Imagine a 15-minute workout that delivers 12 hours worth of oxygen and reverses the effects of aging—that’s the power of exercise with oxygen therapy (EWOT). Our inspiring guest, Brad Pitzele, Co-Founder of One Thousand Roads, shares his incredible personal journey of battling conditions like autoimmune arthritis, Lyme disease, and melanoma, which ultimately led him to develop accessible, high-quality home wellness devices. Brad breaks down the science behind EWOT’s ability to boost your VO2 max and re-establish microcirculation, and explains its perfect synergy with red light therapy. Hear powerful stories of recovery from cancer and CTE, and learn how this combined therapy is being used by everyone from elite high school athletes to the elderly following protocols for reversing cognitive decline.
Learn more about Red Light Therapy For Inflammation.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Reverse Inflammation And Defy Aging: The Power Of Exercise With Oxygen Therapy (EWOT) For Chronic Illness Recovery With Brad Pitzele
Welcome back to Fully Alive, the show where we explore the science and the stories behind living longer, stronger, and more vibrantly. This conversation dives into one of the most fundamental elements of life itself, oxygen, and how harnessing it in new ways can accelerate healing, reverse fatigue, and even slow the aging process itself. My guest, Brad Pitzele, has an amazing story, which you’re going to hear soon. He’s also the founder of One Thousand Roads, a company that was born out of his own remarkable healing journey.
After years of battling autoimmune arthritis, malignant melanoma, Lyme disease, and even Bartonella, Brad faced debilitating fatigue, brain fog, and even mobility loss. Traditional treatments weren’t enough, and in some cases, were causing more harm than good. That search for a safer, more holistic path led him to exercise with oxygen therapy, or EWOT, and later to red light therapy as well, two powerful tools that, when used together, can transform cellular health and help the body do what it was designed to do, which is to heal itself. What began as Brad’s personal recovery experiment has now become his life’s mission, empowering others to safely and affordably access these cutting-edge tools for healing, energy, and longevity.
In this episode, Brad will share how oxygen and light therapies work together to reduce inflammation, restore your mitochondrial function, and improve brain clarity. He’ll share about the simple science-backed ways that EWOT can boost energy, accelerate conditioning, and enhance recovery. He’ll share why true healing is about more than just fighting illness. It’s about reclaiming your vitality and living fully alive. Take a deep breath and get ready to learn how oxygen itself can become one of the most powerful longevity tools in your arsenal. Here’s my conversation with Brad Pitzele of One Thousand Roads.
Brad, thank you so much for being here with us. Ever since we met, I’ve been excited and looking forward to having this conversation, to learning from you myself, and for our audience to have the chance and privilege to learn from you and from your story, the amazing work that you’re doing now at One Thousand Roads. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for the great work you’re doing to change people’s lives.
Thank you so much, Zach. I appreciate it.
Your journey started with yourself and your own journey of struggling and battling through autoimmune arthritis, melanoma, Lyme disease, and Bartonella. Did I get that right?
Yes, I did.
Brad’s Story: The Health Crisis, Finding EWOT, And Recovery Timeline
Can you take us back to that season of your life and walk us through your own journey? I always like to start there. It’s super fascinating where and how people end up where they are and where their passions come from.
I had weird medical things that happened to me throughout my life, this weird set of symptoms. I would go to the doctor. It was nothing life-altering. They may put a label on it, but there was no real treatment. It would eventually go away on its own, and I moved on. I had a little bit of psoriasis throughout most of my life. It was mild, not a big deal until it developed into what’s known as psoriatic arthritis, which is an autoimmune arthritis.
I started to go the traditional medicine route. I got some relief after a while. There were some pretty hardcore biologic drugs that suppressed your immune system. They would work for about six months. They’d wear off. They would double the dose. It was another six months, and then it was on to the next drug. I did that for about two years, and then I developed melanoma. That is one of the known side effects of those drugs. They suppress the immune system and increase the risk of cancers, particularly melanoma.
I was a father of young children at the time. I went to my doctor and said, “I feel like I’m in a rock and a hard place. If I keep doing these drugs, I’m likely to die of cancer. If I stop doing these drugs, I’m going to die a painful death from arthritis. What do I do?” The doctor didn’t have a good answer for me. I walked out of his office a little concerned and said, “Neither of those paths sounds appetizing to me, so I need to find a third way.”
