Stretching & Collagen

In this episode we talk about stretching and bodybuilding. It seems simple but so many people get it wrong. When, how, and how much is too much.

We then jump into Collagen, the benefits, and which source gives you the best results. Collagen naturally decreases in the body as we age, but obviously is a key structural protein that's needed for connective tissue, cartilage, tendons and we need it for muscle recovery and growth.

• Stretching, yes, no, before after, how much is too much? and why?
• Where would you recommend we source our Collagen intake?
• Collagen, the benefits, and which source gives you the best results. 

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Transcript

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Ash Horton:

Our host, the world renowned, Christine Envall, an IFBB professional, three times world champion, a mentor, an icon, and of course, a founding co-owner of the best supplements money can buy, International Protein. In this episode, we talk about stretching. It seems simple, but so many people get it wrong. So we ask, when, how and how much is too much. We then jump into collagen, the benefits and which sources give you the best results?

Ash Horton:

All right Christine, stretching. Is it a yes, is it a no, is it before, is it after? Tell me, what are your thoughts on it?

Christine Envall:

Okay, so stretching, again, as we get older, becomes more important, but coming back to the basics and the theory around stretching, I did phys-ed, PE, what do you call it, physical education in year 12. And I remember we had to design workouts, and we always had to put a warmup and a stretch in before you pretty much did anything. The reality though, obviously, as I got into training, there isn't really, or there wasn't really a lot of time to do that kind of stretching because it was very generic, the stretching that we did in PE and all that kind of stuff.

Ash Horton:

I've also been told that the muscle and correct me if I'm wrong, is that it's like chewing gum. You got to warm it up a little bit before it stretches. So if you actually stretch at the beginning of a workout, it doesn't make sense and it's like cold chewing gum and it can snap easily.

Christine Envall:

Yeah. That is 100% what he's going to happen. So to me, the stretching is so applicable or it's so specific to whatever it is that you're trying to do as well. So if you're trying to do a sprint or something like that, where you're going to be firing very quickly.

Ash Horton:

It's a little close to home, isn't it?

Christine Envall:

It is, it is.

Ash Horton:

We had a conversation prior to this, we're down at the park, throwing a ball around, myself and a mate and he was European, didn't know what a rugby ball was. So I was teaching him how to pass, teaching him how to pass backwards, that concept just for him, he will listen to this, he will laugh, but that concept for him was just, it didn't make sense. But we went through that, having a bit of fun and I said, "Okay, I'm feeling good. Let's do some sprints." So having not sprinted in, I don't know, at least 10 years, I thought, "It'd be really great to get that back and be in that physical shape, so let's do this." And so the first two sprints, they were fine, third sprint, ping, my hammy goes and I got this little tear in the hammy. And I said, "Ah shit, that's just put me back six weeks," or however long it takes to repair.

Ash Horton:

So I walk it off. I think I'm all healed, or not all healed, but I can go to my martial arts, I can train a little bit, do all that kind of stuff. So on the Monday, this was on the Friday, on the Monday, ended up having the old three on one scenario, and of course, I'm like, "Bring it on," to the other guys in the class and the first kick, ping, off it goes again.

Christine Envall:

But that's demonstrating how it's so specific to the activity that you're doing. And a lot of that dynamic movement, dynamic explosive movement is obviously going to need a different kind of flexibility to slow, controlled weight training, versus a sport, I guess, where you're even more dynamic and you can be potentially moving in all different kind of ways. But that also is a difference, I guess, between muscular flexibility and tendon flexibility. People talk about flexibility, they talk about joint flexibility, they talk about tendons, when it does come to a lot of sport, it's the actual muscle that needs to be flexible, and also that's where the warming up comes into it.

