Big 6 Lymphatic Drainage

Lymphatic system's role in skin clarity and immune function

Dr. Cabral explains how optimizing the lymphatic system improves immune function, skin quality, and energy levels.

"If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. We have Dr. Stephen Cabral back on the show. He's one of our favorite functional health practitioners. Today's episode, talk a lot about gut health. And in fact, we do a food sensitivity test. He comes in and goes over the results of mine, Doug's, Justin's, and Adam's. Some of the results you'll expect, and some of them are quite shocking. By the way, if you go to stephencabral.com forward slash food test, so that's S-T-E-P-H-E-N-C-A-B-R-A-L.com forward slash food test, you can get this food test for yourself. It's very easy. Do it at home and then find out what intolerances your body is showing. Now, this episode was brought to you by a sponsor, 8Sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system in the world. It sits on your bed, adjusts its temperature, uses AI technology to individualize your sleep system. In other words, it gives you the best sleep you've ever had, period, end of story. Go check them out. Go to 8sleep.com forward slash mindpump. Use the code mind mind pump and get $350 off your very own pod five ultra. We also have a sale on some programs this month. The shredded summer bundle and the bikini bundle of programs are both 50% off. If you're interested, go to maps, fitness products.com and then use the code June 50 for the discount. Here comes the show."

Dr. Perry Nickelston walks through the Big 6 protocol

Nickelston introduces the Big 6 protocol and explains how lymphatic fluids move through pressure differentials, always draining to the collarbone.

"The big six said change your life. So let's talk about something that's really important for you to understand about how lymphatics work. Fluids move in the body primarily through pressure."

The collarbone is the drain for all lymph and venous blood

Nickelston uses a sink-and-drain analogy to explain why the Big 6 must start at the collarbone, since a clogged drain makes everything else worse.

"Think about your sink and you have a drain. What if that drain is clogged? Well, I don't care what you do to your sink. If you don't clean the drain and I play in the sink, what happens? It gets worse. So you have to clear the low pressure first to open up the drain. So you always start at the collarbone."

Breathing as the lymphatic pump

Nickelston explains that breathing is the primary pump for lymphatic flow and that mouth breathing impairs this mechanism.

"What moves your lymphatics is breathing. Because breathing changes pressure. When you breathe in, pressure increases. When you breathe out, pressure decreases. So it's like a sump pump."

Big 6 Lymphatic: Protocol

I choose only organic meats. I choose proteins specifically that are rich in glycine as well as methionine.