That’s when I started to look into alternative courses of action and treatments. I spent several years trying everything I could, like diet, supplements, and different modalities. Nothing was working. Through that process, eventually I got diagnosed with Lyme disease and Bartonella, which is a co-infection of Lyme disease. At the same time, a doctor recommended I start working on strategies to optimize my oxygen.
At first, it was a shocking thought. “We’re all breathing oxygen. I’mconfused. I don’t have any problems breathing it.” I did a bunch of research. Eventually, I got myself started with something called exercise with oxygen therapy. Later, I followed it with red light and infrared light therapy, which is also another way to optimize oxygen. Sure enough, I began to get better. That was the turning point in my life and my health.
Was this around 2015?
Yes, probably about 2010, it started. I got involved with some of these therapies around 2015.
You started getting better through these therapies. How long did it take you? Can you explain a little bit of that part? How long did you utilize the EWOT, the exercise with oxygen therapy, and then the red light therapy before you started to notice? How did that work? Did you go back to your doctors, and you’re miraculously cured?
When I talk to our customers a lot about the benefits they see, I’m probably a straggler. It took me a long time to see the benefits. It took me about three months. That’s on the very long end of what I typically hear from folks. That wasn’t surprising because I was in a bad spot. I had inflammation all over my body. The bottoms of my feet were in terrible pain. The backs of my legs were in pain. I had brain fog. I had so many different things going on.
It took a while to help me. Once it started, it compounded. I did go back to the doctor about a year in. He immediately saw how much better I was doing. He was shocked. He was the person who suggested to me that maybe I start a company to help supply these to some of his patients and other folks who need them. The birth of it was his idea. “Maybe you should supply it to other folks and help other folks on their road to health.”
You’re sick for five years. Three months after doing this, you’re feeling almost totally better.
Three months is when I started to notice it. By a year, I was significantly a portion better. By two years, I would say I was 95. I did continue to see incremental benefits in my third year. Some of those are beyond sickness, but general wellness and everything else. The thing that is hard for people who don’t have chronic health conditions and weren’t in the space I was in to wrap their head around is that when you’re in that hole, you’re contemplating your mortality and what the quality of the rest of your life looks like. You’ve tried everything, and you’ve failed a thousand times.
When you’re in that hole, contemplating your mortality and the quality of the rest of your life, any ray of sunshine is so important in giving you hope and helping you move forward.
Any ray of sunshine is so important in giving you hope and helping you move forward. To know that I’m going to be better three months from where I am now is in and of itself such a reward, and knowing like, “I’m already crawling out of this thing. I don’t care. I’m going to keep my head down and keep crawling because today’s better than yesterday. It’s going to get better from here on out.” Spiritually, what was important for me was to see results.
The Science Of EWOT: How Oxygen Battles Inflammation And Aging
That makes a ton of sense. You have that hope, and then it compounds. I would love to dive into this exercise with oxygen therapy to start and understand that. We can certainly talk about the red light therapy as well, and how the two are synergistic and working together. I’ve heard of EWOT, exercising with oxygen therapy. I’m sure many of our audience have maybe heard about that or exercising in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and things of that nature as well.
I’ve had other guests on the show who have talked about red light therapy and some of the red light therapy beds and some of the amazing benefits of that. Can you break down for us how EWOT works, and if you don’t have a chronic illness or chronic disease, but you want to optimize your health and live as healthy as possible for as long as possible? Maybe we can talk about some of those benefits, too.
Exercise with oxygen therapy is pretty much what it sounds like. You do about fifteen minutes of cardiovascular exercise while you’re breathing through a mask that provides 93% oxygen. It provides a lot of the same benefits as hyperbaric oxygen. We have customers who’ve done both. They’ll tell us they see probably more dramatic results with EWOT, likely due to the synergies of the exercise, because as we exercise, our body has all these physiological changes. When you start exercising, your body immediately recognizes that it doesn’t have enough oxygen to produce enough energy to maintain that level of activity.