Christine Envall:

So bringing that back to the weight scenario, there's obviously many, many different ways to weight train. And the way that we always used to weight train is what we call the progressive overload. Essentially that's starting off on a very light weight and then going slightly heavier, working up until you're at your heaviest weight, where you're failing on your eight to 10, maybe six to 10 reps for weight training. So how I always saw that was that it was those first couple of sets, so the warmup set and maybe the first set, which were what was basically stretching and priming the muscle to do the work that I needed to do. So no point in doing something which was totally unrelated to what I was going to be doing in the gym because I wasn't necessarily warming up the actual muscles and tendons that I needed to. But also, I'm going to say the [inaudible 00:04:38] receptors, which is basically the nerves which are telling which bits to fire, when, the sequence of firing.

Christine Envall:

Because I think that's a lot of what's gone wrong with your hammy tweak, is that you're telling your body to do something, but it's not necessarily doing it in sequence, so the muscle's contracting when it's supposed to be relaxing. And of course the body has this little trick where if you try to move too quickly, it protects the joint. Because it reads the force that you're putting on and it thinks, "Oh God, I'm going to hyperextend that joint." So the opposite muscle contracts to stop that from happening. And that's a stretch reflex response to the body, so it's your body's way of protecting the joints. So if you're not ready for that, then it's going to all fire off in the wrong way. So you got to be warming up specifically for whatever is activity that you're going to be doing.

Ash Horton:

Going from zero to a hundred is a really bad idea.

Christine Envall:

Really bad, yeah.

Ash Horton:

Not just in one session as well, if I'd actually gone running first, that would have helped [inaudible 00:05:37] a few weeks.

Christine Envall:

Worked into it, exactly. Like gone for a bit of a jog and then built up from there. And that's where I talk about getting older because as kids we seem to be able to do anything. We can go from running around the playground, we can swim, we can jump, we don't even think about it, we just go and do it. And then as we get older and we sit at office desks, we sit at our computer and we hold up bodies in a set position for a long time, like eight hours at a time, we're conditioning those muscles to be a lot shorter or condition those ligaments to shorten up because it's all in response to how we're moving throughout the day. And then we go off and try to do something and it's not right.

Christine Envall:

But just coming back to the weight training side of it, it's a good idea to make sure that you're comfortable, that whatever the body part is that you're going to work, is warmed up. So for example, legs are such a big part of our body, so you might spend a little bit more time warming up the joints around your hips and your knees, before launching straight into doing some heavy squatting. And some people will do that by warming up on a leg extension and not really counting that as one of the exercises that they're doing, they're more saying, "Okay, that's just getting some blood into the muscle." Because again, it's about getting that blood into the muscle, getting it used to firing in the right sequence and then getting the joint warmed up. So that is really, really important, but it's not necessarily going out and doing a full on, you see the stretch cages, it's not doing a full routine circuit in one of those.

Christine Envall:

So it's really being more specific about what muscle group you're about to train. I'm not going to go stretch my chest if I'm about to do a leg workout. So that's the beforehand, but that's more about say warming up and it's more about not launching into your top weight straight out because you're not set, your body's not primed for it. But using the range of motion because obviously on a lighter weight, you can make sure you're using full range of motion. So you're stretching under the tension, you're stretching under the weight and you're stretching in the exact movement that you're going to be doing for that particular workout. And then once you've done, you don't have to do that for then every exercise within that body part, but generally the first one that you're doing and you're generally going to do, maybe some kind of compound work.

Christine Envall:

So again, you see people's squat. A lot of the time they'll be just doing body weight squats, just to get used to that movement. And also that gives you opportunity to feel if there is a part that's a bit tight, if you do that a little bit slowly. So that's what I would be doing beforehand because the thing to remember with weight training, is that you don't want to have too flexible a joint because you are putting a massive load on a joint. To grow muscle, you're going heavy and you'd need to have stability at the joint. So you can't be too flexible. So someone who's doing ballet, for example-

Ash Horton:

Or yoga.

Christine Envall:

Or yoga, they're not doing heavy weight, it's all body weight, but they have to be able to do some crazy flexible things. So that's a tendon flexibility and the tendons around the joint, the ligaments are getting stretched over a period of time. And I have a story from way back when, when I started. I remember I did the fitness instructor course, I didn't do the aerobics part of it, I just wanted to do the theory. And the instructor there was telling us about this ballet dancer that he knew because he was also a physio and he said, she'd come to him 38 years old, ballet all of the life, incredible flexibility. But then she tried to do weights and there was just too much play in her joint and she'd hurt herself because under the weight, the joints were too flexible.

