Kaatsu: A Japanese Technique to Effortlessly Gain Muscle and Improve Your Heart

Is it possible to build muscle without lifting weights? Can we tone our facial muscles? Is it possible to improve our cardiovascular system with almost no effort? Today, we sit down with former USA swim coach and Kaatsu CEO Steven Munatones. He tells us all about his decades-long journey of discovery and tutelage under Dr. Yoshiaki Sato in Tokyo, wherein he studied the myriad benefits of Japanese Kaatsu bands and developed a plan to introduce this technology to the world. Huge amounts of research out of Japan are showing that one can maintain strength and vitality as they age, improve overall vascular function, rehabilitate injuries all with zero risk of injury.

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Key Moments
“Why would someone [restrict blood flow]? They do it for a variety of reasons, and there's a lot of literature out there by researchers, scientists, physicians, and physical therapists, and you want to do this mostly to build muscle. Building muscle helps if you're injured, maybe you had a surgery on your knee, maybe you broke your arm. It helps reduce atrophy. And so part of the recovery process is rebuilding that muscle loss. When you use BFR, you actually reduce the amount of muscle atrophy that you get, so your body will heal itself and then you go through a shorter recovery period because you're not losing as much muscle mass.”

“Fundamentally, what's happening is a bit of hypoxia or lack of oxygen in the muscle. If you do movement as simple as bicep curls. It could be stretching, it can be walking, whatever you want to do that leads to that uncomfortable feeling you have when you work out. That lactate sends a signal through your central nervous system up to your brain. And then the brain thinks that you are doing something very vigorous, something very intense. And when the brain receives that signal again, the brain does not know if you're lifting heavy weight or you're just doing BFR. So it reacts as it naturally does and produces growth hormones amongst other metabolites, which flow through our vascular system and promote muscle growth”

“The Japanese found that when you engorged the limbs and blood and you do slight movement, this is the most effective way to trigger those signals up to the brain and then release a variety of hormones.”

Connect with Steven
Kaatsu
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Book: Open Water Swimming

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

Welcome to SuperAge. My name is David Stewart. I am the founder of Agist and your host on the SuperAge show. We talk about how to live healthier, how to live longer and how to be happier and who doesn't want that? Today's show is also brought to you by Timeline Nutrition with their breakthrough product, mitopure, the first clinically tested urolithin A supplement, which is showing tremendous results for mitochondrial health. Go to timelinenutritioncom. Slash agist. Use the code AGIST at checkout and save 10% off your first order of Mitopure. This show is also brought to you by Element LMNT, my favorite electrolyte mix. It's what I put in my water in the morning and it's what I put in my water at the gym. Go to drinkelementcom. Slash agist and receive a free eight serving sample pack with any purchase. Today's show is brought to you by Inside Tracker, the dashboard to your inner health. Go to inside trackercom. Slash agist. Save 20% on all their products.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Welcome to the SuperAge podcast, episode 161. This will be dropping on November, the 23rd 2023. So we got a couple of big things going on this week. It's Thanksgiving week, which is my all-time favorite holiday. Who doesn't like Thanksgiving? I don't know. I think Thanksgiving is tremendous. There's no sort of, at least in my world like heavy guilt overtones. There's no sort of weirdness around it, it's just like, hey, let's get together with friends and family and eat food. What's not to like? Of course, some of you may know I have a bit of a fixation with unsweetened pumpkin pie. This fixation is like 60 years in the making and I get to have a lot of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. So for all of you owls out there by owl I mean those of you who have taken the SuperAge quiz and have any of you not taken the SuperAge quiz you should do that right now. Just go to agistcom slash quiz, take the SuperAge quiz, find out what kind of SuperAge you are and then we send you tips based on your type. So I'm an owl and one of the things like us owl types have some trouble with is with holidays like Thanksgiving, like just sort of chilling out, eat the pie, it's okay, you're not going to die, it's going to be fine. So I'm really looking forward to that. And one of our best friends is a retired chef. You know what people like that start to do Like a month ago, two months ago. They start researching the menu Like what's the? How are we going to finesse the turkey this year and they talk about it. It's, I don't know, I could never do that, but I can certainly eat whatever they prepare, because it's going to be great.

Speaker 1: 2:58

The other sort of interesting thing that's happening is next week, on Tuesday the 28th, is that amazing national holiday called my birthday. So I know you're all going to celebrate my birthday, but I'm going to be 65, which is, you know, I've been mentioning this but it's, it's sort of remarkable to me that I'm alive and functioning pretty well at an age when I mean, that was sort of like mandatory retirement age, right, like way back when. Maybe it still is for a lot of people, and I just I don't, I don't know, I don't really feel like I'm slowing down that much. Maybe I am. I've been delusional about that, I don't know. It seems quite meaningful to me. I mean, I don't know how you guys feel about this. Like I've heard for some people, like oh my God, I'm 30 or oh, 40 or 50. And it's just like I never had any of those feelings. But this year, being 65, maybe this, like the legality of it, like I have in my wallet Medicare cards which I haven't used yet but I will in about 10 days, should I need them. I think there's something about the legality of this that is affecting me. Like you get notes from the Social Security Administration and I think my disability runs out this year because they figure like you're not going to work after 65. It's a big time and I'm I'm kind of excited about it. I wonder how I'm going to feel at 95. Hopefully I'm still around. Hopefully I'm doing quite well.

