Steven Munatones has launched new products, services and technologies in the U.S. over the last 20 years. At TOTO Frontier, he licensed TOTO’s sanitary ware technologies outside of Japan. At RealLiveSports, he designed and marketed the ESPN Play by Play, a 2006 Toy of the Year. At Aruze Gaming America, he launched hybrid slot machine reel technology in the gaming industry. At the World Open Water Swimming Association, he utilized 9 years of national team coaching to help shape and promote the new Olympic sport of marathon swimming. The Harvard graduate and certified KAATSU Master Instructor co-founded KAATSU Global with Dr. Sato, the Japanese inventor of KAATSU, to introduce next-generation KAATSU equipment.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Munatones about getting fit without exercise.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How anyone can use KAATSU from disabled people to Olympians.
– How you can use KAATSU when you have a cast on to eliminate muscle atrophy.
– How micro movements with KAATSU helps generate lactate which serves as a catalyst for the secretion of the growth hormone.
– How KAATSU lets older individuals and disabled individuals live more independent lives.
– How the compression and decompression from KAATSU enhances what the body already does.
Connect with Steven:
Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@KAATSUGlobal
Instagram
@kaatsuglobal
Facebook
facebook.com/kaatsu
Links Mentioned:
kaatsu.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Do you ever watch a sporting event like the Olympics and you fantasize about being there and wonder what would it take for you to be there? Let’s back that up a step. What would it take if you were, I don’t know, quadriplegic? Well, that seems like an unbelievable path from here to 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, healthy, strong body starting feet first, because 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 do yoga or CrossFit or be an Olympian, all those other things, and to do them enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Wait, did I say enjoyably? 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 Steven Sashen from xeroshoes.com, and I’m your host of The MOVEMENT Movement. We call it that because we are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. And the movement part involves all of us. It’s really, really simple. The first step, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join. That’s just the place where you can find previous episodes. You can opt in to hear about new episodes. You’ll find the places that you can find all of our episodes. You’ll find where we are on social media. And of course, the request is simple. Give us a thumbs up, give us a review, like, give us a five-star rating, hit the bell icon on YouTube, you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just please subscribe.
Let us get started. Steven, do me a favor. Tell people who you are and what you’re doing here.
Steven Munatones:
Yeah. My name is Steven Munatones and I’m the CEO and co-founder of a company called kaatsuglobal.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 KAATSU tries to emphasize and enhance.
So in a word, KAATSU means additional pressure. Some of your runners and other people who move may have heard of the word shiatsu. Shi is a Japanese word. Shi means hand. Atsu means pressure. KAATSU 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.
Steven Sashen:
There we go. I was doing the path from quadriplegic to Olympic, which is one thing, but we’re just talking about a range from quadriplegics to Olympics. Let’s talk a couple of things. I don’t know which one I want to do first because I got a bunch. Let’s do this 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, I’ll explain it. But let me just do the question with the jargon first. How are the devices that you have different than any other form of blood flow restriction products?
Steven Munatones:
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 is no blood flow restriction. The blood naturally flows out. Coming 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 the venous flow, 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 a movement. That creates a variety of biochemical reactions in the body that are healing.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. I’m going to be mildly obnoxious when I say it this way. So fundamentally, what you described is what the… So blood flow restriction, for people who don’t know, is similar to what Steven 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, 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, that when you can’t lift a weight that’s one pound no matter how hard you try, maybe not your thing, but very interesting.
But what you are 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 or benefit is. Did I get that correct?
Steven Munatones:
Correct. I’ll address your second issue first, and that is whether you are someone who are disabled or you’ve had a hip surgery, you’ve tripped as you were doing trail running, or you’re an Olympic athlete who just finished a semi-final and is preparing for the final. In all of these cases, KAATSU 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 live 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 and 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 Doritos and drink a Coke, or you’re a 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.