"What an amazing culture, Japanese. I mean, they are so, so ahead of us in technology and in health and nutrition. And, you know, they eat a lot of sea vegetables. They eat more rice than the Okinawan. So I'm not a big fan of rice. I think brown rice is okay, but I'm a bigger fan of the tubers. The sweet potatoes eaten by the New Guinea natives, they also are free of diabetes, they have a long life, except for they have issues of famine when certain times the crops don't grow and that can kill a 90 or 100 year old and unfortunately that's the reality of their culture. My dinner is a lot of times Asian vegetables that are lightly if if at all, cooked. I use oil-free preparation methods. I go to a lot of Asian pho restaurants, Vietnamese. They have a really low rate of breast cancer. By the way, the Vietnamese have a dramatically lower rate of breast cancer than the Italians. Italians, because they use olive oil, have a very high rate of breast cancer. Not as high as we do in the U.S. because we eat all kinds of fats and meats and everything, but the Italians are definitely at far greater risk than the Vietnamese and the Thai people. So Thailand, you know, they eat a very tasty diet. I love Thai food. I eat out and eat Thai food a lot. Or at home, I just prepare multiple whole food dishes, some split peas cooked in my crock pot with, you know, multiple vegetables and, and big, big salads and Swiss chard. And, and, you know, I just, I have fruit for dessert. So it's all whole food. That sounds fantastic. Now, you know, I'm curious, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I'm curious if you've ever looked into what Weston Price has studied in terms of some of the longest living populations on the planet, as far as their consumption of things like pork fat and organ meats and some of these things that seem to contrast some of the things that you're talking about as far as fat is concerned. Have you looked into that at all, or do you have an opinion on Dr. Weston Price and some of the stuff that he's done? Yeah, when I was doing my PhD thesis and research, I was doing a study on 693 people at a Tony Robbins event and rechecking them in six-month intervals, which I did the most massive human study ever done with microscopy and lipids and follow-up. I mean, there's been studies where they've done more lipid studies, but we did more where we visualized, helped the patients to see under the microscope what their blood looked like when it was all clumped, filled with fat from raw food, like Weston Price recommends eating raw meat. Raw meat can be high in fat. And I saw recently an all-raw foodist, and following Western Price raw meat, raw eggs, the whole thing. And when I looked at their blood, they had so many microbes and bacteria and fat in their blood. And the guy felt awful. And I say, here's why. Look at your blood. It's awful. And blood doesn't lie. I got to tell you, Ben, you know, that's, that's my separator of the truth from the lie. And I, I've been fortunate for 36 years to look at tens of thousands of people's blood based on how they exercise, how they eat, what hormones they take, you know, what lifestyle they follow. And I'm just telling you, I get one in a thousand people where I just I bow down to them and I say, wow, you're doing it all right. You're exercising intensely. You breathe heavily continuous during your exercise for at least an hour. You're eating all whole raw foods. You're not adding oils. You're not eating meats. You're in the positive state of mind. I mean, just amazing stuff. And their blood looks immaculate. I mean, it just looks beautiful. No free radical damage, no signs of cancer, no inflammation. I mean, they just look perfect. And their body looks perfect. I mean, these people are on the planet. And I have the proof that that's the model we all need to follow. I mean, Bob Delmatique was one of my mentors in, you know, 84. And I became his coach. But unfortunately, he was a throwback from the meat-eating people. And, you know, they try to eat processed, you know, raw food and stuff, but meat is meat, and it's got its toxins, and it's got its high fat content, and even protein. If you read the China study, T. Colin Campbell, and he talks about high protein itself is a risk for cancer, particularly liver cancer. Jack Lane was a great, 97, 95 that is, I believe he nearly reached 97. I have a date back at my home office, so I don't have that date in front of me. But Jack, you know, he took 85 supplements, one for every year he was when I videotaped and met him when he was 85. And when he reached his 90s, he just, you know, continued to use whole supplements and exercise and the power of the mind. He never ate food out of a container, never out of a can. And Jack, he's a good model, but Jack, he had some adrenal weaknesses and he ended up having pneumonia. And that's what he died from because no one taught him about adrenal function and how to support the adrenals. I use Adrenal DMG, which is an amazing product, rich in adrenal cortex, dimethylglycine. So I'll deviate from a vegan diet because I know that some things you've got to get glandulars and you've got to get those micronutrients for thyroid, T3, T4. You've got to take certain herbs and supplements and combinations that augment. And wherever I can, I go completely plant-based. But because it's not an ethical vegetarian, I'm following a program for breaking the world record of aging. Then when you read Kershwal and these guys at Google talking about some of these amazing nutrients, but it really gets down to I'll measure my telomeres against theirs in 10 years and we'll see who's's really right. I mean the story is going to come out. When