Christine Envall:

So what she had created was a great scenario for what she had needed to do, which was her ballet, but then when she tried to move into another area, it wasn't right for that. And she really suffered from that because the ligaments were too stretched, and after that much period of time, in the same way that they tighten from doing the same thing, hers were too stretched and they weren't coming back. They won't just spring back, they permanently were stretched.

Ash Horton:

It's interesting to think that people can be too flexible, isn't it?

Christine Envall:

Yeah.

Ash Horton:

I actually meet a lady the other day because I live in a tight body and I explaining my tightness issues and I was probably talking about my hammy thing.

Christine Envall:

You probably were.

Ash Horton:

And then she said she had the opposite. So that really fascinated me.

Christine Envall:

Yeah. So for weight training you want to have, and again, it's making sure you have enough range of motion because one, you want to be able to do the exercise properly because a lot of people, you do start to see because the muscle gets tight and the muscle itself locks together and then the tendons and everything get tight. And then they shorten the range of motion that they're using for the exercise, and then when they go to pose on stage, they can't open up properly and they can't show their body off properly. Because you've got to actually be quite flexible, particularly through your shoulder joints, to hit your front double bicep properly, to hit your urea poses. So again, particularly a lot of the guys who carry a lot of mass through their chest, they can create tightnesses through their front delts and through their chest and they can't actually open out enough to hit their back poses properly. So they need to be mindful of that.

Christine Envall:

And that's where the best way for stretching for bodybuilding, is actually after you've trained, but stretching again, the muscle group that you've worked whilst it's still warm and doing the stretching at that point in time. So again, that's going to help with the joint mobility, but with bodybuilding, what happens obviously is that the thing of getting toned and I think we did talk about this in one of the other podcasts, is that it's the muscle crossbridges, so you're actin your myosin, which crossover each other and pull the muscle together and cause that contraction, they get more and more engaged. So when someone's untoned, the actin and myosin are basically not engaged at all, so the muscle just is, but then you contract and they spring into action and they work like rows, like interlacing rows. If you imagine a row on a boat, so that one's going one way and one's going on other and they pull to pull the muscle together to contract.

Christine Envall:

So as you get fit and toned, they stay what they call, more engaged. So they're already half contracted and that's what gives muscle that toned and tighter look. So then bodybuilders go to the extreme because they create more muscle fibers and they are constantly engaged because of how they train, gives it that very dense look to the muscle. And that needs to be released because that isn't actually not a good thing because then it can to cause adhesions where it's permanently stuck and that's where you can get little tears and things if they're not smoothly falling over each other. Or just that discomfort of not being able to move properly because I guess that word, muscle tied or that thing, muscle tied that you hear where people actually can't move because their muscle's actually stopping them from moving.

Christine Envall:

So it's beyond stretching, it's more like the actual massage to break down the adhesion's. And there's a few different techniques. I think one of them's the stripping technique, where they use a steel rod or something, to basically break up the fibers and make sure that they are not sticking together. Because again, a lot of the pain and a lot of the injury, injuries will come from it, but the first signal before the injury is the pain and the tightness is from the muscles creating knots and being too tied together. So I think stretching is really important, the more muscle that you get and the older that you get, that you're doing it properly. So you're doing a body part that you've trained, you're doing that after, but beforehand, you're warming it up properly. But I think the most appropriate thing is to warm it up on the body part that you're going to be doing, actually doing some light weights of the movements that you're going to be doing, to make sure that you are feeling everything properly

.

Ash Horton:

Okay. So we do some light weights, and then rest for a period?