Steven Sashen:
What kind of things in terms of those biochemical reactions, what are you seeing? How much research is behind that more specifically? 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 are dealing with when you’re impeding blood flow to a certain extent, and then how that releases. I can imagine, since I haven’t used this device, how that could have a slightly euphoria-inducing effect.
I’m just having a flashback quite comically to when I had some wrist surgery and they put a tourniquet on my arm, filled me 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 tourniquet, all of that anesthetic and just all the blood just flowed into my brain and I literally just shouted a rebel yell 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. But I’m also curious about the researchy, sciencey part.
Steven Munatones:
Again, I’ll address the latter first so that-
Steven Sashen:
I’ll try and figure out how to ask these things in reverse next time.
Steven Munatones:
No problem. Well, it’s easier to go from the layman’s perspective and then we’ll get to the scientific perspective.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Steven Munatones:
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 increase in dopamine and adrenaline and euphoria that 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 KAATSU session with what we call the KAATSU smile. Now, people aren’t yelling like a rebel but they are making a smile. And when you can make that Olympian, that 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 KAATSU. And 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 powerlifter 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 KAATSU or finding out the mechanism of KAATSU 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 his. He was sleeping better. And he would just intellectually curious, why were these things happening?
So around 1994, 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. Sato’s protocols or actively doing bicep curls or pushups, they were seen unheard of results at the time. And as scientists being scientists, they wanted to ask, “Why was that?” Dr. Sato at the 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 the year 2000, they came out with the seminal paper in the Journal of Applied Physiology on BFR, on KAATSU.
Reason why BFR was the acronym that was chosen in Dr. Sato and Dr. Ishi’s paper that they submitted to the Journal of Applied Physiology, they actually used the word KAATSU, 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 KAATSU 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 the translation. And the doctors at 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 KAATSU. And then from the year 2000, more and more papers were being developed. And the real key where we know all the stuff that we know to date about KAATSU was between 2004 and 2014. And because by 2004, Dr. Sato, Professor Ishi, et cetera, they understood that this mechanism of KAATSU 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 KAATSU. 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 10-year period, then we started KAATSU Global.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Okay, so I got it. Now, I’m not going to do things in reverse because 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. I’m going to use bicep curls as an example. When you’re doing a bicep 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 is going, “Oh crap, we 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 was actually, 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 that’s doing studies on aging, almost every study they’re doing has to do with vascular flexibility, both arterial and venous. 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 trehalose that seems to help with vascular flexibility. But my question becomes, if you know, how are they checking this or measuring this, especially if you’re only applying the pressure in very specific places rather than something… Let me ask the question differently. Are they seeing and is there something showing a systemic effect from doing the compression in specific locations?
Steven Munatones:
Yes. The answer is yes, and I’ll explain the mechanism why. Increasing the vascular elasticity is goal number one. Goal number two is eliciting that hormonal response. So there are two goals that the cardiologists and Dr. Sato were looking at. Number one, increasing the vascularity elasticity, that makes sense locally. I put the band on, you engorged the limb in blood, there’s more blood so 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 live a sedentary 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.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. No, it didn’t hit me as I was thinking about this and then asking the question, that yeah, you’re doing the compression in your upper arm or your upper leg. But clearly when you’re restricting the return blood flow, that is making the blood vessels have to expand. So it’s a passive stretching thing in a way.
Steven Munatones:
Yes, absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
Very interesting.
Steven Munatones:
Absolutely. When I explain it to people, whether a physician or someone who’s obviously as knowledged as you are of the human physiology, it all starts to make sense. Now, if I just put this band on and I show up in the gym, people are saying, and I’m not going through this explanation, they’re like, “What is this weirdo doing? This makes no sense whatsoever.” If I’m lifting a two-pound dumbbell and I’m sweating and my muscle, 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 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.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. Well, that’s an intriguing thing for eliminating atrophy without any movement. I’m just going to keep asking questions about certain facts. Boy, where to go on this one? So one of the other things that affects people as we get older is sarcopenia. We start losing muscle mass. Is there anything that this is doing, let’s say, above and beyond lifting weights that may impact that?
