← The Neuro Experience
The Neuro Experience
Benefits of Red Light Therapy: Here’s What You Need to Know for Better Health
00:17:49
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
In this video, I'm going to share with you the top eight benefits of red light therapy that I wish I had known before so I could have started using red light therapy before and reap all the benefits that I'll share with you in this video. But I'm not only going to share the benefits, but also the mechanisms of action, meaning I'll explain what happens when red and infrared light hit your skin or your tissue, what happens on a molecular level that enable many of those benefits, or all of the benefits that I'll share with you in this video. Now, before we get started, one important thing. Whenever I say red light therapy, I really mean the combination of red and near infrared light. So any red light therapy device that I've ever used uses a combination of both wavelengths. And so maybe the better term is photobiomodulation or pbm. And that's also the term that's used in most scientific circles. So, but for the purpose of this video, I'm going to say red light therapy or PBM or photobiomodulation and I mean the same thing, meaning the combination of red and near infrared light. So let's talk about the eight benefits first before we dive into the details, the of those mechanisms of action. First benefit, it improves skin health, cosmetic issues, fine lines, wrinkles, et cetera. Number two, it improves athletic performance. That's an interesting one. And there are a couple of direct and indirect mechanisms of how that works that we'll cover in this video. Very related to athletic performance is the speeding up of muscle recovery. So if you use rattler therapy, you can speed up muscle recovery. And that's actually one of the indirect ways on how you can improve athletic performance. It supports muscle growth. That's one of the, I guess, direct benefits of improving athletic performance. When you know your muscles grow quicker, they recover quicker, you can perform better. It also reduces the risk of injury. So you can strategically use red light therapy before exercise to reduce your risk of injury or before you go hiking or rock climbing or whatever the case might be, doesn't necessarily have to be a workout in the gym, also reduces pain and inflammation. And, and I think that's maybe one of the main benefits for someone who is not an athlete. You know, you might have bad knees, you might have lower back pain, you might have fallen down or gotten into an accident, whatever the case might be. And so you're in pain, you have inflammation, and you want to treat that and you want to speed up the healing process. Radler therapy also improves sleep and reduces anxiety and I mentioned those things in the same sentence because very often sleep problems can be associated with anxiety. So if we are anxious, you might have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, and getting a good night's rest. And so by reducing anxiety, you can improve your sleep. But that's not the only mechanisms. There are others, like, you know, improving your circadian rhythm and aligning your circadian rhythm, really optimizing it, that can help you sleep better using red light therapy. And last but not least, I'm sure there are other benefits, but that's the last one that I'll cover in this video. Red light therapy can help with the regrowth of tissue and specifically the regrowth of cartilage tissue. And that can be a game changer and a major factor of improving the quality of your life. If you have maybe knee issues where your cartilage tissue has disappeared over the years, maybe because of overuse, maybe because of chronic inflammation or other factors. And with red light therapy, you can actually tip the balance of tissue growth and tissue degradation into your favor so that more tissue grows than degrades. And that means over time, I mean, that's obviously a process that can take several months. You can regrow cartilage tissue and significantly improve the quality of your life, if that's something you're dealing with. Now let's talk about the mechanisms of action, meaning how does red light therapy or photobiomodulation deliver all of those benefits? And so, on a very high level, as you know, I'm sure light carries energy, and the amount of energy carried depends on the wavelength. So red light and near infrared just happen to have a certain wavelength that has been shown to be beneficial to carry energy into your tissue, and your tissue then absorbs that energy. And more specifically, there are molecules in inside the mitochondria. The mitochondria are your cell's power plants that make ATP, the energy currency in your body. And so there are molecules in your mitochondria that absorb those specific wavelengths of red and near infrared light, and that increases the cell's energy production. And whenever your cells produce more energy, when they function more optimally, good things happen, including all of the benefits that I've mentioned already. And one of those molecules that is responsive can handle that, that is involved in that process is called cytochrome C oxidase. And so that that molecule absorbs the energy and makes your mitochondria produce more energy, produce more ATP. At the end of the day, it does many other things as well. But that's one of the main mechanisms of how red light therapy can deliver all of those benefits. And from there, you have several downstream benefits that occur because of the increased energy production. And one of the things that happens is the dilation of blood vessels. So when you use red light therapy, nitric oxide gets released, and nitric oxide, again, has many functions in the body, but one of them is to dilate your blood vessels. And when blood vessels dilate, when they become bigger in diameter, more blood can flow. And with the improved blood flow, you get also improved nutrient delivery, specifically oxygen, and any of the other things building blocks, amino acids, whatever the case might be, that your cells or your tissue needs to either build