 My name is Hamilton Staples, and it's my great pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Keith Norris. Keith Norris does many things, including running efficient exercise down in Austin, Texas. He's also a partner in ARX, and of course he's the co-founder of PaleoFX. The title of Keith's talk today is From Teflon to Tang, Proposed Effective Training Methods for In-Mission Astronauts with Takeaways for the Earth-Bound Mortal. Please join me in welcoming Keith Norris. Thanks for that introduction, Staples. Can everybody hear me okay? I tend to move around a little bit, so I had them lapel like me. So, From Teflon to Tang, I remember very clearly, 1969, as a five-year-old kid watching the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Obviously that was a huge step for America, and it was a culmination of then-President Kennedy's proclamation in 1961 that by the end of the decade, we would put a man on the moon and return them safely to Earth. That was done flawlessly, people could say. The mission itself, though, took only eight days, and what I would like people to think about is eight days in weightlessness, what that does to a human body. And really, we have not come very far since 1969 in trying to take care of a human, and what is essentially, if we think of what we live in today as being a biological and evolutionary mismatch from what we were designed to do, think about what space is. That is a times ten exponential, I don't even know what to say, but that is a for sure mismatch between what we were designed to do. Another point I would like to make to start off, neither Teflon nor Tang were invented by NASA. They were entities that already existed that NASA saw a need for and co-opted those entities in. My hope is that if we can keep astronauts healthy and alive long enough to transition to Mars, which is what the next step is, that those proposed training methods that will keep them healthy will filter down, just like Teflon and Tang, into the public consciousness and we can take off and run, because the same thing that is going to keep an astronaut healthy for six months in zero gravity is the same thing that every one of you need to do week to week to week to week, and we will get to what that is in just a minute. I am going to fly right by that because Hamilton did a fantastic job already introducing me. I will speak to what the ARX technology is in just a bit, I will get to that, because that is central to the training methodologies that I propose need to be used by astronauts. So the problem statement, to be sure there are numerous problems that take place in human physiology during zero extended periods in zero gravity, to be sure there are many. The number one physiological problem though is sarcopenia, muscle wasting, or osteoporosis which is bone deterioration. We don't have any real studies that have been done on astronauts who have returned from long periods in space, which in itself is kind of sad that that hasn't been done, but we do have studies in rats. Number one thing that I took away when I was trying to dig through this and find out exactly what kind of studies have been done and what NASA is doing about trying to train these astronauts is one third of the muscle mass in a rat is lost after ten days in space. It is one third that is immense. Another study I saw that kind of looked at what does that mean to a human being is you can look at a 40% drop off in a person's ability to do work, which is how it was covered in the paper. Unfortunately there is no muscle biopsies, dexascans, before and after anything like that. I think that needs to be done and maybe that has been done by NASA and that information is just not available, I don't know. But let's think about this. Christopher Hadfield, Canadian astronaut, spent a little over five months in space on the International Space Station, he was a commander of mission 35. Five months in space came back, I heard an interview with Commander Hadfield shortly after he came back, this was 2013. The interviewer was asking him questions, obviously what's it like in space, what's your day-to-day routine, and then they got into the re-entry part. And the interviewer was going with what were the psychological implications of coming back from being virtually isolated and trying to go that direction. And immediately Commander Hadfield said, upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, I felt as if I had an elephant on my chest. It was so excruciatingly painful to have gone from five months in weightlessness to re-entry that I was debilitated, I could not do anything. And he went on in the interview to completely forget about the psychological aspects, but talk about the physical aspects of what it was like to return from space during that time. It took him months to where he could just get up, walk around, and not feel like he was being crushed. All that said, it got me thinking, well, because I really never paid a whole lot of attention to how astronauts trained. I didn't, obviously my, or maybe not obviously, but my strength and conditioning background has been to keep athletes healthy and make athletes better. And then that has segwayed into, okay, what can I do to keep a Taipei attorney healthy during his, you know, during his period. So I really didn't think much about what astronauts did. So I got to thinking, well, he's that devastated upon re-entry. And one thing you need to think about too is we can say, well, if an astronaut's in space, it really doesn't matter because the job they do, you know, they're doing it in zero gravity. If we send a manned mission to Mars, it could be argued that, yes, they don't have to be in the same kind of shape because, again, they're still in microgravities compared to Earth. But the point is that first person or that first crew on Mars is, in