Steven Munatones:
Our oldest user worldwide is a woman, 104 years old. We demonstrated very clearly through imagery of her thigh that we increased her thigh or her quadricep and her hamstring by 22% doing KAATSU. Our oldest user in the United States is a 95-year-old woman on the island of Kauai. Now, these are 104-year-old, 95. My own father is 88. My mother’s 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, 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.
Steven Sashen:
Just the body-
Steven Munatones:
So 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. It’s an isometric hold. You’re holding the book, turning the page, holding the book, turning the page. As the bands are on, whether they’re 88 or 104, they’re filling a pump.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. Well, what’s interesting to me is that there’s 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, put one on whatever the protocol for anti-aging is and the other doesn’t get it, and the first one lives to 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 increased 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-1. But what we’re talking about here in this conversation is a temporary increase in those things rather than a 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 rapamycin which reduces the effect of certain anabolic activities in the body, which seems to improve longevity, but it also reduces your ability to grow muscle mass. So what people are doing now is cycling that on and off, a couple day on, a couple of days 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.
Steven Munatones:
Yes. When I first was spent those 10 years with the researchers at the University of Tokyo Hospital, 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 KAATSU bands, 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 they go, the first thing they say for I would say 25% of the people say, “I don’t feel anything.” And I say, “Good, 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 manner anyway. And the Japanese knew enough that if we added it gently in a regular manner, then over time, that would lead to a very healthful 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’ve got to learn how to wash that rice for years and years and years before you get to cut one slice of fish.
Steven Sashen:
Again, I got a handful of thoughts. Talk to me. Well, I want to do a specific case first. 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.
Steven Munatones:
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 even if they wanted to. So we put on the bands, and this is where The MOVEMENT Movement really dovetails with KAATSU. 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 leaning, especially for people who… We have burn victims. We have people who have a compound fracture. We have amputees, especially in the military. We’ve got these, unfortunately just great tactical athletes. 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 a leg, they’ve lost an arm, et cetera. We can still allow their residual limb, their stump, if you will, to function or to move even though they’re not holding a barbell, even though they’re not doing resistance training.
And so that’s where KAATSU, the Japanese, Dr. Sato and his colleagues, saw in the future. And I didn’t explain this in the beginning. When I joined Dr. Sato and his group, KAATSU 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, protocols do we need developed now so we can make the Japanese population as strong, as resilient in the year 2100.
Steven Sashen:
Somewhere out there, yeah.
Steven Munatones:
And so with KAATSU, people visited 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 he said, “In 40 years, the population is going to go by half. It’s going to drop by half. So 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 KAATSU is 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?
Steven Sashen:
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 no one predicted the internet the way it is, let alone at all. No one predicted. Watch any old sci-fi movie and it’s pretty funny. But it’s an interesting thought experiment. But I would argue that 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.
Just for the fun of it, if we actually crack the code on nuclear fusion where effectively we have free energy for the rest of our life, 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 go this way. For the different kinds of people who may be listening/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? So including the bodybuilding thing, if somebody wants that goal versus someone who is just immobile versus whatever’s… Or an athlete who’s looking to deal with the recovery, again, how do we pick or how do they find the appropriate protocol? And again, how does that evolve with over time?
Steven Munatones:
When the individual buys the KAATSU equipment, it comes with actually a too massive amount of information, 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 are a collegiate athlete looking to increase their vertical leap, for example. Now, we simply give the specific protocols to achieve a specific purpose. Now, most people, especially as we age, 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 don’t know, 40 years starting to live his sedentary life. Now, he retires and he’s got a bad back, a bad knee, his shoulder hurts. What can he do?
And so what they do is we offer a variety of services for those people. Give us your goals and we give to you the 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 lift my shoulder and I’ve got no bicep. I 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 KAATSU, and 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. What’s your number three goal? Let’s achieve that,” with very specific protocols that they can follow and that we provide.