I reach and break the world record for aging, hopefully you're around to see me do it. Yeah, I got to get on this telomere testing bandwagon as well. My whole take on the meat and the fat thing is I choose all whole pure unprocessed oils. I choose only organic meats. I choose proteins specifically that are rich in glycine as well as methionine. So most of my proteins are coming from like organ meats and things of that nature rather than just like the nasty red meat that our ancestors would have traditionally fed to the dogs. And that's the way that I roll. And it sounds like what I'm doing is a little bit different than what you're doing. And so I'm going to have to do some of this telomere testing myself because I'm happy with my blood panel, but it sounds like I need to do the telomeres as well. I'm curious about your exercise protocol. You obviously have a huge amount of strength endurance, and you've kind of hinted here a second ago about the type of exercise protocol that you're seeing folks do that you really respect. What do you think is kind of the best type of protocol in terms of anti-aging for exercise as far as the research that you've done? You know, I've studied interval training. I've studied ultra marathons. I've looked at, you know, just almost every imaginable type of exercise. And of course, I think, you know, most of us into fitness realize that we do need to do a variety of types of training. But I isolate it down in a different way when I talk about fitness and training. I look at it from this standpoint. Does the exercise stimulate your lymphatics? And that's a big question because I incorporate a lot of trampling work while I'm lifting weights. That's so funny. That was the first thing I thought of when you said lymphatics because my dad does that. He's got a mini trampling and I asked him why he uses it and that was the first thing that he talked about was lymph flow. You know, the lymph is probably the most amazing. I mean, beyond the bloodstream, it accounts for 36% of the entire fluid volume. So, it far exceeds anything that we can imagine with the bloodstream circulatory system. So, you always see these images, you know, and they're showing someone's skeleton and you see the bones and then you see the heart and the blood vessels coming off and so clavian vein and the blood vessels going to the brain and so forth. But they never show the lymphatics. The lymphatics are far more extensive, far more important. And remember, for every toxin that the body liberates during metabolism, every time you take a breath, your lymphatics have to work overtime to clear out all these toxins and chemicals. And so that's why I've looked under a microscope. I've looked at and understand the white blood cells, the immune system, how these nutrients function. And I've discovered that by wind sprints, Ben, running fast, running hard, you increase your efficiency of your lymphatic system tenfold, ten times more efficient in clearing toxins and chemicals. Have you ever noticed when you're exercising consistently, and I mean hard and consistent, how easy it is for the bowels to function, more efficient urinary tract extraction. So your body, your bowel habits increase dramatically because you're getting rid of more toxins when you exercise intensely. Yeah, yeah. I especially like the concept of this type of limp activation in the morning. So I don't have a mini trampoline, but what I do in the morning is I do about 200 jumping jacks just to bounce up and down for a while. And then I actually have an inversion table and I go out to my garage and I hang from this inversion table. And I do all of that before I go in and kind of do my morning thing in the bathroom. And it helps tremendously as far as just like cleaning you out almost right away. It's pretty amazing. It's amazing. Hey, I'll add to that. Let me give you an exercise that I created. I don't know of anyone that does this. I do three to 500 jump pull-ups in the morning. And what I do is I reach up to a high bar and I vary my grip on the pull-ups to do chin-ups, which I'm doing like a curl reverse grip so that I'm training the biceps. But then I'll do a little bit of a wider grip at times. But at the bottom of my pull-up, I have a trampoline, which is a jump mate. And it basically has these bungee cords. So when I touch the bottom, I get a little kip. And so instead of doing 30 or 40 pull-ups, I'm doing 300 to 500 pull-ups. And every time I hit that trampoline, zero to three G4s, I'm stimulating my lymphatics. And I can rip off three to 500 pull-ups in less than 15 minutes. And I'm telling you, it's a cardio workout. It's a lymphatic system training. And it stretches out my spine, like you mentioned, inversion table. It stretches out my entire body and i just feel wonderful because i mix it in with a lot of hammer curl presses on the trampoline so i'm either lifting or i'm pulling right that's all exercises are they're either squats lifting pulling eccentric concentric contractions and so you're either doing a lengthening movement eccentric or contract, contraction or concentric or shortening contraction. Everything is all based on that basic primary movement. And then how intense you do it. I do a series of pyramiding. I start heavy because you're fresh, you're strong. I don't worry about warmups because I do really good form and I move the weight slowly through the motion. I start heavy and then pyramid down as I get tired. And then when I get to the bottom of my pyramid where I'm doing maybe 100, 200 lifts, I pyramid back up so I have mental toughness and I end with the highest weight because you have muscle memory and you'll remember the last weight you moved."