fact, going to have to do work. Somebody's going to have to build the initial station. And yes, materials are going to be sent up there very light. There's going to be equipment that is going to help this process out. But at the end of the day, somebody has to do work. And if somebody is going up and the paper kind of equates it to this, you send up a healthy person from Earth into space. That person becomes a feeble 80-year-old in a couple of months. You're not going to get a whole lot of work out of a feeble 80-year-old. I can tell you that. Number two, if an emergency happens on re-entry where someone has to do some kind of physical work fast, that's not going to happen. That's putting an astrodon in danger. So this is very, very critical, critical stuff. So back to my point, I was wondering, okay, what do astronauts do in space to train? I hadn't thought about it before. I've kind of seen pictures of treadmills and I've seen pictures of exercise bikes, which I was like, okay, that's not going to work. But I really didn't dig into it a whole lot. What I found was, yes, in fact, they do have exercise bikes. Yes, in fact, they do use treadmills. But they also have, and I'll give NASA credit for this, they do realize that resistance exercise is very important and that muscle mass is important. Jamie Scott will tell you in his presentation later today or tomorrow. I highly recommend you go see that. But that muscle is just not a dead organ. It's not for athletes. It's a secretory organ. The myokines are secreted helping a bunch of different processes. It's not to mention the diseases of modernity that are going to be due to muscle loss for the astronaut in space. So those are other health concerns. But number one concern, the easiest thing to fix is the muscle loss. I'll give NASA credit for this, and I'm not here to bash NASA. This is certainly a step in the right direction. This is called an ARAD device. Advanced Resistance Exercise Device. It's a series in a coming together of vacuum pumps, some hydraulics, and some other things that come together. A step in the right direction. The problem is, and I'll get into this in just a little bit, that there is no eccentric loading on this machine. It's very, very little. I'll step back a little bit of exercise physiology. The eccentric portion of exercise is, you can think about it as a lowering portion. If we're back into gravity, it's a lowering portion of an exercise. It's a muscle elongation portion of an exercise. It sits in opposition to the concentric portion of the motion, which is, we can think again in gravity, the pushing or the muscle shortening position of the exercise. When we look at training athletes, when we look at training everyday people, when we look at bang for the buck with resistance exercise, we always look at eccentric exercise first because eccentric exercises is what causes the microtrauma in the muscle. It is what sets the cascade up for muscle building. In fact, in training of athletes, we use the concentric portion of the motion as a recovery tool. We don't even think of that as a building tool. All of it is important, yes. And we look at all of it when we have the time to train an athlete. We look at every portion of the movement as important. But if we're looking at a purely recovery tool for an athlete, we look at the concentric portion of the motion. That is to say, there's not a whole lot of muscle building going on with that. In fact, very, very, very little, it's a recovery tool. The resistance exercise that NASA is doing currently is mostly concentric exercise. In fact, a paper that I read that discussed the ARAD device said that the eccentric portion of the exercise of the motion on this device was only 80 percent of what the concentric does. This is a total flip-flop. Exercise physiologists will tell you, and I'll show you a little graph up here of an end-time graph, a person is able to produce 40 percent more in the eccentric on a motion than they can in a concentric. A person is very, very strong in the eccentric. This is where the muscle building properties come from. Obviously, this is hard to do in zero gravity environment. You have to think out of the box to be able to get around the fact that I cannot do an eccentric loaded motion if I don't have gravity as an assist. This has been a long... Many, many years have gone by in the strength and conditioning community among people who, that is their sole job, is to look at this type of stuff, to try to figure out ways to maximize eccentric loading and to match the force curve, the natural force curve that a person produces in a certain movement. I don't have pictures up here, but there's all kinds of manipulations of chains and bands that can go on bars. If you think of a normal bench press, you can think of lying flat, bringing down a bar that has chains draped over. Does the chains fall down on the ground? Obviously, there's less weight to handle. As the weight comes up, chain links are added to the bar, so you have more weight. So you have more weight at the top, and then you combine that with bands that are pulling down the bar. So these are manipulations that are done in these little links that we used to go through in the strength and conditioning community to really match the force curve and to get eccentric loading on that athlete. An efficient exercise, and at ARX, we started thinking about this outside the box. How could we more effectively match the strength curve? How can we fully, eccentrically load an athlete, and in fact, anybody? We actually use these machines with the type A personality lawyer I was talking about. How can we do that in a timely manner, because time is of a huge concern with astronauts. They don't need to be spending two hours working out, which in fact they do currently, because they can't affect the body enough in