Steven Sashen:
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 as a 61-year-old sprinter who basically at this age, I can’t recover as fast as I want to get as much training in as I want, and I’m trying to just do everything I can to stay as strong and fast as I can or slow down, slowing down for as long as I can. So if those are my goals, to the extent that I’ve given them with enough clarity, what happens next? What might that protocol look like?
Steven Munatones:
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 Masters track events?
Steven Sashen:
I am in Masters All-American Sprinter. So yes, I do.
Steven Munatones:
Okay, so then we get more specific on is your event the 100, 200?
Steven Sashen:
100-meter outdoor, 60-meter indoor.
Steven Munatones:
Okay, then we get more specific. Where is your weakness and where are your strengths? Is it the start? Is it the acceleration? Is it… Where?
Steven Sashen:
It’s holding on after max velocity?
Steven Munatones:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
So sprint endurance or speeding.
Steven Munatones:
Okay. So if you wanted to drop, let’s say, 3/10 of a second, getting your start would be a start and then that acceleration phase.
Steven Sashen:
I’m saying poo poo on the start simply because I’ve trained with a handful of Olympians, and I get them for the first two steps out of the blocks. After that-
Steven Munatones:
Oh, you’re ahead of them? Okay, I got it.
Steven Sashen:
No, I got a good start.
Steven Munatones:
Yeah, okay. So it’s the latter half of the race.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Steven Munatones:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
Once I hit max velocity, it’s holding onto that.
Steven Munatones:
Got it, got it. Okay. So in that case, then there’s three things you can do. One, before or when you get to the track, use the KAATSU device and you use the cut cycle. So it’s pressure on, pressure off. You can do that while you’re stretching or while you’re doing your easy jog, et cetera. What we want to do is when you start, let’s say your core workout, we want you to be as vascular, as 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 8:00 AM but I’ve been around a lot of track athletes. You’re joking around. You’re not mentally going to be on the track yet. You’re in the field. So we want to be as vascularly 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 KAATSU in the period of your preparation warmup, your early drills, et cetera. When you get to the portion of your training where it’s working on that sustained velocity in that second half of the race, roughly 12 to 15 minutes before that, you take off the bands.
Because we view KAATSU is this is the 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 8:00 to 8:30 and you know you’re going to be hitting it hard from 8:45 to 9:00. Ideally, you’re using the KAATSU until 8:30-ish. Take off the bands, hydrate, stretch a little more if you want. And then in that 15-minute window, you are hormonally optimized in all the measures that we have. That is 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’re toweling off if it’s a hot day, throw back on the bands in order to remove as much lactate that had 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.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. I’m trying to figure out how inappropriate I can be. This is we’re talking about whole body Viagra, and so…
Steven Munatones:
Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. In fact, for people who don’t know, for sprinters, it was a very, very well-kept secret for a while. They were using Viagra as a performance-enhancing drug because it’s a vasodilator. And in fact, Justin Gatlin 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, 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 Viagra to please my woman?” And we’re all like, “Wait, what? You’re using… Wait, what?” And this was 15 years ago when just the idea of Viagra as a performance-enhancing drug, suddenly people are going, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
So that’s really fascinating. You’re setting yourself up too with the vasodilation to be… Well, I’m getting way too biochemical in my head. I’m just thinking about ATP production in addition to clearing lactate and having just those wide open capillaries, which is the same thing caffeine does as well. That’s really interesting.
Steven Munatones:
In addition, let’s say, actually just you mentioned Justin Gatlin. He came to us and he’s a KAATSU user. All of the track… I say-
Steven Sashen:
Well, let me interrupt and say this not just about Justin but it does include Justin. 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 Masters All-American Sprinter. But what I know from the 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. It’s like if they think it’s going to do something, then they’re going to try it.
But so again, 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 showed it to me and we’re touting Justin, it’s like, “Yeah, that’s cool. He just lost the last couple of races, so you might…”
Steven Munatones:
So I just mentioned Justin because you mentioned him, but-
Steven Sashen:
True.