You go through all these physiological changes. You start breathing more quickly and more deeply. Your lung membrane thins so that more oxygen can pass through more quickly. Your heart beats faster and deeper. Your blood pressure actually goes up. Your systolic blood pressure goes up during exercise. Some people worry about blood pressure. This is a good thing because the difference between the pressure in your circulatory system and your cells drives the oxygen out of your circulatory system and into those cells. That’s obviously part of the benefits of exercise alone. When you’re exercising, you have vasodilation. Your blood vessels get larger and open up.
All those physiological changes allow our body to consume more oxygen, to pass it through our circulatory system more quickly, and eventually drive more of it into our cells where it’s needed to produce more energy. When you’re doing exercise with oxygen therapy, you’re hijacking all of these physiological changes to allow your body to bring in a massive amount of oxygen in a short period of time. In this fifteen-minute session, you can bring in as much oxygen as you would in a typical day, in twelve or fourteen hours. It’s a large amount. That’s the mechanics of it. You don’t have to go full-out sprint.
You don’t have to be a die-hard athlete to do it. EWOT will meet you where you’re at. To speak to some of the benefits to general people in their health span, the very first benefit is that when you’re exercising with that oxygen mask on, the exercise immediately gets easier. For instance, if you’re on a treadmill and you are walking at 5 miles per hour, and you put the mask on, you wouldn’t feel like you were getting a workout. You might want to put it up to 5.5 or 5.75 miles per hour. That’s going to go on for a while. Your cardiovascular conditioning improves quite rapidly, much more quickly than with exercise alone. That’s the first thing most folks notice when they do EWOT.
When you’re exercising with that oxygen mask on, the exercise immediately gets easier.
They also notice better recovery, whether that’s from weight training or cardiovascular exercise. When you’re doing these exercises, oftentimes, you’ll notice the next day, maybe you’re sore, or you don’t feel as strong. A lot of that has to do with your body running out of oxygen during that exercise. It starts to do anaerobic respiration, which produces a massive amount of lactic acid, which is what causes our muscles to be sore. That lactic acid also causes further damage to the tissue and delays repair and regeneration. When we do EWOT, we manage to flush all of that lactic acid out, if there is any. We actually stop the initial need for the production of lactic acid. The recovery is much quicker.
Probably the most fascinating thing oxygen does for the body is that, as we all age, every year past the age of 25, our body loses 1% of its ability to utilize oxygen. Not a lot of folks talk about this, but if you think about it, when you get to be 50, you’ve already lost 25% of your body’s ability to utilize oxygen. That leads to a lot of the things we think of as typical with aging. You don’t feel as energetic. Maybe your mind isn’t as sharp. You have more aches and pains. This is often directly related to oxygen deficit.
The gentleman who did the initial research on EWOT in the 1960s and ‘70s found a prolific, amazing inventor named Manfred von Ardenne. He found that when you exercise with oxygen therapy, what happens is you’re able to reverse that loss of oxygen utilization back to more youthful levels. He had elderly people do two or three sessions. He had them come back several weeks later. Those benefits were retained. It was a durable improvement, not just when they were doing EWOT, but in their everyday life.
That looks like, for many people, more energy, but it’s not just the energy you feel. If you think about it, every cell needs energy to do whatever it is, whether it be your liver needs energy to filter, your skin needs energy to regenerate, your brain, etc. Every system in your body works that much better when it has the oxygen it needs. The last one that’s important for longevity and health span for many folks is that anywhere in your body you have this oxygen deficit, you have inflammation. Anywhere you have inflammation, you have an oxygen deficit.
Those two are united in a way. You can’t break that pairing. As we age, we get more and more inflamed. Nowadays, there’s this term called inflammaging. You can actually reverse this inflammaging by restoring natural oxygenation. Not only is that about feeling better today, but it’s also about getting rid of aches, pains, and other inflammatory conditions. It’s also staving off future conditions that can be caused by this chronic inflammation.
The Full Scope: VO2 Max, Microcirculation, And EWOT For The Elderly
In terms of reversing our lack of ability to utilize oxygen, so we’re talking about VO2 max?
Yes.
You can restore your VO2 max or increase your VO2 max significantly by utilizing EWOT.
A lot of research on that shows you can increase your VO2 max by up to 12% doing EWOT. It does something even deeper. What happens with this inflammaging is that the cells that line our circulatory system, called endothelial cells, become swollen. They swell shut in your capillaries, which are thinner than a human hair. Red blood cells can’t get downstream. All the cells downstream are choked off from oxygen, regardless of how much oxygen you’re breathing in.
