my woman? And we're all like, wait, what? You're, wait, what? So that was and this was like 15 years ago when just the idea of Viagra's performance dancing drug suddenly people were going, oh, that's interesting.
So that's very, that's really fascinating. You're setting yourself up to with with the vasodilation to be, well, part of, I'm getting way too biochemically in my head. I'm just thinking about ATP production and additional clearing lactate and having just a sort of wide open capillaries, which is the same thing caffeine does as well. That's really interesting.
Yeah. In addition, let's say, actually Justin, you mentioned that she came to us and he's a cots user. All the track. Well, let me, let me, let me know up to say this about not just about Justin, but it does include Justin every, so I'm a former nationally ranked athlete and I guess I am now too, but not in a way that matters in my life.
There's no prize money as a master's, all American sprinter. But what I know from the Olympic, Olympic level people that I know is they will do and try anything and everything just to get that little bit of an edge. And I know that a handful of things that Justin uses don't actually do anything. I'm not saying you're in that situation.
I'm just saying that it's very interesting watching people at that level is like, if they think it's going to do something, then they're going to try it. But I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I know what I'm really thinking of is some of the companies that use Justin as their example. And I know for a fact that product does absolutely nothing, including my saying when they first go to me and we're telling Justin, it's like, yeah, that's cool. He just lost the last couple of races.
So you might, you know, so I just mentioned Justin because you mentioned him, but his, the team and the group of people that he worked with, this is what he came to us. So we were giving him a very specific example. Yeah. Justin came and he said, my arms, my arm speed is not as good as my leg strength.
He's, he's a leg driven athlete. In addition, his, and I could hit this mix up. So I forgive me on this, either his right leg or his left leg is stronger than the other. And as a runner, if your arm speed and both legs are not totally in sync, you're only running at the fat at the slower.
And so with Justin and with many other athletes, what we do is we put a higher pressure on the weaker leg or the weaker arm. And so in his practice, we're essentially putting more metabolic stress on the weaker limb than the stronger limb. And because we know if we, let's say theoretically, this leg was running at at 9.6 and this leg is running at a 9.8. Well, our effective speed will only be 9.8.
So we want to increase the speed of the weaker leg. So at least now this weaker leg is running, let's say at a 9.7 or 9.6. Therefore, you're going to be able to achieve the optimal speed of your faster leg and same with the arm. So in his case, and many other runners, and especially jumpers, you know, jumpers or triple jumpers, they're one leg, both of all those you name it, javelin throwers, you name it.
And so what we do is with, with the katsu, we can put different pressures on different limbs at the same time. So it's a, and that in itself, you're making the athlete more balanced. And, you know, let's say you're a hurdler. Well, you know, you're pushing off, I forgot what the technical, you know, pushing off one leg and extending the leg out.
So we're putting different pressures on the athlete as they're going through their technical movements. And in the swimming world where I come from, you know, Michael Phelps, you know, he's got this perfect stroke left and right arm are just spot on. People who get silver and bronze and don't beat Michael Phelps, they literally are off just a tad, just a tad bit. And so what we do with them is we put a higher pressure on the weaker side.
So you get the same proportion on both sides and we do that with track and field. We do that with basketball players who are strong going up with the right and not so strong on their left or when they spin to their left or he spins right as they go through their technical movements. We are putting different pressures, therefore different stresses in the practice. So when they are on the field of play or they're in competition, they're uniformity, they're left and right side up in lower body upper body core are all optimized to whatever the level that you want to achieve.
Very interesting. Are there any questions that I haven't asked or even better? Any question that I haven't asked where you would tell me no, because I could ask you questions like, Oh, yeah, we do that. Oh, yes, that's so I'm trying to think of a question that would be that would stump the band.
I think there's one. Katsu was the subject of a keynote speech at the World Congress of Sports Medicine last year and speech done by the IOC sports scientist under Professor Janis Bitzley. He didn't show us his result of his research on Katsu until we got to the World Congress of Sports Medicine. Go Steve, don't worry.
You're going to be very happy, but I don't want to tell you, I want it to be a surprise. I was a little nervous, frankly, here all these sports scientists come from around the world and they're in this giant lecture hall and professors up there explaining the benefits of this cut cycle pressure on pressure off. Yeah. First one made sense.
Second one made sense. And the last one just absolutely floored me. I hadn't thought of that, but when he explained what was happening, it was, yes. Why didn't I think of that?
And that is the cognitive awareness of athletes and Professor Kitzleida who works with, you know, the IOC. So he's working with all these great athletes. He says, you know, the greatest athletes are so cognitively aware of everything around them. Their tactile feel, their spatial awareness, they're just, they're just locked in.
Like, you know, like we know, you know, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Larry Bird, you name it, they just, they just have this spatial awareness, this kinetic feel, this, this technical, you know, the touch. And he says, if body physiologically understand understandably with Katsu, but what his research showed them is after you did pressure on pressure off pressure on pressure off, he is a scientist said, you know, if we're increasing the elasticity of the vascular tissue in the shoulders, in the core, where the bands are not, he goes, then it must make sense that they're increasing the capillary actions in the brain. That's what he thought. He said, so he tested these athletes would do the cot cycle on and off, then he tested them with a control group and experimental group.
Their cognitive awareness through basic cognitive tests and the pressure on pressure people just scored higher. Interesting. And I go, that is great. Because as IOC person, that is what he's, you know, he's, he's looking at things that optimize human performance, right.
You know, the physical part is a given that emotional, you know, do you choke under pressure? Do you rise to the occasion of pressure? Another aspect. And then the third was this cognitive awareness that completely blew me away.
That's very interesting. I don't even have a frame of reference where I can explain that one per se. But of course, the joke that comes up is yet that lack of spatial awareness is the entire reason I'm not a professional basketball player. The fact that I'm a five foot five white guy has nothing to do with it.
So, so, you see, this has been a total total blast. I can only assume that there are people who want to find out more. So can you tell them how they can do that? Yeah, just go to www.catsu.com.
We offer webinars, free webinars you can join. You can ask any questions whatsoever. We sell through our online, you know, cuts.com. A lot of people first come across katsu through, you know, people like yourself who who interview me or maybe they heard from their next or neighbor or something.
Everybody, it's a nonintuitive way to get stronger, faster, be more cognitively where. So it does require some explanation. And I spend 90% of my time explaining katsu. So that's how we've grown.
So www.catsu.com Hey, A-A-T-S-U. So yes, some people can't see your hand. Oh, sorry. There we go.
Well, not that they can't see it. You need to get closer. There's a listening, not watching. Oh, God.
Yeah. That's sort of like going to a foreign country and speaking English louder to make people here understand it. Just doesn't work. So once again, thank you.
Thank you. And for everyone else, you know, A, please go check out katsu and tell me what you think. And especially if you decided to try it, I'm dying to hear what you experienced. Because that would be super, super fun.
And let's take it from there. And just as a reminder, go back over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us, all the places you can leave a review and a thumbs up and hit the bell icon and subscribe and blah, blah, blah. And if you have any requests or suggestions, if you are any feedback, if you have some idea of someone who should be on the show that I haven't talked to, especially if you know someone who thinks I had a case of cranial reorientation syndrome, then you know, I'm all ears, even if they're my butt from that metaphor.
But suffice to say you can drop me an email, just send an email to move M-O-V-E at jointhemovementmovement.com. And until next time, go out, have fun and live life, feet first.