Speaker 1: 4:35

If you guys have any thoughts, any advice on how I should handle my thoughts about 65, maybe aren't you supposed to have a like. Your midlife crisis is maybe like 40 or something I'm supposed to buy, like a red sports car or something. Or maybe that's 50. Or if I'm Jeff Bezos, marry the weather girl who's turned into a helicopter pilot, or I don't know. None of that stuff really appeals to me, but I do feel like there's some sort of like a delayed midlife crisis brewing around in the back of my head. Whatever that looks like, maybe it's this ski racing thing that I've taken up, which seems as I think about it. Maybe that's my midlife crisis. Maybe it's ski racing, and well, you could do worse.

Speaker 1: 5:14

Right this week on the show we're going to get to the reason why we're all here. Right, it's not all about me, david. We're going to talk to Steve Minutis about catsu and I don't want to turn this into like a commercial for catsu, but it's just this remarkable thing that they're bands and we're going to talk about it in the conversation, but they're bands that like go around either your arm or your leg and they're similar to the sort of bands you may see. You know, like on Amazon. These sort of they're called BFR bands, blood flow reduction bands. They're essentially tourniquets and it costs about 15 bucks. Catsu does not cost $15.

Speaker 1: 5:51

It's a fairly spendy, technical thing and I came across this a few years ago and I didn't really understand it. And then I had some friends using it, maybe like six or eight months ago, and I tried to understand a little better. And then I've sort of really started to get my mind around what this was, because I'd spoken to Steve about we're going to do a profile on Steve coming up a couple of months and he was explaining to me exactly how these worked. And then I thought these are really fantastic, especially for people as we're aging and maybe you don't want to go to the gym all the time or maybe you're just lifting heavy weight. Is this like not a great idea for you? Or, like you know, hit training maybe is not really in your best health interest at the moment, maybe you have some kind of impairment, or maybe you just can't. You know, you don't have time. These catsu bands they have this enormous amount of data on these things about how effective they are. So we're going to get with Steve Mounitone's in just a quick moment, and Steve probably knows more about catsu technology and catsu methodology than anyone outside of Japan, so that's why we've got him on here. We're going to get with him in just a moment. After a quick word from our sponsors. The first sponsor of today's show is Timeline Nutrition with their breakthrough product, mitopure.

Speaker 1: 7:13

We all know how important mitochondrial energy is, and especially maintaining muscle and strength as we age.

Speaker 1: 7:20

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Speaker 1: 8:30

My favorite electrolyte mix, the one that I use every day, is element LMNT. You know, one of the things that I learned last year was the importance of sodium. We may actually not be getting enough sodium and I know there was a lot of sodium fear out there. And it's true if you have hypertension or prehypertensive you do want to check with your doctor. But for most of us, having sodium actually helps us to absorb water and in fact, drinking straight water without any minerals in it, we will be pulling the electrolytes out of our system. Go to drink elementcom slash ages. That's D R I, n, k, l, m N. Tcom slash ages. Get a free eight serving sample pack with your next order. My favorite one is citrus salt. What's yours? Let me know.

Speaker 1: 9:19

We're going to give Steve a call in just a moment. A quick reminder, because after the conversation we're going to do, just try this a quick little tidbit that maybe help you a little little healthier, a little longer and a little happier. But let's check in with Steve right now. We're going to talk cats soon. Hey, steve, how are you today?

Speaker 2: 9:38

Good, I'm very fine, thank you very much. How are you?

Speaker 1: 9:41

I'm good. Thank you, we actually saw each other. When was that? Yes, no, two days ago.

Speaker 2: 9:46

Yes.

Speaker 1: 9:46

Yeah, in California, in the South Bay.

Speaker 2: 9:48

Yes, I enjoyed our meeting.

Speaker 1: 9:51

During our meeting you explained a lot of things about Katsu and the bands and that, even though I've been using them for a while, I didn't really understand. I'm guessing a lot of other people also have some confusion. Correct, yes, because there's an immense amount of information out there and it can be difficult to parse it. But let's start with your background, steve. You're a competitive swimmer.

Speaker 2: 10:16

Yes, I played water polo and was a competitive swimmer in Southern California all my life. I, as a young kid, high schooler, collegiate athlete and then postgraduate I was competing all over the world.

Speaker 1: 10:32

Then you went to Japan and you discovered Katsu. Correct, tell me, how did that happen.

Speaker 2: 10:41

After graduation I moved to Hawaii. I was working in the mayor's office. The Japanese were buying a lot of property in Hawaii, in California, new York, etc. I decided to move to Japan. I worked for a large company, hitachi. I learned how to read and write Japanese DOW forward 10 years.

Speaker 2: 11:03

My old high school coach was then the national team coach of the US team. He invited me because I knew swimming. I knew Japanese. He invited me to attend or be a participant of the US national team at the World Swimming Championships. It was there at that time when I saw Katsu for the first time. I was introduced to Dr Sato, the inventor of Katsu, and I was immediately enthralled by it and I asked him. I said Dr Sato, how do I learn about Katsu, this wonderful thing? He said you are the exact person I've been looking for. He doesn't speak Japanese, he doesn't travel outside of Japan. I said well, I speak Japanese and I travel outside of Japan. In fact, I live outside of Japan. He was great. I will teach you. That teaching process, that mentorship, took 13 years. At the end of 13 years, dr Sato said okay, steve, I think you understand much of Katsu and please go out and introduce it to the world.

Speaker 1: 12:09

I want to back up a little bit here, because Katsu, it's a form of blood flow restriction, but modified. Some people know what blood flow restriction is there. Classically, what you do is you would put a tight band on a limb or a couple of limbs and then you'd be doing exercises. But those are like occluding, right. You're like cutting off the venous flow back. You're stopping it for some period of time. Is that correct? Did I get that right?