Steven Munatones:
The team and the group of people that he work with, this is what he came to us. So I’m giving you a very specific example.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Steven Munatones:
Justin came and he said, “My arm speed is not as good as my leg strength.” He’s a leg-driven athlete. In addition, his… And I could get this mixed up, so 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 it at the slower speed. 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, let’s say,, theoretically this leg was running at a 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, jumpers or triple jumpers, they’re on one leg. Pole vaulters, you name it. Javelin throwers, you name it. And so what we do is with the KAATSU, we can put different pressures on different limbs at the same time. And that in itself, you’re making the athlete more balanced. And let’s say you’re a hurdler. Well, you’re pushing off… I forgot what the technique. You’re pushing off one leg and extending the leg out. So we are putting different pressures on the athlete as they’re going through their technical movements.
And in the swimming world where I come from, Michael Phelps, 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 their weaker side so you get the same propulsion on both sides. And we do that with track and field. We do that with basketball players who are strong going up with their right and not so strong on their left, or when they spin to their left or you spin to 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, their uniformity, their left and right side, up and lower body, upper body core are all optimized to whatever the level that you want to achieve.
Steven Sashen:
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 kept asking you questions, you’re like, “Oh yeah, we do that. Oh yeah, that’s that.” So I’m trying to think of… I can’t think of a question that would stump the band.
Steven Munatones:
I think there’s one question. There’s one. KAATSU was the subject of a keynote speech at the World Congress of Sports Medicine last year. And it-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wow.
Steven Munatones:
… was a speech done by the IOC sports scientist under Professor Yannis Pitsiladis. He didn’t show us his results of his research on KAATSU until we got to the World of Congress of Sports Medicine. He goes, “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 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. 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 it?”
And that is the cognitive awareness of athletes. And Professor Pitsiladis who works with the IOC, so he is working with all these great athletes, he says, “The greatest athletes are so cognitively aware of everything around them, their tactile feel, their spatial awareness. They’re just locked in.” Like we know Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Larry Bird, you name it. They just have this spacial awareness, this kinetic feel, this technical, the touch. And he says, “If body, physiologically, understandably with KAATSU.” But what his research showed them is after the pressure on, pressure off, pressure on, pressure off, he as a scientist said, “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 cut 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.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Steven Munatones:
And I go, “That is great.” Because as the IOC person, that is what he’s… He’s looking at things that optimize human performance. Physiologic, the physical part is a given. That emotional, 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.
Steven Sashen:
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 that lack of spatial awareness is the entire reason I’m not a professional basketball player. The fact that I’m a 5′ 5″ white guy has nothing to do with it. So Steven, 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?
Steven Munatones:
Yeah, just go to www.kaatsu.com. We offer webinars, free webinars. You can join. You can ask any questions whatsoever. We sell through our online, kaatsu.com. A lot of people first come across KAATSU through people like yourself who interview me or maybe they heard from their next-door neighbor or something. Everybody, it’s a non-intuitive way to get stronger faster, be more cognitively aware. So it does require some explanation. And I spend 90% of my time explaining KAATSU. And so that’s how we’ve grown.
Steven Sashen:
Awesome.
Steven Munatones:
So www.kaatsu.com.
Steven Sashen:
K-A-A-T-S-U. So yes, some people can’t see your hat.
Steven Munatones:
Oh, sorry. There we go.
Steven Sashen:
Well, not that they can’t see it. You don’t need to get closer. They’re just listening, not watching.
Steven Munatones:
Ah, got it. Got it.
Steven Sashen:
You don’t need… That’s like going to a foreign country and speaking English louder to make people hear it.
Steven Munatones:
I understand.
Steven Sashen:
It just doesn’t work. So once again, thank you, thank you. And for everyone else, A, please go check out KAATSU and tell me what you think. And especially if you decide to try it, I’m dying to hear what you experience 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 or 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 have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, then I’m all ears even if they’re up 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, @jointhemovementmovement.com. And until next time. Go out. Have fun and live life feet first.
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