Do healthy people actually need lymphatic treatments?

The hosts examine whether lymphatic drainage treatments are medically necessary for healthy individuals or primarily a wellness trend.

"At Sierra, you'll always find apparel, footwear and gear for 20 to 60% less than department and specialty store prices. But right now it's clearance time, so you can save even more on everything you need to get active and outside. Visit your local Sierra store today. Down a long gravel road. Very quiet and secretive. Behind locked gates. You can see the future. Lies a wellness cult. If you break the rules, then things begin to go wrong. Behind the promises. I was scared. I was shaking. Lay something more disturbing. They were healing her energetically, Phil. How does that go, though? I don't know. Obviously it doesn't work because she's dead. Who should you trust to make you better? Follow and listen on rnz.co.nz forward slash podcasts or your favourite podcast app. ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Am I right in remembering, Norman, that you hate massages? I loathe massages. I cannot imagine why anybody would spend money to have somebody hurt you like that. It doesn't always hurt. I get so uptight about them and tense up that I don't get any benefit out of it. It's the opposite effect. Yeah, that's fine. Oh, well, I can get it. Some people are addicted to them. They just absolutely love it. You're going to hate this episode of What's That Rash? Yeah, it's kind of what we're going to talk about on this week's What's That Rash, the podcast where we answer the health questions that everybody's asking. So today, the questions come from Nikki and Kate, who are both asking about lymphatic massage. So a very specific type of massage, maybe one that you would hate less than others, I don't know. Nikki says, I want to know if lymphatic treatment actually works or if it's just another money grab. Nikki said, I had my second bout of diverticulitis and was recommended by a non-medical person to try it. What do you know about this treatment? Well, I will say I'm always a bit sketchy when a non-medical person is the person giving medical advice. I say that myself, not being a doctor. Quickly, what's diverticulitis, Norman? Well, diverticulitis is where pouches develop in your colon, in your large bowel, and become plugged and infected. And it's really quite a painful condition. And it can actually turn into something surgical requiring major surgery, either to remove the diverticula of these pouches, but usually it can be settled with diet and antibiotic treatment. And maybe lymphatic drainage massage, as we'll discover soon together. I'm not sure I'd want somebody pummeling my stomach while I've got diverticulitis. That might just be a... Oh, goodness. Anyway, Kate is asking the more broad question saying, is lymphatic massage as beneficial as claimed for otherwise healthy adults? I've seen massage gloves with metal bumps claiming that the recommended massage technique, along with essential oils and massage creams that I'm sure you all get for a fee, will detoxify and drain your lymphatic system, boost your circulation and support skin health. Is this something we should all be doing? Detoxify is always a red flag word for me. Well, it's a sort of TikTokify word, isn't it really? Yeah. And I think this is a very TikTok-y space. I don't know about all of the different types of lymphatic drainage massage, but at least on my algorithm, I see a lot of stuff about facial massage to de-puff the face. You make you look snatched, isn't that the word? I'm just snatched from where I'm not quite sure, but anyway. You're always like it when I'm up with the terminology. I love it when you're up with the terminology. I'm up with the lingo. Always on. Well, you always look snatched to me, Norman. Oh, you're very kind. Yeah. So where do we even start with this? The lymphatic system is perhaps the lesser known and loved of some of the systems in the body. It is. Once you describe it, people say, oh, of course that exists, but they don't know. It's in a sense a parallel circulatory system in the body. This is a network of vessels which carry fluid, white blood cells, rubbish often, infective particles, back up, often in line with the arteries in the same sort of channel, to lymph nodes. So you get blood coming through the arteries to tissues, goes into the tissues, the veins then take away the deoxygenated blood. But fluid gets Thank you. So you get blood coming through the arteries to tissues, goes into the tissues. The veins then take away the deoxygenated blood. But fluid gets pushed into the tissues, but also cells themselves live within, if you like, an aqueous environment where stuff from cells goes into this aqueous environment. and the lymphatic system is designed to take a lot of this away, filter it through the immune system and return, in effect, filtered fluid back into the bloodstream. So I think most people's point of reference with the lymphatic system is lymph nodes. You know, when you've seen a doctor and they felt around your throat to see if maybe your lymph nodes in your throat are a bit swollen as a sign of infection, or you might have heard of lymph nodes in relation to cancer treatment that perhaps they're sort of like a sentinel that cancer might have spread out of the original site, say for breast cancer or something like that. But beyond that, apart from maybe having puffy ankles at the end of a long flight, it is something that we don't seem to think about quite as much. And puffy ankles at the end of a long flight may have nothing to do with your lymphatic system. It may simply be something going wrong with the blood getting back to your heart. That's not always the case. Problems with your kidneys can cause swollen ankles. The point being that swollen ankles, swollen limbs needs to be investigated in its own right and not assuming that it's just poor lymphatic drainage because you could be missing something serious like heart failure. Okay, that is a really good word of warning there. And so then the lymph nodes are kind of part of your immune system. It's part of the way your body's checking what's running around it and making sure there's no nasties in there. Yeah, and the lymph nodes are, if you like, waste stations for foreign material that's coming into the body, and the lymph nodes can alert the rest of the immune system that something's up and trigger various immune reactions, both nonspecific and specific to the threat. I know that sometimes when people have cancer, they have to take lymph nodes out as part of the treatment, and then that can be something that causes lymphedema, where someone has a buildup of fluid in, say, their arm because their lymph node isn't working, which is just sort of one of the many ways that the lymphatic system isn't working sometimes in some people. Yeah, it's very different from the sort of swelling that you might get with heart failure or kidney problems. It's the whole limb that gets swollen, and's usually just one side. And it is a recognized and all too common side effect of cancer surgery and therefore needs