Speaker 2: 12:38

Correct. So BFR, blood flow restriction. They use either a tourniquet or blood pressure cuff or a modified tourniquet or blood pressure cuff and you put it either on your upper arm or upper leg and that it does what you would think a blood pressure cuff does it cuts off or occludes what we call the arterial flow that goes from your torso out to your hands or from your torso down to your feet, and they use a concept called limb occlusion pressure. So what percentage of total occlusion should you use with this equipment? Generally the marketplace looks at 50% of your occlusion rate is safe and effective on your arms and 80% on the legs, and of course anybody can modify that. But that is generally what blood flow restriction is.

Speaker 1: 13:34

Why would someone do this?

Speaker 2: 13:37

They do it for a variety of reasons and there's a lot of literature out there by researchers and scientists and physicians and physical therapists and you want to do this mostly to build a muscle. Building muscle helps, for example, if you're injured maybe you had a surgery on your knee, maybe you broke your arm. It helps reduce atrophy when you have a cast on or when you're in a wheelchair or, let's say, you're on crutches, and so part of the recovery process is rebuilding that muscle loss. When you use VFR, you actually reduce the amount of atrophy muscle atrophy that you get, so your body will heal itself and then you go through a recovery period. If you can shorten that recovery period because you're not losing as much muscle mass as possible, then this is a very good thing.

Speaker 1: 14:36

What are the mechanics of that? How is it possible that, like partially occluding blood flow reduces muscle loss? Help me out there.

Speaker 2: 14:46

It's actually quite, quite detailed and the scientists are still studying it.

Speaker 2: 14:51

As our technologies improve we can get dull, deeper and deeper, but fundamentally what's happening is there is a bit of hypoxia or lack of oxygen in the muscle.

Speaker 2: 15:03

If you do movement and movement can be simple bicep curls, it could be stretching, it can be walking, whatever you wanna do that actually leads to lactate and some people call it lactic acid, lactate being built up in the muscle, that uncomfortable feeling you have when you, let's say, walk up 10 flights of stairs or lift weights.

Speaker 2: 15:24

That lactate sends a signal, goes that signaling mechanism goes through your central nervous system up to your brain and then the brain thinks that you are doing something very vigorous, something very intense, although you may be lifting very, very light weights or no weights at all. And when the brain receives that signal, again the brain does not know if you're lifting heavyweight or you're just doing BFR. So the brain reacts as it naturally does, as our brains have evolved to do, and it feels this discomfort in the working muscle and then it secretes or produces growth hormone, amongst other metabolites. Those growth hormones flow through our vascular system and then, when it gets to the working muscle, as it normally would do without BFR. When it gets the working muscle, then each cell has a receptor and that hormone actually enables that muscle tissue or that muscle fiber to get stronger or bigger.

Speaker 1: 16:32

I wanna jump to Katsu, because BFR is something you know. You see these bands on like Amazon or something and they're like I don't know 20 bucks or something. I just thought like, oh, this looks like really dangerous, like I don't know if I wanna get involved in this. And I think I became aware of Katsu maybe like three years ago and I somebody somewhere was talking about it, and then I saw somebody in the gym with these things and then we have a mutual friend who was using them because she had a hip problem and she was saying like without exercising she actually gained muscle mass. So that's when you and I started talking about this, and so I've had these now for I don't know about six months or so, because Katsu is quite a different thing from these BFR bands.

Speaker 2: 17:21

Correct. So BFR, as it name indicates, blood flow restriction, restricts the blood going into the arm and out of the arm through tourniquets or modified blood pressure cuffs. That is what the machine, that is what the equipment is designed to do, and it does it very well. Katsu, on the other hand, was never meant and does not occlude the blood flow from the chest out to your hands or out to your legs. Katsu was tested and created by a Dr Sato in Japan, but it was also tested by a fairly big team of cardiologists at the University of Tokyo Hospital. There they understand that if they put some kind of tourniquet or blood pressure cuff in the hands of consumers, they're gonna have something untoward happening. So it was never their intention to occlude or impede the arterial flow into the limbs. What they did was create a special band, and I have it here and it's quite narrow, much more narrow than a blood pressure cuff, and it goes around the upper arm, as I have an upper leg Now. This band took many years to develop because the band is an oval shape when it's inflated and the pressure on the artery is just along this ridge. What that allows is for the blood to go normally into the hand or the feet or to the lower extremity, and when this band is inflated, the band actually slows down the venous return or the blood coming back from the hands or feet. That's all that the equipment is intended to do.

Speaker 2: 19:13

Now the effect of that is let's see, if I do this, you can see this is the normal color of my hand and this is the katsu color of my hand, so you can see how it's a little more pink.

Speaker 2: 19:30

It's a little more pink. What's happening is, when the band is on my arm, blood is going into my arm normally and is slowed down every 30 seconds slightly. That slight slowing down or modification of the blood flow, coming back to the arm, forces the blood into the very small capillaries of your hands, forearms and upper arms or your legs. And that is what it's meant to do, because the Japanese found when you, when you engorge the limbs in blood and you do slight movement, this is the most effective way to trigger those signals up to the brain and then release a variety of hormones. So that was the course of their study over several decades. And so that is why and how the bands are designed the way they are and how the equipment works. It's only meant to engorge the limb in blood temporarily and gently in order for the body to respond naturally.

Speaker 1: 20:38

You've used the word gently and we also talked about lactate, so to me these are two very different things. I experience lactate under vigorous exercise. It's just like my muscle hurts and I have to stop. What you're talking about is something. Help me to understand this.