Christine Envall:

No. You pretty much go straight into your work out. You'll feel when you're warm because if you rest, you cool down again. So you have to, like I say, you feel, if something feels a little tight, then go and maybe ... you'll have some specific stretches that you do. You don't have to do, say that your whole encyclopaedia of stretching. I actually bought a stretching book by a martial artist and I use two stretches out of that book regularly and that's my lower back stretch. So it's like the cat, when your arch over like the cat and then the opposite way, because I get lower back tightness some days and I find that that fixes it up straight away. So I do that regularly. I do another stretch too, actually I do the one where you lay down on your back and you have one leg out straight and the other leg bent and you crush your knee over, head goes the other way and stretching, again, lower back stretching.

Ash Horton:

Keep your shoulder to the ground?

Christine Envall:

Yes. Yeah. So that's hip and lower back stretching. So they are a couple that I do really regularly because of issues that I had years and years and years ago, around my early days of weight training and tweaked a few things. And physios have said, "You need to keep the flexibility in that lower back area." So it's not something you directly work out, but you use it in literally everything that you do at the gym, if you're standing up-

Ash Horton:

Everything's hips, at the ens of the day.

Christine Envall:

Yeah. Hips and lower back. So that's around weight training, but I know after …

Ash Horton:

Sorry, so how long would you stretch after you've trained, on each stretch?

Christine Envall:

It's going to depend on the person because it depends if you still feel incredibly tight, then keep stretching, don't leave it half done. So you know yourself, if you've ever done stretching where the first one, you feel like, "Oh God, that's really, really tight there." Hold at what's comfortable as well. Everyone has a different level where you might be able to tolerate it in that particular position for 10 seconds and someone else it might be a little bit longer. So I think it really has to be what feels good, what feels good for you. And sometimes, with my back stretch, I might do five sets I guess, because I'll do one way then I'll do the other way, until it feels good.

Ash Horton:

For durations of what, 20 seconds or something?

Christine Envall:

That's something that nobody's sitting there with a clock watch.

Ash Horton:

I'm just intrigued. With yoga, there's the yin side of it, where they get into the three minute stretches. I think that's, what do they call it, the deep tissue.

Christine Envall:

No, let the masseuse do that. That's what I mean, if you're trying to break up adhesions and really get that work done, then try to get that massage thing. And that's something where I know that I've really not done well. I've waited until I have an acute problem, maybe a chronic problem and then I'll go get that all broken up by a proper remedial masseuse and it frigging hurts. And if you get a good one and I know I've had some really bad lockups and adhesions through my hips and the what do you call it, the TFL, up around the top of the hip, there's a little floating muscle and then the one down the side. The tibial band, the IT band and the TFL around the top there. And going to the masseuse, the first one was excruciating. The second one was a little less excruciating. And the third one, I couldn't even feel because he fixed the problem.

Christine Envall:

So that was an actual acute problem and obviously now, I think it's like, if I had to time it, your duration might be 20 seconds to a minute, but most of the time it's like I say, what feels comfortable or until it feels good. There are other stretches that are more like nerves stretches. I don't know if you've ever been given them by physios over the years, but they're a pulsing stretch. So they basically are breaking up adhesions around the nerves so that your nerves can travel properly. And they're ones where, again, in the early days of my bodybuilding career, not knowing that you weren't supposed to raise your head off the bench when you're benching, you've probably done that Ash, you're nodding.

Christine Envall:

Yeah, so a lot of the time when people start out their bench press, instead of keeping their head flat back on the bench, they tend to curve their head forward. And that, plus the benching gave all kinds of problems through my back and into my arms. And I used to do like what I'd call the pulse, it's a common one, the pulsing nerve stretch, where you pulling your head toward your opposite shoulder, and then the arm on the opposite side is rotating backwards and pulsing. To undo an adhesion of a nerve, you have to pulse, you can't just do a continuous stretch. So those ones, pulsing stretches are also good. And again, that's normally something where you've got adhesions around the nerve, which is causing an impingement and causing a nerve pain, which is a different thing to a tight joint pain.