new tissue to produce maybe more collagen in your skin, which can then reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles and make your skin look healthier and better. Make your skin more resilient to UV radiation, for example, so you don't burn as easily and you don't wrinkle as EAS when you are exposed to the sun. It can also cause increased cell proliferation, meaning more cells grow or regrow if they are damaged or if there is a. If you have degraded tissue, degraded cartilage tissue, for example, the cell proliferation can help regrow that tissue. You can, even with red light therapy, regrow new blood vessels. And that's a process called angiogenesis. And as you can imagine, if you have more blood vessels in a certain area, that means there is going to be more blood flow and more nutrient delivery, more oxygen. And so that, again, speeds up wound healing. And it increases also skin thickness and many of the other things associated with, you know, just having healthier tissue that's healing faster. Now, in terms of athletic performance, studies have shown that red light therapy can increase the excitability of muscle fibers, meaning that, you know, when you, when your muscles contract, the more muscle fibers you can recruit during that contraction, the stronger you are, and the more that muscle tissue grows because it gets stimulated from, let's say you're weightlifting, you're doing squats, or whatever the case might be. And the more muscle fibers you can recruit, the more of those muscles then get stronger and grow more, and the better your athletic performance. Red light therapy can also balance your inflammatory response. And what that means is it can lower chronic inflammation, chronic inflammation. You know, there are two types of inflammation. There's acute inflammation, there's chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation is incredibly important. If you cut yourself, if you get injured, if you have a bruise, if you work out, for that matter, acute inflammation or your, your body's Acute inflammatory response is incredibly important to send blood, nutrients, etc. Into the tissue so you can repair maybe those, you know, micro tears that you sustain from a workout, which is an entirely normal process, or your wound, your cup can heal, etc. So acute inflammation, incredibly important and a normal part of your wound healing and tissue healing process. Chronic inflammation, not so much. Because chronic inflammation can over time deteriorate tissue and cause your immune system to be out of whack. And you know, chronic inflammation really is one of the root causes or at least a significant factor in the development of metabolic disease over time. Be it cancer, be it cardiovascular disease, be it, you know, stroke, all of the things go back to chronic inflammation. Your body is not meant to be chronically inflamed. Your body is meant to be inflamed or areas of your body if there is an injury. What red eye therapy can do is, which is ingenious, it can lower your chronic inflammation by decreasing the expression of pro inflammatory factors and it can also increase the expression of anti inflammatory cytokines while at the same time not negatively impacting acute inflammation. So that's really the interesting part. So if you, if you, if you have a wound, you know, or a bee sting or whatever the case might be, and you use red light therapy, your wound healing is not negatively impacted, in fact it's sped up, it's improved because of the blood flow, et cetera, increased blood flow and vasodilation. But chronic inflammation, if you have it, get suppressed and that's a good thing. Radar therapy can also modulate certain neurotransmitters that are responsible for pain relief and reception. So in other words, it can block certain pain receptors so you feel less pain while at the same time triggering the release of endorphins, for example, that also mask pain or make you feel good in the presence of pain. So that's obviously a temporary benefit. But nevertheless, if you have debilitating injury that's causing you a lot of pain, you can use radlet therapy to reduce the pain, while at the same time speeding up the healing process, which might take longer than you know, the couple of hours that you get pain relief, but it speeds up the healing process over time so you hopefully get back to normal quicker than you would otherwise. Radlet therapy can also improve muscle endurance and reduce muscle fatigue. And that again goes back to the improved production of ATP. If your body runs out of ATP, if your tissue, if your muscles run out of ATP, they fatigue and your endurance goes down, your muscle endurance goes down. By making your cells or your mitochondria produce more ATP and making your body more efficient at leveraging or at using that ATP, you can increase your performance, your endurance, and reduce muscle fatigue. And last but not least, I mentioned it before in terms of, you know, how it can help with sleep, not only by reducing anxiety by, but by fixing your circadian rhythm, because circadian rhythm is incredibly important. So your body releases certain hormones at a certain time, like melatonin in the evening and cortisol in the morning. So you get sleepy in the evening at the right time, and you feel energetic and awake at the right time in the morning, and not the other way around. You know, many people suffer from disturbed circadian rhythm that leads to a disturbed release of hormones where your melatonin doesn't get released or not insufficient amounts of. And then suddenly you have a cortisol spike in the middle of the night, you wake up and you can't sleep anymore because you're all in. You're wide awake. And so red light therapy can address that and optimize your circadian rhythm so you sleep better at the end of the day. Now, what's important with red light therapy, with any red light therapy device, is dosing. Dosing is important. If I were to use that red LED bulb here in the back and shine it on my skin or my tissue or what have you, nothing would happen because it's just an LED bulb that, yes, it emits red light, but