Speaker 2: 20:53

Yes. So almost everything with katsu is non-intuitive. What we learned in the past, or what we know from sports science, from athletics, from performance, is in this bucket, and what I learned from the Japanese and Dr Sato is in this bucket. They're two different things. So it is absolutely natural for you to go. It doesn't make sense. How can something be natural but then produce the hormones, produce the natural mechanisms in the body that we all equate, rightly so, with vigorous exercise? And it's simply because and this was the beauty and the simplicity of katsu in that when the blood is engorged in the vascular tissue and we have to understand that sports science often looks at athletes' heart what is your resting heartbeat, what is your cardiovascular system, what is your VO2 max, what is your running speed, lifting capabilities, etc. But in reality, when we look at our vascular tissue and our vascular tissue are arteries, veins and capillaries when we take those three things the arteries, veins and capillaries and line them up and to end, they circle the earth two times for every human on the planet. That is how much vascular tissue we have. So it's a major component of every human on this planet. So when you engorge all of that tissue in blood, those very, very tiny capillaries and your heart beats normally. So let's assume that my heart is beating at 60 beats a minute. 60 beats a minute is going dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, but with the engorgement of blood in all of those capillaries. Now, instead of going, let's say theoretically, this much now it's going much bigger. Now it's going much bigger. Physiologically, my body is actually requiring and using much more energy. Just that basic fact of increasing from this amount to this amount is the effect of running faster or lifting weights or doing something vigorous. So the fact that we've engorged it in the major muscle groups and our vascular tissue expands sort of tricks or bio hacks our body to believe that it's actually requiring and using a lot of energy, and in fact it is. We can do that while we're sitting down. We can go running, we can lift weights, we can do push-ups, but we don't have to.

Speaker 2: 23:47

And that is what the Japanese were looking at, because when they were developing katsu, the key point here for them in Japan has the most elderly population in the history of the earth. Their population, about 130 million, is so old, they don't have much immigration and the number of young people who are being born are not replacing all of the older people, so they knew that they were given a population base that is rapidly aging. As you age, you don't have the incentive to go to the gym, to do a 10K run, to ski, to swim, etc. They had to deal with this aging population that is, as you can imagine, becoming more centering, but they wanted to keep them as healthy, strong and resilient as possible.

Speaker 2: 24:48

So katsu was the way that if the older people could engorge their limbs and blood and do simple movement and simple movement can be talking with your hands. It could be holding a book, it could be squeezing, it could be knitting, it could be a variety of things, walking comfortably. That is a way to engorge the limb and blood. Use a lot of energy. That energy creates lactate. That lactate, even in small amounts, sends the signal to the brain and then it produces a hormonal response, therefore keeping the body strong and resilient. That's a long answer to a short question.

Speaker 1: 25:32

Thank you. So I see there's really four areas that I see katsu currently being used. This is what led to confusion in my mind about processing stuff. First thing was there was this 10-year study from 2004 to 2014 with something like 12,000 older people in Japan. So this is a very large study, a lot of data there. Tell us, what did they find there?

Speaker 2: 26:05

So the initial goal was is katsu safe? Can we put bands on people's arms and legs and let them do what Dr Sato envisioned them to do? That was the number one goal initially, and they found it was safe. And by, out of those 12,000 people, they had over 2,000 of their test subjects who were undergoing cardiac rehab. So they had had a heart attack, they had had a stroke, they had had some form of heart disease and they figured if we can prove that katsu is safe for people undergoing cardiac rehab, it would follow that it was safe for most other people. So the first goal was just to establish the safety of it. Was the equipment and the protocols safe for the population? The answer there was unenquivocally yes. Then the second goal was how effective is it? Like? What are we trying to do here?

Speaker 2: 27:03

There were many studies, hundreds of studies actually, and initially the Japanese when they looked at this project and they looked at it through the lens of the 22nd century medical center. So this was a project that the Japanese government, the hospitals, private industry looked forward 100 years. How can we keep our population healthy and strong 100 years from now? Well, when the Japanese demographic experts looked 100 years in the future. They saw an extraordinarily old population and so one of the things that they did is they understood that a lot of older people fall. They fall break their arm, break their hip and then become hospitalized and they undergo a lot of. They create a lot of medical costs. So one of the very important parts of Katsu was how do we prevent older people from falling, building muscle enabling someone who, if you trip or you stumble, or you walking upstairs, downstairs, what have you do they have the leg strength in order to catch themselves. Do they have the leg strength to go up and down stairs, to go down a street? So part of the initial studies was does Katsu build strength in older people?

Speaker 2: 28:34

And there was another unavailable yes, in that they were testing people between most of the people who were cardiac rehab obviously were over 50 and say we're taking groups anywhere from 10 to 20 people, having a control group, having an experimental group. One group uses Katsu, one group doesn't use Katsu, doing the same movements. Try to control the factors. And then they came up with the fact that, wow, the people who are doing Katsu have significantly higher growth hormone levels, have significantly higher adrenaline, beta endorphins and a variety of other molecules as a result of Katsu and that is leading up to building up of muscle strength. They had another group of tests where they found that it actually increased the blood circulation and for those people with neuropathy, if you have neuropathy and you can't feel your feet, then it's very easy to fall. So as this 10-year project went on, they were looking first at safety, then the efficacy. Could it build muscle, could it make people stronger, more resilient? Was it improving blood circulation? And those were all yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1: 29:51

Okay, so now we have the use case is older, possibly elderly, people decreasing the likelihood of sarcopenia, and their cardiovascular systems are becoming more robust because the heart is having to work harder even though they're not doing much, and the capillaries are becoming more flexible. Did I get that right?