Christine Envall:

So depending on what it is, there's a whole bunch of different things, but it is really good to get a hold of a good stretching book, because like I say, you'll find that there's, out of the hundreds of stretches, you'll probably find five that are really applicable to what it is that each person needs to do, depending on where they get tight. You talk about the hips, hip flexes can get really tight, front delts and pecs, for other people it's their back or traps that get really tight. So depending on what it is, it's good to get those ones. Because I do a lot of the F 45 now, now that COVID is over, we're able to do our stretching after the class. Now, interestingly, it's very club specific doing the stretches and the F 45 themselves actually don't recommend a stretch after the class. They say a dynamic stretch, which again, I think that's like a pulsing type of stretch type thing.

Christine Envall:

They're saying when the muscle's warm, don't try to overstretch it, but we do a stretch cool down after the class and I do find that that helps. As part of the warmup, again, we don't spend a lot of time. They do enough of a warmup to get the blood flowing and they incorporate some stretching again, flexibility around the hips, lower back, not so much the upper body. It is mostly hip hips and lower back are there areas where, for most things and I guess, a lot of the movements that they are going to do, are the parts that you need to warm up, but nobody goes really overboard on that. But combination of stretching your muscles, stretching your joints and looking at getting some kind of deep tissue massage or anti adhesion massage to keep the muscle flexible, because that's probably most important for a bodybuilder for growth.

Ash Horton:

Okay. Let's just change directions a wee bit. Obviously we have to come up with subjects for the podcast and we get asked a few questions on our Facebook page, we answer them, do all those sorts of things. But occasionally I jump into Google and I say, "Okay, what are people actually searching?" And collagen popped up. So I thought that would be an interesting topic to discuss. All I know collagen really is, is the thing that makes you look better as you age sort of thing. It's in the skin creams and things like that and I really don't know much about it. Can you sort of [crosstalk 00:20:17].

Christine Envall:

Well, it's probably a really good topic to talk about after the stretching topic because ligaments of course, are made up of collagen. So after, I guess, your muscle mass, your collagen makes up a massive amount of the lean tissue in your body. So collagen is in all your ligaments, all your tendons and your skin, in your bone. All your connective tissue is all made up, all your blood vessels, everything is made up of collagen. Collagen itself is made up of about 50 different types of collagen, it's not one thing. But there's four most common types and I think even three, which are most talked about, and I'm going to talk about type two collagen first, because that is the one which is mostly your cartilage. So obviously what's protecting your joints.

Christine Envall:

So from a bodybuilding point of view, it's, to me very important. If you get joint pain and wearing down your cartilage, because of all of the repetitive weights that we do, it's a really great supplement. Now, years and years and years ago, and I'm talking probably like more than 20 years ago, there was a really great product on the market that had ... bird cartilage, was the type two collagen that they used. So it was a product that had obviously glucosamine and chondroitin and a whole bunch of citrus bioflavonoids and different compounds to help make that product work. But it was more effective even than sharks cartilage.

Christine Envall:

Now it's really interesting because nobody really talks about those type of ingredients anymore. It's almost like, does it even exist? Because now joints is all about curcumin and anti-inflammation, anti-inflammatory and all that kind of thing. But the actual bird cartilage was shown in studies, or people who were ready to have hip replacements and stuff, were taking this particular supplement and they didn't need to have surgery after a 12 week period. It actually had rebuilt the cartilage around the joint or had definitely minimised the amount of damage.

Christine Envall:

So my experience with taking that product was I had knees which were incredibly sore from heavy weight training and it was a long-term thing, but after about four months, four to six months of taking it, the pain had pretty much gone away. So I believe it had rebuilt. So that, to me is the bodybuilding collagen, is really the one which is helping to protect your cartilage. As far as bird cartilage, I don't know if there's any products on the market at the moment that have that in because apparently, I don't know whether the bird flu had anything to do with people not being able to touch it. Because unfortunately, a lot of these collagen products come from animals.

Christine Envall:

So whenever there's a disease like BSE or bird flu or any of those kinds of diseases, then there's potential that that can work its way into the raw material stream. So there's always a fear around that. And that's why that has to be processing and everything has to be done very, very carefully. So if there are any products on the market that have the bird collagen, and you have collagen and joint problems, the stuff is actually fantastic.

Ash Horton:

So you rate that over the shark?