not in the right wavelength, not in the right frequency, not the right power output. And of course, you know, the distance from the source of the light to my tissue would not work either. So wavelength, power output, distance are incredibly important that determine the dosing that you get from a certain red light therapy device. My favorite red light therapy device is the Kineon Move Pro. It's actually a device that leverages not only the combination of red and near infrared light that I've discussed before, but it leverages a combination of LEDs like this one. I mean, not exactly this one. It actually has much better LEDs that are specific that were specifically designed for such devices, but it uses a combination of LEDs and lasers, which have a much narrower cone of light to help penetrate tissue at certain depths. Right. Because red light therapy devices only work if the photons reach the target tissue, you know, and so you need certain, you need an exact ratio of power output, of wavelength and of distance from the light source to the tissue to deliver the right amount of energy at the right target depth, you know, so if you have joint pain, you know, you need to reach, you know, your knee joints, your cartilage tissue, maybe inside of your knee capsule if you have soft tissue pain, you know, if you want to use it for cosmetic reasons, you know, to reduce fine lines or wrinkles, whatever, you need the right dosing. And so Kinean Move, probably my favorite device, it's highly effective. I've been using it for several years. I was actually one of the first prototype users. And I've used it for anything from severe shoulder injuries that I sustained because I was doing stupid bench press competition that I wasn't supposed to, you know, where I let my ego get out, get in the way. And I've lost my range of motion and my mobility and really my ability to bench press, to do push ups, to use my shoulder for several months before I discovered Kineon. And then the pain was gone. Within less than two weeks. I, you know, I had my range of motion back and several weeks later I was fully functioning and pain was gone. The injury was basically completely healed. All thanks to Kinen's Move Pro. We've used it for bee stings. You know, that's a great way where you can see how red light therapy modulates inflammation by not suppressing it completely, but by preventing your immune system from going into overdrive. So I'm not allergic to bees. Things we are, you know, I'm a beekeeper, we have bees. I get stung, unfortunately, or all the time or several times a year. And I tend to react poorly to bee stings or to the venom, to the bee venom, to those proteins. And so I swell up like crazy. I'm going to add a picture, a comparison picture of my hand when I got stung on my hand the first time. You know, one hand looked significantly larger than the other one. And it itches like the devil. And it's, I just don't have a good time when I get stung by bees. Now, ever since I discovered Move Pro, whenever I get stung, I just put it on. It never itches, it never swells up. And it's an incredible way of seeing how red light therapy modulates my immune system by, by allowing my body to denature, to get rid of the venom without letting it escalate, without letting it go into an inflammatory response that might last days where my hand and itches for days with red light therapy, not so much. Never starts itching. It heals off. And it's incredible. The other day, you can barely see it anymore. But I got scratched. It was a really deep scratch. This one Here, not this one is an old one, but here, across, you know, my. My decrease here by a chicken. I picked up a chicken. She wanted to get away and scratch me. And, you know, blood was. Was dripping down my fist. It was fairly deep. She must have, you know, hit a blood vessel or something. And I didn't really do anything. I'm like, yeah, it's going to heal, no problem. I just, you know, disinfected it, let it be. But then, of course, I kept using, you know, my, my hands. I did like, you know, barbell work, etc. And like in night three, throbbing at night. And it, you know, it became like I felt like something is. It's not healing properly. It's. It's still painful. It's, you know, it didn't feel great. So I used Kenyon, put it on. Next day, the wound was closed and it wasn't completely healed yet, but I could fully use my hand. No more throbbing, no more, no more, you know, the pulsating sensation that you sometimes feel when you have a cut or a deep cut or a wound completely gone. You know, one treatment was all it took to significantly boost my wound healing and speed up the recovery, get me over the bump, so to say. So it could heal completely without further debilitating me. So that was incredibly impressive. And it was one of those. If you've never experienced that yourself, you might say, you know, it works or it doesn't work. I don't know. But one, you know, those are one of the examples. I'm like, holy moly. This is incredibly effective. And it works every single time. You know, my wife uses it. Kids use it whenever they get scratched or get a wound, and it works every single time to significantly speed up the healing process and make it, you know, such an incredible, incredible tool in our tool belt, ultimately. Now, if you want to learn more about all of that, I have an extensive review of the Kinean Move Pro on my blog and on my YouTube channel. So check that out. I have an upcoming podcast interview with Forrest Smith, the CEO of Kinean, where we really deep dive into the science. Much more so than what I did in this video today. So check that out. Maybe by the time you watch this video, it might already be live. Otherwise, Primal Shiftpodcast.com, sign up for it. You'll get notified when the episode hits the air. If you want to give the Kinean Move Pro a try, you can use MKummer Move for a 10% discount. I'm going to link everything down in the description with that, we're going to wrap it up. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If not, let me know in the comments what it could have done better. Until next time.