Speaker 2: 30:15

Yeah, actually, their heart is having to work less hard and their capillaries are becoming more flexible. So a lot of people, for example after you know it doesn't happen overnight after, let's say, three to six to nine months then their resting heart rate comes down, and a variety of other things they're able to walk up two flights of stairs without getting out of breath. These are the sort of practical things that the research was looking to prove, to test and prove.

Speaker 1: 30:51

So now I'm going to go to one of the other use cases that I've seen on this, which is the other extreme athletic performance. So these are people like the US ski team or first responders, or Pira Tia uses these and Ben Greenfield does, and they're doing hard stuff and I've done hard stuff with Katsu Ben's on. It's not comfortable, yes, it's not. So why? What's the benefit to somebody who's? Because now we're on when the other end of the spectrum, right, so we have somebody who's a highly trained athlete and they want to use these for purposes of increasing athletic performance, hypertrophy, something like that. How is that working?

Speaker 2: 31:39

Okay. So let's take hypertrophy, for example. Let's take just an athlete who wants to get stronger. It could be a college football player who wants to enter the NFL Combine, become a professional football player. It could be a high school student who wants to play in Division I basketball. It could be a track athlete who simply wants to get faster or run further faster. So in all of those cases, when you use the bands on either your arms or your legs, you can actually lift less heavy with the same results. So what does that do? A that significantly reduces the likelihood of injury. It reduces any kind of. It reduces the likelihood of overuse injuries.

Speaker 2: 32:29

So if I'm an athlete and I'm doing a lot of bench press or shoulder press or any kind of movement, if I can do that with less weight but get stronger, strength and conditioning, coach would say use less weight. If, on the other hand, I'm trying to get faster, I'm trying to perform either on a ski race or running race or swimming race and I need to move faster, what coach does is I can put the bands on and instead of and I'll use the case of a swimmer, because I'm a swimmer, I'm familiar with that Instead of swimming, let's say, two hours hard every day, really stressing the body. You could put the bands on and reduce the amount of hard training that you do. Why? Because when you do katsu with the bands on, as you experience, it is intense, it is extraordinarily intense and we refer to that as race pain. A lot of coaches understand the concept of race pace. Okay, I wanna run a mile under four minutes. I have to maintain a certain pace to do that. In competition there is race pace, but at the end of the race there is race pain where a skier, a runner, a rower, a boxer, it doesn't matter they get to the point where this is the separation between the gold medalists and the silver medalists where somehow this person blocks out that pain and goes through that plain threshold.

Speaker 2: 34:09

When you're working with katsu, you can do that on a daily basis, in every workout. So you don't fear the race pain, you understand it, you accept it, but you don't have to push yourself as far and as long as you do in a race. You can do, in this case of, let's say, the miler, instead of doing mile repeats or 800 meter repeats, on and on and on and building up to a very intense race pain threshold. Now you could do much shorter distances or much fewer distances with the katsu on. That is creating the same level of race pain. So on the other end of the spectrum, you could use katsu for as intense and vigorous exercises that you need to for your particular sport, but you're reducing that amount of time and distance which, over the course of an athlete's career, will actually be very beneficial. So those are two examples.

Speaker 1: 35:15

So we have the athlete. One benefit is he becomes accustomed to a high degree of pain and he can deal with that. He's getting the hormonal response and then he's also getting the VO2 max stuff. So he's getting more efficient because his capillaries are more flexible. Correct, right.

Speaker 2: 35:35

Correct. He's getting the physiological benefits with less time training and he's getting the psychological benefits of that competitive mindset that every champion needs to have.

Speaker 1: 35:51

And with these bands there's several ways that you can use them, so you can. They're different pressure settings low, medium, high, or you can customize it, or you can have constant pressure. So when these folks are doing this, are they doing? Maybe we should talk about the cycling too, because I think that's important. It's was it 30 seconds on and 10 off.

Speaker 2: 36:14

Yes, with our newest products you can actually customize. So the bands inflate and our standard protocol is it inflates for 30 seconds and deflates for five seconds. That's our standard. We have further developed that because different sports have different requirements and they just take a 100 meter dash sprinter versus a marathon runner. There's two completely different athletes. Their body types are different, they train differently, and so we extended the ability or we customized the ability for athletes, if they're a sprinter or a marathon runner, to utilize katsu in different cycles. So, but our standard is 30 seconds on, five seconds off in the cycle mode and there's also constant mode which is just on, and there's also constant mode where the bands inflate and they stay inflated.

Speaker 2: 37:07

So we use that constant mode in very limited situations. So, for example, it could be a baseball pitcher. It could be a golfer taking swings or NFL football player throwing the football. It could be a soccer player practicing kicks. It could be a water polo player practicing passes or shots. So it could be a boxer or MMA fighter practicing certain moves. It could be a pianist or a person playing the cello, the violin, you name it that is working on a very specific element of their sport or performance. It could be a dancer, a acrobat, et cetera. They're working on a very specific part of their sport for a very short amount of time and in those cases we inflate the band to a constant pressure and they'll do something. The track runner will practice their starts. The javelin thrower will practice the javelin throw in a very short amount of time. For more sustained workouts, you wanna use the cycle mode, but for very specific movements you can use the constant mode.

Speaker 1: 38:21

I wanna go back to the older folks in Japan. They're using this on cycle mode at a very low pressure.

Speaker 2: 38:28

Correct very low pressure.

Speaker 1: 38:30

And so they're getting virtually the same benefit.