to be thought about and people try to prevent it. And it's also where lymphatic massage can help. We'll come back to that in a moment. But there are other causes of lymphedema. Lymphedema can occur in its own right where they just don't know what the cause is. You can get cancer of the lymphatic system itself, which is, you know, lymphoma is one of those. You can get inflammation of it, lymphangitis. You can get congenital problems with the lymphatic system. You can have parasitic infections of the lymphatic system. So there are lots of things that can go wrong with the lymphatic system causing lymphedema. And people might have seen photographs of filariasis where the limbs can become enormous due to the blockage of the lymphatic system due to parasites. So I did a couple of stories on lymphedema as part of the health report a few years ago. And when I was speaking to the people involved in that, one of them was a woman who'd had breast cancer. Another was the parent of a child who had congenital lymphedema. And for them, massage was a really big, important part of their therapy. So it obviously works to drain this lymphatic fluid for people who have a malfunctioning of that system. But I think the question, especially Kate's question is for otherwise healthy adults, is there any health benefit here? Well, before we get there, let me just deal with a little bit with the causes that you spoke about. Post-surgery for people where the surgeon suspects that you might be susceptible to lymphedema because of the surgery. They do compression bandages. There's exercises that can be done. And indeed, there's a dragon boat racing for women with breast cancer was originally... What? Well, I don't know if you know, there's a whole worldwide movement of dragon boat racing for women who've had breast cancer, who are breast cancer survivors. Okay. I mean, that sounds awesome. And one of the reasons that it started was a group of women with lymphedema. And they found that paddling in the dragon boats helped their lymphedema. And this has now become a real thing. You'll find boats full of women following their breast cancer around the world in dragon boat racing. Okay. Is there something specific about the type of paddling with dragon boat racing or is it just that they're active? They're active arm exercises, which gets things moving, gets whatever lymph drainage you've got is enhanced. Plus community and it's awesome. They do those chants. That is very cool. So there's a whole process involved in the treatment of lymphedema and manual lymph drainage, which is a specialized technique, which is following the drainage of the lymphatics. And the thing about the drainage of the lymphatics is there's some areas in the body where we know that lymphatic fluid drains into the bloodstream. It's about three litres a day in normal circumstances. And so the idea is just to get this moving, often with quite light touch, but it's a mixture of light touch, heavy touch. There are various techniques used to release the fluid and try to get it moving. And in expert hands, this can help. In severe lymphedema, you do need other techniques, but lymphedema massage does work. So that's obviously very specific cases in people that have a disordered lymphatic system that needs manual help, as well as other things. I've also seen some studies around lymphatic draining massage comparing to other massages for sports recovery. The studies that we found for this particular podcast have not shown a big difference between manual lymphatic drainage and other specialized forms of massage, such as petrissage massage, which is really more of a kneading style of massage. So that's very specific application there. I guess what I'm, we talked about the TikTokiness of this before. I think some of the claims that I've seen around this area and that our correspondents are writing to us about is this sense of your lymphatic system is perhaps congested, that it's, you know, making you bloated, it's making you puffy, you're not snatched, as you said, Norman. What do we know about whether there's... What does snatched actually mean? It's when you make... I thought you knew you were using it so perfectly. It's where you sort of like lifted and especially around your face or your waist that you look kind of very tight and angular in a way that is culturally aesthetically pleasing in this specific moment in time. Yeah. Whenever people claim that a particular factor explains almost everything that's going wrong with your body, it's not. It's as simple as that. And you can never say never, but the likelihood that abnormal lymphatic drainage has effects on a wide range of conditions, including diverticulitis, is just not there. Yet, when you've got inflammation, you will have an effect on the lymphatic system. You'll have more fluid going through the lymphatic system, more rubbish, in a sense, getting into your lymph nodes. That would be an issue. But there's no sense that the drainage is particularly abnormal and would benefit from massage. The thing about massage is it's not necessarily going to do you any harm unless you're treating something that should be investigated medically before you jump to the idea that it's lymphedema. And we've spoken about that earlier. The specific type of massage that I think is worth digging in on with this, especially around skincare, is gua sha and facial rolling. Are you familiar with this? Yes. I mean, I do it every morning before I go to work. Do you? Do you have a jade roller? No, I don't. So if you're not... Okay, so the facial roller is a little bit more self-explanatory. It's like a little rolling pin that's usually made of jade and you can sort of use it to roll on your face and it's kind of cold and some people use it like with this skincare that put their moisturizer on it. So it's not a stretching roller like you would lie in the ground and run your face over a rough roller. No, it's like a little tiny magic wand that you kind of rub around on your face. And then the gua sha tool, it looks like a kind of wonky love heart and it's sometimes made of jade, it's sometimes made of metal, but it's the same sort of thing. And the gua in gua sha, it's Chinese medicine thing, means scrape. And sha refers to the kind of bruising effect that like in traditional Chinese medicine, you might do it over your whole back. And it's a very firm scraping motion that leaves that kind of, what do you call it? That sort of speckly red bruising mark behind it. It's called petechiae. Petechiae, what a cute word for something that looks kind of intense when you first see it. And that's very much embedded in Chinese traditional medicine. As far as I could see, I couldn't find a huge amount of evidence to support it. But in terms of making your skin look, I don't know, tighter, brighter, lighter, higher, I don't know, what do we know about that? Well, we found one study, which was a small study, not well controlled, where people were either using the facial roller or the full gua sha technique. So it was about 34 people. So it was one against the other rather than control. There was no placebo, obviously."