What happens during EWOT is that, by flooding the blood with oxygen, we don’t just utilize those red blood cells. We utilize the blood plasma, which is 1,000 times smaller than a red blood cell. It’s able to get through those blockages, not only giving immediate relief to the cells downstream but also creating this anti-inflammatory effect. That’s what we were talking about, that durable impact. It re-establishes normal blood flow in those capillaries, so the red blood cells are able to get through even when you’re not doing EWOT.
It’s impacting the microcirculation, through which almost 70% of our overall circulation goes through these microvessels. That’s huge. You’re improving your body’s ability to utilize oxygen. You’re bringing it to places that are normally choked off, as you mentioned. That’s the benefit of fighting that inflammation or inflammaging. I like that term. We’ve talked about that before.
I have to break down some of these. I have some questions. I want to think about different demographics and different people. As you said, you don’t have to be a super athlete. You just need to be able to get your heart rate up a little bit. If you’re someone who is much older and maybe has some mobility issues and things like that, could you do a chair pedal bike or something very minor? You put this on, and you’re going to get the benefits.
Yes. We have a lot of folks who are using this for longevity or healthspan, as well as folks who have some serious chronic illnesses, everything from cancer and Alzheimer’s to Lyme disease, long COVID, or Parkinson’s. A lot of these folks can’t do intense exercise. We have folks who start by doing gentle stretching, calisthenics, or floor aerobics. We have folks using pedal bikes, as you describe, these $49 pedal bikes that you get on Amazon and use with a regular chair. We have folks using rebounders and walking on a treadmill. It will meet you where you’re at, and then it will help lift you over time and even help you improve your exercise capabilities as well.
Anyone who is able to do even just mild stretching, but you’re wearing the oxygen mask as you’re doing it, it’s going to lead to those benefits. You mentioned Alzheimer’s as well. People with Alzheimer’s can see some benefits.
There’s a well-known doctor, Dr. Bredesen, who’s got this ReCODE protocol, which stands for Reversing Cognitive Decline. They’ve been recommending EWOT now for a couple of years that I’m aware of, and seeing some great results with it. We have a lot of people who are following Dr. Bredesen, or read his book, and have been to his clinics. They are coming to us, starting EWOT, and seeing great improvements because having full oxygenation to the brain does everything from improved memory to helping it detoxify to helping the immune system be at its best.
EWOT For Elite Athletes: Performance Vs. Altitude Training
That’s amazing. People are seeing significant benefits even with Alzheimer’s or things like that. I want to ask you too about people who are healthy, like if I’m training for an Ironman or something like that, or my daughter is a distance runner. It’s interesting to me because most of the time, I think about our Olympic athletes training up in Colorado Springs, where there’s a lack of oxygen. This is the opposite. Can you explain that to me? How will I benefit from using EWOT if I’m trying to decrease my marathon time, for example, if I want to run an 800 a few seconds faster, or things like that? How is that reversed from training in Colorado Springs?
They’re actually the same in a different way. A lot of the research on EWOT was done by the US and Russian Olympic teams. There’s quite a bit of research on athletic improvement, VO2 max, recovery times, reduced lactic acid, and even memory and response time, which sometimes, in some of these competitive endeavors, is important. What they tell folks to do often is “Live high. Train low.” Why live high? If you live up high, live up in Denver, what happens is your body gets acclimated to less oxygen. At sea level, there’s 21% oxygen, but perhaps a mile up, it’s less. Your body has to adapt. It has several physiological adaptations.
One is that it produces more red blood cells so that it can squeeze every last dose of oxygen out of every breath you breathe. Two, it generally improves its efficiency of oxygen utilization. When you go compete in a relatively higher oxygen environment, your body is going to be more resilient. It’s going to be able to go further, faster, and harder. You’ll notice in the competitive component of this, they’re training low. In other words, in relatively high oxygen environments. In our case, instead of being at 21%, folks are at 93% oxygen. When you’re breathing a massive amount of oxygen, oxygen is actually the gating factor for how much energy your cells can produce.