a short period of time. Adaptive resistance exercise is what I'm talking about, I'm getting ready to show a film, a short clip here in just a second, about what that is and what that looks like. Maximum safety, time savings and efficiency, which is huge. Like I said, back up to what the astronauts are currently doing, it takes them about two hours per day to go through their exercise routine. With what I'm proposing, I can probably knock that down to 20 minutes. That's a huge savings, huge savings. The first question people ask, well, what about payload? Because the machine that I'm getting ready to show you is a big machine and obviously, payload means a lot. You can't be sending up a machine like that. It's a huge cost to escape gravity. But these machines can be configured such that all you're sending up is a small motor, blast strap bands, some gearing, and some transmission type stuff. It's very, very light compared to what NASA is already using with the ARAD machine. So what does eccentric exercise look like as opposed to a concentric portion? Lowering, the plate is lowering. I'm resisting that plate's motion as it comes down. It's turning here and going up, I'm pushing it faster than it wants to go up right now. Concentric portion of the motion, muscle shortening, finish off the exercise. Now, what I wanna point out, I don't know if everybody can see the graph that's at the bottom. That was the instantaneous graph that was produced from that motion that I just did. If you look at the blue line immediately, the machine starts moving down, I resist, bam, there's my force output, that first peak. As I come down and I'm biomechanically, I start to reach a point where I'm biomechanically the force output comes down, comes down, comes down. This is textbook force curve right here. I come down to the first peak is where I'm in this position, biomechanically most limited in a pressing position and I start coming out of that position. My force output starts to come up as I come up through this range of motion. I kinda pack it in in the middle because I'm a little bit fatigued. You see force output come down, I get a boost towards the end. I'm up in this portion of the concentric and I finish off in that position that I'm stuck at right there. That's the final peak you see at the bottom of that green line and then a drop off where the exercise ends. The ARAD device never puts an astronaut past that lower green line in that green band. In fact, what that green band represents is the 40% more force I produced on the eccentric than I did on the concentric. What does all of that mean? What that means is number one, it's gonna be very, very, very, very hard if not impossible for me to build muscle unless I get up in that green band. What astronauts currently use never put them in that green band ever. They're never forced to go in a heavy eccentric like that. Two things happen. Number one, they're not building muscle and number two, their workouts take two hours instead of the 20 minutes that it should take. I'll just wrap before I take questions with a couple of things. Number one, if we could get astronauts to adopt eccentric exercise between the routines, they're gonna be a hell of a lot healthier. They're gonna be able to actually perform duties both in an emergency situation upon reentry and in a situation where they're actually put on, let's just say Mars after six months and they're gonna save a lot of time. Time is of the essence for astronauts in space. If we can cut out an hour and a half of their daily workout routine so that they can now carry on experiments or do whatever else they need to do on the space station, that's huge, that's a huge, huge plus. Obviously that machine is not going in space, that's too much payload, but anything on this device can be reconfigured with simple drive device, a simple motor and blast straps like you see this guy down right here, easy. Send it up, it can actually fit into the wall of the space station or whatever. Spacecraft can be configured in any way, just some configurations and you're off and running. Any questions? Thank you very much. Anyone would like to ask? I know this is a shorter five minute break in between the talks, so feel free if you have to go to the next one, but we'd love to ask any questions here too. And again, that was a 30,000 foot flyby of a very, very complicated issue, so. Thank you very much, that was very interesting. Similar question, have you talked to anyone at NASA or do you have any contacts there? Yeah, we do have. Here's what you found. So we do have an end at Jump Space Center, but as you might imagine with the bureaucracy, it's kind of tough to get an idea, especially an idea that is outside of the box and not a continuation of what is already being done. So we're not coming with a new treadmill, we're not coming with a device like that that they get and they go, okay, let's see what the new and revised design is. We're coming totally outside of the box, which is tough and people are entrenched. Just like in any other science, people are entrenched and they're like, well, obviously, if we hadn't a thought of this inside, this yahoo coming from training meat heads, what's he gonna, so it's tough, it's a tough sell, but I think if we can get somebody to look at it, look at the force curve, I think is huge, that we have to be able to show them that force curve and if we can get this in front of actual exercise physiologists with the Johnson Space Center, that alone will grab their attention long enough for them to ask a question, okay, what exactly are they doing? And that's all we need is for them to ask that question. Anyone else? Just one in the back. Do we have time? Quick question. Okay, we'll hold off and you'll be able to connect soon, how about that? All right, thank you so much, thank you so much.