Speaker 2: 38:33

Actually what they're doing is they're actually getting a better benefit because as you age, you're just producing less. You're producing less everything from adrenaline, testosterone, estrogen, you name it. And so what we found again, which was non-intuitive, was you put the pressure lower, you put what we call time under tension, you put the length of time that you're doing this cycle more and you're getting a greater hormonal response. That's what we have found, which it did make sense until we looked at the data, we looked at the science and go, oh, that is the case, that is what we're doing. So, and that felt perfectly in line with the original premise was how do we keep older people, how do we keep an aging population as healthy as possible? And so when we were saying, hey, this is gentle, it's convenient and it's easy to do, those three things to the ears of someone who's 70, 80, and 90 are sweet, they're perfect, convenient, easy to use and gentle. Sign me up was the response in Japan.

Speaker 1: 39:50

Because we're talking about like non-intuitive and I find everything about this to be just contrary to my thinking the tests on the blood flow in the foreheads of women tell us a little bit about this blows my mind.

Speaker 2: 40:08

Yeah. So there were two applications that really started to blossom in Japan, and one was what we called katsu walking, where people would just put the bands on and just go for an afternoon walk, evening stroll, and they were seeing great benefits. I'm stronger, my legs are. I can see the musculature on my legs. For a man who's 80 years old or a man who's 50 years old, this is remarkable.

Speaker 2: 40:38

The second boom that we had in Japan again the cardiologist, dr Sato that wasn't their focus, but that's what the consumers saw was what we called katsu beauty, and that was bands being used on the arms and it doesn't matter where you go in the world, but skin beauty is quite prized and we were seeing all of these studios open up that was focused on katsu beauty for women, and the practitioners there, the katsu specialists there, didn't care what the science was. They were saying that the women who were using katsu in this certain protocol were swearing by their skin health, and that is incredibly important for any woman, any man, of course. But when you're 50, 60, 70, and 80, and a woman feels that her skin is getting better, is glowing, it's a gold mine. I don't mean that in a financial sense. I mean they were so happy.

Speaker 2: 41:47

So one of the projects that we did is we put katsu bands on older women they were over 60, the control group. We put them on their legs, pressure on pressure off, pressure on pressure off on our standard katsu cycle mode, and then we measured their blood flow on their forehead and it increased Again. What was it? We were putting cuts on their legs and their cerebral blood circulation was improving. And again, that was. It was great to see. So then we went back to those practitioners who were focused on katsu beauty and we said well, now we have the scientific reason, this is why your patients are swearing by this. And that was one of the outcomes unexpected, non-intuitive outcomes of katsu.

Speaker 1: 42:44

What's the protocol that they're using? How many cycles, how much time that?

Speaker 2: 42:49

Yes, so that was. I forget when that study was done. It was well over 10 years ago, anyway. So once we understood the scientific principles about that, then we actually went back to the practitioners and said what are you doing? It was very simple putting the bands on their arms, doing the cut cycle mode, making sure that the user was very well hydrated. So they were taking a bottle of water or whatever their chosen liquid was, and they would drink that, doing the cut cycle, pressure on, pressure off and then doing face exercises, literally face exercises. So they would do the Japanese vowels so in Japanese it's A-E-I-O-U really using the muscles of their face in an exaggerated manner as the cuts was on then doing head rotations and different other upper body movements. And this was remarkable.

Speaker 2: 44:00

My wife, my sisters do it to this day and it's not going to eliminate wrinkles. That's not the case. What we found was, if you can keep the underlying capillaries underneath your skin as robust as possible, that is gonna make your skin and you're basically exercising your jaws, your neck, et cetera. And now there's a variety of exercises they do. There's things that you hold in your teeth and it goes up and down and you're holding it. So really the marketplace is taken over. We just provide the bands. The applications of this cut's beauty are very simple just doing face exercises. And the funny thing about this is I just tell my wife and her friends who do this. They said just talk, put the bands on and just talk with each other. That's, you talk, smile, laugh and you're doing that. So we call this double stacking. You don't actually need to go to a gymnasium or a specialized cut's beauty clinic. You can, if you want, for one-on-one attention, but just put the bands on your upper arms and do this as you're talking and enjoying a conversation with your friend.

Speaker 1: 45:25

And how long does one need to be talking? 10 minutes an hour a day. What are they doing?

Speaker 2: 45:31

Ideally what we found. Ideally, you do that toward the end of your day toward the end of your day and then, in the perfect scenario, an hour before you go to bed. And the reason why is what we also found in all of this research is that when you take off the bands, there's about a 12 minute delay in their hormonal response. So you're using the bands, either vigorously or gently, one or the other, and whether you use it vigorously or gently, based on our studies of actually taking blood samples during and after the katsu sessions, we found that the hormonal response peaks about 12 minutes after we take off the bands, but then it continues. So their hormonal response continues for a few hours.

Speaker 2: 46:27

If you're having a robust hormonal response as you're sleeping, this is ideal. Because you're not. Why is it? It's much more efficient for you to be asleep in a recovery mode, and that's what our bodies are doing. It's in a recovery mode and you want, at the time when you're asleep and your visual cues are zero, your body is totally relaxed. That is an ideal time for these hormones to be flowing through your body, because they're not preoccupied by the things to use it.

Speaker 1: 47:09

In very simple terms, that's right, I was thinking it would keep you up, but actually, what deep sleep is is when, I believe, your pituitary secretes all this growth hormone to repair your body, so that that would make sense. Yes, yes.