We all get enough food. If we walk around in America and look at people’s bellies, we all see that we’re at no dearth of food. It’s oxygen that determines how much energy our cells can produce. When you’re breathing pure oxygen, you’re getting 4 1/2 times more oxygen every breath. You’re able to flood your system. As I mentioned earlier, because your red blood cells are normally tapped out, meaning they’re already at capacity, there’s no room for more oxygen on your red blood cells typically. Your blood plasma traditionally only carries 2% of the oxygen in your body.
When you’re breathing pure oxygen, you’re getting four and a half times more oxygen. Every breath, you’re able to flood your system.
Oxygen does not readily go into solution in blood plasma. Under the conditions of EWOT, because it’s a massive amount of oxygen, it goes into solution and actually saturates the plasma with oxygen. Your blood is able to carry much more oxygen than it traditionally would be able to. This allows you to exercise longer, faster, and harder, without fatiguing, without developing lactic acid, and without all the negative effects that come with that.
A lot of our high-performance athletes, if we want to improve our athletic performance, should be using EWOT, right?
Yes. It’s a super simple way to improve your endurance and even muscular strength. What I’ll do is I’ll train with weights a couple of times a week. Right after I’m done, I’ll do an EWOT session. I never get sore. Even if I missed a week or two, because I had to travel for business or something, I come back, and I still don’t get sore, which is crazy at my age. Considering when I was 25 and 30, I would have gotten sore. Naturally, without all that damage from the lactic acid, you recover faster. You can build muscle more quickly.
I’m training for a running event a few months from now. I’m thinking, “If I did this, I would probably drastically improve my times in that short period of time.”
That’s right.
My daughter is running track in the spring, so she could improve her 2-mile race time significantly by training like this a couple of times a week.
Yes, we’ve been helping several elite athletes at the high school and even college level with improving their performance using EWOT. It’s quite impressive.
You can see obviously a marked difference, because with running, your time is your time.
I like to give you my own example. When I was sick, I started working out on an elliptical machine. It has twenty levels of resistance. I was at a level twelve, which was pretty robust. Most people got on it at twelve, and they’re like, “This is tough.” I’d done it for many years, so it was easy for me. I started doing EWOT, and then I had to turn it up to fourteen and then fifteen. Over time, and today, I do it at seventeen out of twenty, which is outrageous when I think about it. I don’t feel like I’m working any harder than I did back in the day. The other thing is, sometimes, if I forget to fill my reservoir or whatever the reason might be, and I exercise without it, I can still do that elliptical machine at a seventeen resistance, which is crazy to me, but it is the reality of it.
Inspiring Patient Stories: Beating Cancer, CTE, And Chronic Fatigue
Considering where you came from, yes. What you’re describing, every single person can significantly benefit from this, especially if we want to maintain our health, mobility, mental status, and everything else. As we age, we need to combat inflammation, and so this is a fantastic way to do so. If we want to be hiking and skiing in our 80s and 90s, then we need a high VO2 max. This is a great way to increase that now and maintain that. Can you tell us a few stories of people, maybe some of those, as you mentioned, high-performing athletes? Are there others whom you’ve seen a significant change or shift in older and younger people?
Yes, a younger person. I’ll start with a gentleman who had stage four cancer who was told he would never walk again. He started doing this. A few months later, he told me he had walked 6 miles. He was never going back. He was certain he was beating the cancer. I always thought that was so inspiring to me because he was a younger guy in his 30s with young kids, and he was in a scary situation. I had another gentleman who had CTE concussions. He was a tax preparer. He would get foggy in the afternoon. He couldn’t focus. He would get angry and rage, which is typical of what happens with concussions as behavioral changes.
He was foggy and couldn’t concentrate. He started doing this. Within a session, he noticed he was better that afternoon. After a few sessions, it would last him a couple of days. After even a few weeks, he was like, “I’m back to my old self. I’m cognitively able to perform. I no longer have anger in the afternoon.” He was so grateful. We have another gentleman. He’s an elite high school athlete looking to set a national record for long-distance running. A family member who knew about EWOT reached out and got him set up with it. He’s currently using it and looking at going into the Olympics. That’s exciting. It’s always the stories that mean the most to us.