Christine Envall:

Yes, yeah. It was shown to be more beneficial than the shark, but if you can't get the bird one, then you're going to have to use the shark one. I think there was things like squalene, and then there's obviously shark's cartilage, but your MSM, your chondroitin, and all those kind of things, all work together in that. So that's one type. Now apparently too, just doing a little bit more reading on that, that one should be taken on an empty stomach, that type of collagen, it's a whole collagen.

Christine Envall:

Yeah, it's whole collagen, meaning that it's in its native form, it hasn't been hydrolysed. So that's where I go talk about the other type one and type three, which is the one which we associate with our skin, with our connective tissue, with our bone and obviously anti-aging and youthfulness and all that kind of stuff. Because basically collagen is giving the elasticity to all of those parts of our body, so it allows us to just stretch and the ligament doesn't break. Imagine if it was made out of brittle, some kind of brittle material, your body would fall to pieces basically. Now that on the other hand, if you take it in the whole form and I think that's essentially what gelatine is, your body just breaks it down into the amino acids that are in it and just utilises it however.

Christine Envall:

Now the hydrolysed form, which is your small peptides and we've talked about peptides because they are the small clusters of amino acids, two, three chain lengths. Now those apparently are able to be absorbed by the body and then sent to the area where the collagen is required, rather than being broken down into the single amino acids. So if you take collagen as a whole protein, you don't get the same benefit as if you take it as a hydrolysed protein. So I think majority of the supplements on the market that are collagen, are a hydrolysed form of collagen. So that's where the studies are coming out that yes, it does actually work in helping to repair those parts of our body, get rid of wrinkles and improve our connective tissue and improve the elasticity of our blood vessels and all that kind of thing.

Christine Envall:

Now with the collagen, the type one and the type three, so the type one and three both are present in those things. I think it's bone where it's only type one. But what happens as we age is that the type one diminishes and obviously the type three becomes a higher proportion. And I was blowing Ash's mind here before, because it is a little bit complex, but the thing with collagen, I guess what makes them different is that the way that they themselves, the structure of them. So like I say, they're very well studied and they're very, very complex physical, their own little physical structure. They're all very different and that's what makes them one type or another. And I was reading that the type one is a very much more organised structure than what the type three is in the way that its little matrix fits together.

Christine Envall:

So essentially that's what gives our skin its tightness. So as it decreases and the other one, which is less organised, which, I guess, gives us that floppy look, as the organised collagen, which is type one decreases, that's what causes the sagging and the way that the skin ages and caves in and all that kind of stuff.

Christine Envall:

So if you're looking from a sports perspective and making sure that your ligaments and your are strong and everything's working properly, then you got to have your type one and your type three, which is obviously your bovine collagen. The fish collagen, a lot of marine collagen is mostly type one and that's where that, I guess, finds its way into more beauty products because it's specifically or more specifically about the anti-aging or replacing, what is being lost from your body essentially. Now that's from collagen, the dosages that they're looking at is somewhere around the 2.5 grams, up to about 10 grams. So it is a definite supplement rather than a protein. Whilst it's protein, because of the way that your body is treating it, it's sending it to the area to remake the collagen, it's not there being metabolised. So if you're looking at collagen as a protein source-

Ash Horton:

And there are some of them on the market, isn't there?

Christine Envall:

Correct. Try to replace whey powder or something like that because they are a whole bunch of amino acids and it's very, very low in fat and it's low in sugar and all that kind of thing. It's missing tryptophan, so it's missing one of your amino acids there, one of your essential amino acids. You can't have it both ways, basically if it's going to repair all these parts of your body, it's not there to be used nutritionally. So we actually don't recommend it as a replacement for a whey protein. Some people say that they do that and it's fine. And I guess at the end of the day, your body will start to consume it if it needs it, but it's more effective taken in a 2.5 to 15 gram dosage.

Christine Envall:

So there was a study with older people, and I don't know how old, I'm thinking it was over 60, people who basically get muscle wastage due to ageing. So they gave them 15 grams of collagen or nothing and put them through a weight training program. And they did actually rebuild more muscle by having just the 15 grams of collagen. So again, that to me, is a supplement because most people would have a 30 gram serving of a whey protein.