Speaker 2: 47:25

Now keep in mind if you do this, let's say, you put on the bands and your wife is there doing the Katsu Beauty protocol and you go. Well, I wanna do some push-ups and burpees. What you're gonna find it's you'll go to bed and have this nice sound sleep and you'll go to bed and all this adrenaline will be in your body and you'll be up. So we do caution, people. Don't do vigorous exercise with Katsu before you go to bed, because one of the things that you're gonna produce is adrenaline and you don't wanna be producing adrenaline when you're trying to fall asleep.

Speaker 1: 48:04

There's some people out there who say take a very hot sauna before bed. But I find that a hot sauna such a sympathetic activator for me I can't go to sleep. I can only do the sauna like the ladies I can do is like four or five or yeah. Anyway, sidetrack. The other interesting thing about these is the recovery. So if someone has had a hard workout or they're sore for some reason, they can be used for recovery. What's a recovery protocol?

Speaker 2: 48:35

with these. Okay, so in general Katsu, we have three buckets that people can use in four, and one is athletic performance, which we discussed. Another is rehabilitation that could be after an injury or after surgery, and the third is recovery. Recovery is actually our biggest use or application of Katsu, especially amongst competitive athletes. It could be a college athlete, a professional athlete, olympic athlete, it could just be someone who's a weekend warrior and they just went for a long hike over the weekend. And so what we do here is we put the bands on, sit down no need, or sit down or lie down whichever you prefer watch TV, listen to music, whatever you wanna do put the bands on, enable the bands to inflate and then deflate, inflate and deflate.

Speaker 2: 49:32

When it deflates that blood that had been engorged in your limb during that five second release, it washes out.

Speaker 2: 49:44

And as it's washing out, there's taking that metabolic waste that he had just built up during some kind of vigorous exercise or intense competition. And so a lot of our athletes who do multiple events in any given day it could be an Olympic athlete who does the preliminaries in the morning and then the finals in the evening. It could be a tennis player who has a singles match in the morning and then a doubles match in the afternoon. It could be a college athlete track and field. They're swimming and they have a dual meet where they race three different races in the course of two or three hours. So all of these examples are when the athlete has done something intensely In the process of their warming down. They do warm down but they still have accumulated lactate in their muscle. They put the cuts bands on 30 seconds, on five seconds off, and during those five seconds off the metabolic waste, because the bands essentially act as a slight dam. When the dam is opened, the flush goes away and they're able to reduce the amount of lactate in their muscle very effectively.

Speaker 1: 50:57

And in this case, steve, it would be limb specific. So, for instance, if your legs are sore from something, you wouldn't put them on your arms, you would put them on your legs because you want that release of the dam in the limb that we're talking about. Correct, correct?

Speaker 2: 51:13

And the good thing about a lot of these athletes are they're actually slightly sore, slightly more sore on one side or the other. It could be a tennis player or a pitcher baseball pitcher. They're using their. If they're right-handed, they're using the right side more than the left side, and so with the Katsu products you can actually put on our newest B2 product, you can put a higher pressure on the limb that you use the most. If you put a higher pressure, the engorgement is greater and therefore when you release, the whoosh is faster.

Speaker 1: 51:57

And you're also gonna be getting the growth hormone response during this?

Speaker 2: 52:02

Yes, naturally, and the growth hormone is yes, and that's something where you have some kind of micro trauma in your muscle fibers and that's literally a hormone that can go and help repair that micro trauma. So it could be as something as it could be a power lifter, it could be a Bob Sledder, it could be a rugby player who's actually stressed their muscles so much they have what the equivalent does of muscle soreness and you want to repair that muscle soreness, which are little micro trauma in the muscle fibers, as quickly as possible to go to the next game or to get to the next workout and as high as readiness as possible.

Speaker 1: 52:47

I find this fascinating how we're going from competitive rugby player to elderly people in Japan and it's the same device and it's used pretty much the same way and you're getting this variety of benefits. I don't want this to sound like a Katsu commercial, but this is actually what bothered me about when I first got them. It was like I don't understand how all this can be true at the same time.

Speaker 2: 53:18

Yeah, and that's our problem as a company Trying to educate the public and users how varied it can be used. And we see it all the time. When someone buys our product because they tore a muscle or broke a bone, they're using it for that. Then they get on the field to play and let's say they don't use the equipment because they associate rehabilitation with Katsu. And then they might hear, oh, my teammate uses it too, but she isn't hurt. Why is she using it that way? And then that's what we have to go back. So when a product like this, its underlying principles and protocols are all the same, the underlying human physiology, anatomy mechanisms are all the same, but the applications are slightly different, and that's why we have different pressures, different modes, and it's that teaching of those modes and those pressures that has been challenging to us and that's why we have a new user. It takes time for that information to be taught and to be understood.

Speaker 1: 54:34

I just want to touch on the pressure thing. So this is something that I found really interesting in our conversation, how you pointed out that the amount of benefit from going from low pressure to high pressure is quite small. It's the low pressure is where you're getting the vast majority of the benefit from Correct.

Speaker 2: 54:54

Correct. So what we mean there is when the bands inflate. Let's say the inflation for a maximum at high is 100. And let's say the inflation rate for the low is 80 and medium is 90. Let's just use those rough figures. When we're doing 80 versus 100, from our capillary perspective, there's not that much difference. There's not that much difference.

Speaker 2: 55:26

Now, there is difference if you're doing movement. So if you're my 88-year-old father, he does it while he's reading the newspaper, he does it while he's watching the LA Dodgers or Los Angeles Chargers, and so that's when he does it. He uses the same gentle pressure, low pressure, medium pressure, high pressure as Dr Peter Atia does, or Ben Greenfield or any of our NFL users or Major League baseball users do it. Except when they're doing it they could be doing something much more vigorous. So my father is sitting there, using the same pressure, same equipment, same protocols, sitting on his couch watching TV, because he's 88 years old and he doesn't want to go to 24-hour fitness.