Knowing personally where I’ve been and being able to relate to people, I can tell you the beginning of this. I was brain foggy. I was fatigued as could be. A few years ago, I was thinking about it. At the time, I’d gone from faking it to make it through my life and having to sleep all weekend so I could fake it at work. I turn it around. Now, I run this business. At one point, I had a second full-time job while I was running it at the beginning. I was my kid’s assistant wrestling coach. I never got tired. It’s shocking to think where I was and where I am. We do see some incredible improvements in people’s quality of life.
The Perfect Combination: Red Light Therapy And EWOT Synergy
That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing those stories. As you said, everyone can benefit from this, whether you’re in the very late stages of life or beginning. Can we talk about the red light therapy as well? I’d love to tie it together with how the two work synergistically because I know they do work well together.
When I say red light, I mean red and near-infrared light. The interesting thing about red light therapy is that we are all starved of these reds and near-infrared wavelengths with intention. We all spend more and more time indoors. The lighting manufacturers purposefully filter out reds and near-infrareds because they’re very energy inefficient. They produce heat. You don’t want your lighting to produce heat. You want it to have good illumination, which is the blues and some of the yellows. As we all move indoors, and especially with LED lights and so forth, we’re all taking in more and more blues and yellows and not enough reds.
As we all move indoors, especially with LED lights and so forth, we’re taking in more blues and yellows and not enough reds, which are actually really important to us.
These reds are actually important to us. They help us in a very interesting way. When red and near-infrared wavelengths are absorbed by our cells, they cause the mitochondria, which are the little power plants inside the cells, to suck in more oxygen and produce more energy. I know you said you’ve had other folks talk about the benefits of red light. Almost all of the benefits that come from red lights come from this one single phenomenon, which is that they cause us to utilize and demand more oxygen in our cells. That is why they are a perfect pairing with EWOT.
EWOT is about creating a massive supply. As I said, in fifteen minutes, you can take in twelve or fourteen hours’ worth of oxygen and flood your body. Immediately afterwards, you do red light therapy. It causes a spike in mitochondrial demand for this oxygen. Those cells produce more energy. They’re able to do whatever it is that they’re supposed to do better, whether it be regenerating themselves. Skin cells produce more collagen, so we look more youthful. Bones produce more osteocytes and heal more quickly. Muscles recover more quickly and can clear the lactic acid and regrow new tissues more quickly. Brain tissues regrow brain tissues. They all, not surprisingly, with this increased oxygen utilization, tamp down on inflammation and pain as well.
Putting these together, you do the EWOT first and then the red light therapy right after. You have that massive amount of oxygen, and then your cells are opened up and demanding it. It gets pushed in in near-infrared light. That’s an amazing one-two punch combo for maximizing the effects of this treatment and this therapy.
If you just started and used red light, it will offer you some benefits, but as I mentioned in the beginning, we’re all in an oxygen deficit unless you’re doing oxygen therapy to reverse that. If you’re in a place where you’re in an oxygen deficit, you’ve got a low ceiling on what red light and near-infrared light can do for you, but when you pair them, it’s the perfect combination, quite frankly.
Home Wellness: How One Thousand Roads Made EWOT & Red Light Accessible
Let’s talk about your company, One Thousand Roads. You created your own EWOT mechanism machine devices. You’ve put some things together, and you made it accessible for people. When people hear about red light therapy, some of those beds can be costly, or you have to find a facility or a chiropractor’s office that has one. It’s costly. I appreciate that you’ve taken that technology and found quality ways to make it financially accessible.
The idea of One Thousand Roads was a pay-it-forward mentality. I started with gratitude. Having been in one of these dark places where I didn’t know where I was going to be in five years and it was scary, to find myself on the other side of the rainbow and see a break in the clouds, I wanted to help other folks who were in a situation like I was, who were dealing with chronic health conditions or weren’t feeling their best. I wanted to create something that was accessible. That was the birth of it.
We designed our own EWOT system from the ground up to make it more accessible. Our prices are half of some of our competitors’ for similar products because a lot of those products were designed to go into chiropractors’ offices or recovery clinics. There’s not a lot of demand. There are only so many chiropractor facilities. Our thought was, “If we could bring the price down, more people could experience the benefits of these technologies in the home.”
If we could bring the price down, more people could experience the benefits of these technologies at home. The best modalities are the ones you can do consistently over time.