Ash Horton:

So it's a supplement, as well as your proteins?

Christine Envall:

Yes. Yeah. And that's why people are having it in that, they put it in a coffee, adding it to smoothies and doing all that kind of stuff with it. Because the studies that are being done around that 2.5, up to 15 gram type of thing, it's definitely a supplement to your regular food or to your protein powder because your body's using it in a totally different way. You don't want to use it as a dietary protein, you want to use it as a building block protein. You want it to be able to be sent directly to where it's needed. Now the only thing there is that just taking collagen on its own, isn't really proven as to whether it's the college and doing it because it definitely needs to have vitamin C to make it actually form the collagen in your body and zinc and copper also very, very important.

Christine Envall:

So a lot of the studies that have been done have been done as part of a full on supplement. It may have resveratrol, other antioxidant type of ingredients and herb's and nutritional compounds. I think one of them had coenzyme Q 10, resveratrol and another couple of antioxidant type compounds and together they all worked. But there hasn't been a lot done with just pure collagen to see if that actually worked, because obviously you need everything to be there, to create the compound, much like you need all of the essential amino acids to grow muscle tissue, you need to have all the other cofactors to actually grow the ligaments and the tendons and repair the skin and do all that kind of thing. So you do need to be mindful that you've got to have it with a vitamin C type of content, or it's not going to be as effective. But yeah, collagen is definitely, it's around to stay, I believe, because like all the things, like we talked about with pre-workouts, there's just going to be more and more and more research come out about these things.

Christine Envall:

I know in Australia there's a company called [inaudible 00:30:26], which actually makes the collagen and they've even fractionated that hydrolysed collagen down into more active bio fractions and are looking at really specific areas, where that's going to really target skin or is going to really target joints. So they are looking at which fractions of the collagen act in certain ways in the body and really trying to get quite specific. So it's only going to get better from here. But as I said, it's one of those things where, try it for yourself, you are looking at about an eight week period before you'll get-

Ash Horton:

Like a loading period?

Christine Envall:

I guess it's not a loading period, as much as you need stuff to grow and change. So like anything in the body, it doesn't happen overnight, to rebuild structures and that type of thing. But I think it's about after an eight-week period, where people have noticeable changes and less wrinkles, less fine lines. And as I said to you, when I was taking the bird cartilage in the product, it was about a four month period where I just realised like, "Oh, I don't have any pain anymore." Whereas I'd gone from I would wake up every morning and my knees would just be so sore, it would be hard to get moving and I was barely 30. So now I'm fine and I'm nearly 50. But it wasn't an overnight thing, and you were going along and one day you realise that the problem's gone and it's the same thing with these products, one week of taking it or using it is not going to make a difference.

Christine Envall:

But if you look at yourself over a period of about two months, and that's when a lot of the studies said that that was where the impact was shown, but then you have to keep on taking it forever. You don't just get to that period, then if you stop, then it will go backwards again. But as I said, the main sources, obviously fish for type one and then the bovine for types one and three and, shark cartilage and bird cartilage is type two. Take one with food, which is the hydrolysed form, which is your types one and three and the cartilage ones are the ones that you'd take without food. And the dosages on those a much smaller, you're talking about 500 milligram dosages, as opposed to say 2.5 to 15 gram type of dosages.

Ash Horton:

Cool. Well, that got complex quickly, but-

Christine Envall:

You had to ask, you had to ask Ash.

Ash Horton:

Yes, I did.

Christine Envall:

But yes, do I recommend collagen, yeah, depending on what you're trying to do, it definitely, I think, would have a good benefit. But as I said, it's got to be in combination with all those other ingredients.

Ash Horton:

Awesome. Thank you very much. Words of wisdom, if you like, what you heard recognise that these tips, they're free. So show your support by becoming a loyal International Protein customer by jumping online, hunt our product down and hit that buy now button. So once again, like, share and subscribe to our podcast so we can continue to bring you these episodes from our one and only Aussie mussel guru, three times world champion, Christine Envall.