Big 6 lymph reset clears chronic pain irritants

Chronic pain often stems from congested lymphatics trapping chemical irritants around nerves. Daily lymph node stimulation restores drainage.

"Your primary exit route for those chemical substances that can cause irritation is going to be the lymphatic system, mostly through your lymphatics."

Why the Big 6 is called the Big 6

Dr. Nickelston explains that the Big 6 refers to six major lymph node clusters that must be primed before any movement or exercise.

"We call them the big six because it's a big deal to work them."

The Big 6 must come before rebounding or any other modality

Nickelston explains that rebounding is great for lymphatic flow, but the Big 6 protocol should always be done first to clear pressure blocks.

"So, how do you, when someone recognizes that this is an issue for them? And what were the what and what maybe you can describe your personal story as to how you your life got to the point where you had suffered such misery from lymphatic stagnation. And then, what caused you to realize that? And maybe help us understand your journey and what you happened to you."

Spinal lymphatics improve after Big 6 clears pressure blocks

Nickelston describes how the harder-to-reach spinal lymphatics begin to flow once the Big 6 drainage points are opened.

"And I have people that do those things. So, they start moving and they start breathing, and they may feel a little bit better, but they still have lymphatic blocks. And the reason is the blocks are too big to now be moved by those two things. Movement and breathing itself are not enough. And the way I kind of describe that is this: if you have a toy."

Big 6 Lymphatic: Benefits

All right, episode 476 with our good friend Stephen Huir from Synergistic Nutrition is brought to you by the Bellicon Rebounder. This is an amazing machine.

"All right, episode 476 with our good friend Stephen Huir from Synergistic Nutrition is brought to you by the Bellicon Rebounder. This is an amazing machine. I highly recommend it."

Big 6 Lymphatic Discussion

It does contribute to chronic inflammatory conditions like arthritis and like cognitive decline. In your case, of course, as you indicated, you're interested in prevention because you already know that you're ApoE4 positive.

"So many people, I mean, this wasn't even known as a problem when I was in medical school, but it's become very clear that it's very common. It does contribute to chronic inflammatory conditions like arthritis and like cognitive decline."