Quite frankly, the best modalities are the ones you can do consistently over time. If we could put it in people’s homes, we knew that a lot of folks would see a ton of benefits from it. There was that. It was the same thought process, to your point, with the red light therapy. There are red light beds, very expensive. They take up a lot of space. They often require special electrical installations. They can’t just be plugged into a normal wall outlet most of the time, so that’s problematic for most folks.
There are some folks who can afford it, and that’s awesome, but the vast majority of us can’t afford it. We don’t have the space for it. We came at it from an angle of finding things that are accessible for people in their homes. That’s where red light panels are a real sweet spot. You can get near full-body coverage, a much smaller footprint, and at a much more reasonable price.
EWOT Practical Use: The Filling Process, Mask Sizes, And Frequency
Thank you for making that possible. With your EWOT device, essentially, you come in, and you fill it up with the oxygen concentrator ahead of time. How long does that normally take?
What it looks like is there’s a device called an oxygen concentrator. It’s an electrical device. You plug it into the wall. It purifies the oxygen out of the air, so it can produce a near limitless amount of oxygen. It boosts it from 21% oxygen to 93% oxygen. We sell two different sizes. One produces 5 liters in a minute. The other produces 10 liters in a minute. When you’re exercising, you can easily use 50 or 60 liters in a minute. It can’t keep up with you, and so the way we provide you with the oxygen you need is we use it to fill a large reservoir that’s 1,000 liters. It’s 6 feet wide and 5 1/2 feet tall. We fill this 1,000 liters. It takes about 90 minutes with the 10-liter system and about three hours with the 5-liter system. You connect a hose from that reservoir to a mask that you wear when you exercise.
You fill the reservoir. You do have to plan ahead of time. Is there a way to set a timer, like 3:00 AM every morning, go off, and fill it up?
One of the things we try to do differently is that ours are digital timer-capable or outlet timer-capable. Anything you’d use to toggle on your Christmas lights, you can use to toggle on the machine and automate the filling. I like to do mine first thing in the morning. If I’m out there at 6:00 AM, I don’t want to have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to flip the machine on, so it’s ready an hour and a half later. Rather, I’ll have the timer turn it on. I’ll walk out at 6:00 in the morning. It’s filled and waiting for me.
As far as the mask goes, is it one-size-fits-all, or if you’re a family, do you have different sizes? How does that work?
We have three different sizes for different folks. On the website, when you order, there’s an image showing you how to measure your face and which mask is right for you. Even if you’ve got the same size face, most folks want their own mask, knowing they’re going to be sweating in it. Even if it’s your husband and wife, they don’t want to share it. I can respect that. You can, and you can just wash it with warm, soapy water, drip-dry it, and share it if you guys have the same face size as well.
Red Light Practical Use: Optimal Duration And Panel Setup
You’re using this, it says 4 to 7 times a week, so it’s every other day. If you want, you can use it every day. What do you see? If you use it at least three or four times a week, you’re going to see the benefits, right?
That’s right. We even have folks who are sick who start using it once or twice a week, and they’ll get good benefits. Over time, their endurance improves. Their ability to do it improves. They can crawl up that experience curve. If you can do 3 to 5 times a week, we find that’s a sweet spot for folks where they see the benefits. They compound relatively quickly.
As far as the red light panels that you guys sell through One Thousand Roads, I know you have several different sizes. You want to be pretty close to those. It is 6 to 12 inches away. Do you hang yours over a door? How do you normally use yours?
There are a few different ways. We have three sizes, two that are near full body/full body panels, and then we have one that’s more of a portable one that’s more for spot treatment, which you can pick up, carry, and bring wherever you like. For the full body panels, you can hang them on the back of a door. They come with a door hanging kit or on a wall. They also come with stands. There’s a boot stand, which will set it up vertically. For our largest model, it’s got a stand that can either set it up vertically or hang it horizontally, so you can put it over your bed and do it while you’re lying down.
That makes it easy. You normally do that right after you exercise. Are you just standing there after you’re done exercising?
That’s right. You can either stand there, you can put a towel down on your bed and lie on your bed, or however you want to do it.
You do about ten minutes.
Yes, about ten minutes on each side is enough to get the benefits. The interesting thing about red light is the technical term they use is a biphasic dose response, which is a fancy way of saying that you don’t want to do too little and you don’t want to do too much. It’s like Goldilocks and the three bears. Ten minutes is just about right. If you do more than ten minutes, it’s not harmful in any way. It just starts to negate the benefit. Who wants to spend fifteen minutes getting nothing when you can spend ten minutes and get a lot?