Speaker 2: 56:16

But then you have an NFL player, an Olympic athlete, using the exact same equipment, exact same pressure, exact same protocols, but their movement is different. They're moving faster, they're jumping higher, they're running further, and so it's that movement that can be the differentiator between a lot of hormones or fewer hormones, but because if you're 88 years old, even an incremental increase on a daily basis of hormones leads to a significant lifestyle difference over the course of several months, and so that's why most of our users are older, because they say, well, this is easy and convenient to do and I'm seeing benefit over time. A competitive athlete is different. They've got a specific time frame, a window of opportunity, and so they need to maximize everything. But the underlying principles, the pressures, are all the same.

Speaker 1: 57:19

This is just one of those things that really intrigue me. I like anything that will improve life long term. I mean, that's what we're talking about here Better quality of life for longer that's not invasive like this.

Speaker 2: 57:37

When I was studying under Dr Sato and the cardiologists, I saw things that I couldn't even imagine Using bands on comatose people, using bands on people's sleep, apalsy, ms, quadriplegics, people with traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries. I mean they were using stuff with people that you wouldn't think would ever touch bands like this, but they were seeing great benefit. They were also using it, dr Sato also. We went to see professional baseball clubs, olympic wrestlers, olympic volleyball players, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 58:15

Those are the same, but it was really satisfying to take someone who is very weak or disabled, amputees, someone who's had a stroke, to take those people and literally build muscle, increase their functional strength Something as simple as a woman who's had a car accident and then being able to put on mascara or makeup, or a man who can't even lift his arm to wash his head or hair and getting those people to be able to hold a hairdryer or brush their hair or walk up and downstairs. We've had professors who's had rheumatoid arthritis who said Steve, before this I never was able to write on the whiteboard. I had to give my lectures sitting down and had to prepare, so I couldn't write as I normally did, and now I'm writing on a whiteboard. I mean, that is where Dr Santos' vision really is so valuable to me, because I love helping these people and teach them how something that's gentle and convenient can really improve their quality of life Remarkable.

Speaker 1: 59:34

So if people were more interested in katsu, where would they go?

Speaker 2: 59:38

There's two things you could do. One you could just go to our website, which is katsu k-a-a-t-s-u. Some people confuse it with katsu, the pork cutlet kind of Japanese dish, but it's k-a-a-t-s-u dot com and many people probably have heard of the Japanese term shiatsu. Shi means hand and atsu means pressure. Katsu, k-a means additional and atsu means pressure. So katsu is that word simply means additional pressure, which is what the bands are doing. So you can go there and then we give free webinars twice a week and people just listen in. That information is on the website.

Speaker 1: 1:00:23

Super Steve, thank you so much for your time today. It's a pleasure getting to know you. These bands, I think, are amazing. They're so simple. My Western brain had a lot of trouble wrapping around what went on there.

Speaker 2: 1:00:37

Yeah, and that's why I think when Dr Sato, when he first met me and I said, dr Sato, is there something I could read and study as you teach me? And he shook his head and I was like what? He doesn't have any. And I said why he goes? Oh, it's all up here. So I had to take what he had developed in Japanese and translate it to English. But there was so much there that even now, I must admit, we have a lot of information and sometimes it's not intuitive. And so if anybody has any questions, they could write us, they could look at our webinars and hopefully I can share something of benefit to people out there.

Speaker 1: 1:01:24

Steve thanks, so much Appreciate having you out today.

Speaker 1: 1:01:27

Ok bye. That was great talking to Steve about Katsu and Katsu's about K-A-A-T-S-U. I know he said that, I'm just repeating it Just in case you want to investigate further what these things are. There's an enormous amount of information out there on them. Stay tuned, we're going to do just try this. After a quick word from our sponsor, today's show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, the dashboard to your inner health.

Speaker 1: 1:01:51

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Speaker 1: 1:02:51

This week being Thanksgiving, I'm actually hoping you guys are not listening to me on Thanksgiving. I know that's maybe not in my best interest to say that, but listen to me before, listen to me after. You got the whole weekend. It's fine. Just be present with your family and friends. It's a wonderful occasion. So what's my tip for the week? My tip for the week is just take a walk after you eat, and I think this goes for any day, especially Thanksgiving. So the normal sort of protocol on Thanksgiving is eat ourselves into a coma, lay on the sofa, don't move, and watch football. I don't have anything against football. Football can be kind of fun to watch but in this case my suggestion is just go for a brisk, like 45-minute walk or so. It's going to help the food digest. It's going to lower any sort of blood sugar spikes you've got, especially if you have pie, like I like to have pie, and I think this goes for any kind of meal. I find that I sleep a lot better after I go for a walk after dinner. It helps me digest things, it helps my metabolism get going and, as I said, it'll reduce the blood sugar spikes. So I'll just try this Go for a walk, especially after Thanksgiving. The weather's really nice, it's fall. You have to be out there with your friends and your family outside. Give it a try.

Speaker 1: 1:04:09

Thank you for listening to us on the show today. If this is useful to you, you find it entertaining, informative in some way, please leave us a rating, leave us a comment, or hey, you want to be a superstar? Share it with your friends, ask your friends to subscribe and next week on the show, guess what? I'm going to be 65. Woo-hoo. Until then, everybody, have a wonderful week, enjoy the holiday, enjoy your friends, enjoy your family. They are wonderful gifts in our lives and we should appreciate them as much as we can. Have a great week. We'll see you later. Music.