Ten minutes is the perfect amount. Is that what you normally do, ten minutes on your front side and ten minutes on the backside?
That’s right.
Could you alternate every other day, like I do the front side this day and the backside this day?
If I don’t have time, that’s what I definitely do.
Could you put the panel up against you while you’re exercising and do it all at once?
You could do that. Especially for athletic performance, you can do that. The challenge is you’re moving. If you’re trying to keep a certain distance from the light, it becomes a little bit challenging. If you’re doing it on your side and you’re on a bike, an elliptical machine, or a treadmill, you can do that as well.
Brad’s Personal Stack: Daily Routine, Supplements, And Vision For Age 90
What does a day in your life look like as far as your own wellness routines and maybe even supplements or stacks that you’re taking? How do you maintain your own health, now that you’re well?
I used to have to do a lot more. I’ve peeled back to the essentials for me. I find that if I don’t exercise first thing in the morning, then my day can quickly get away from me. I get up somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning. I’ll do my EWOT session. Immediately afterwards, I’ll do my red light session, shower, get on with the day, help the kids get off to school, all that stuff, and get into work. I do take certain supplements.
We’re deprived of minerals like magnesium in the environment and the soil, trying to make sure you’re getting some of those supplements. Vitamin D is a critical one. I try not to have fists and fistfuls of supplements. What happens when you have that many is that it becomes overwhelming for most folks. We all throw our hands up and say, “I’m so sick of counting all these pills out and so on.” I’ll cycle between things. I love adaptogenic herbs as well, great for reduced stress response, pretty amazing things. I’ll take those as well.
You do some strength training as well.
That’s right. I’ll do EWOT about five times a week, and then I’ll do strength training twice a week, also in the morning. If on the days I do strength training, I’ll start with the strength training and then do the EWOT session.
I’m curious. Based on what you know about the human body, the work that you’ve done, and now this deep research into EWOT and red light therapy, when you picture yourself at age 90 and based on what’s coming and what’s on the horizon, what do you imagine your body and mind will look like and feel like? What’s possible in your mind?
Here’s the funny thing. When I was 35, and I was ill, I felt like I was about 90. That’s how I describe myself. Getting out of bed would hurt. The bottoms of my feet hurt so badly. I had to put on shoes to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. I’ve seen how much better I feel today and how much energy I have vis-à-vis my peers. I don’t see a need for a large decline in energy or ability to do things. I do think that as we get older, we have to be more mindful that sometimes, our brain is more youthful than our body.
As we get older, we have to be more mindful of how sometimes our brain is more youthful than our body.
My son is on the high school football team. They said, “The dads are going to do a flag football.” I said, “I’m not doing that. Someone is going to end up with a torn Achilles tendon.” Sure enough, someone ended up with a torn Achilles tendon. I didn’t regret that. I know my limits, but I don’t feel like they’re super limiting. I won’t do intense things. I think when I’m 90, I’ll still be able to go out and do a hike, not up Kilimanjaro necessarily. I expect that I’ll be able to do that as long as I maintain my strength, my cardiovascular conditioning, and my level of activity.
I have people ask me sometimes, “How long do I need to do EWOT for?” I’m like, “I want to get you to do it for a year or two. After that, I don’t think you’ll want to stop.” That’s where I’m at. I would never stop at it. It’s fifteen minutes a day, and I feel so great. I feel like I’m able to do things that a lot of folks aren’t able to do. I don’t foresee myself reversing on that anytime soon.
Just keep going. That’s fantastic and exciting. This is fascinating. It seems like it should be more well-known. Is there a reason, in your mind, why more people aren’t doing this and why it’s not more common?
It’s a close cousin of hyperbaric oxygen. Hyperbaric oxygen is much more well-known, probably for a variety of reasons, one of them being that it’s covered by insurance for certain medical conditions. It’s in medical facilities. It has been used for a long time for that. People knew more about this. This is something that almost no one knew about. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was this research. It was forgotten. There were a few folks doing it.
It started to grow in popularity, probably since we’ve gotten into this business. When this doctor told me I should look into this, I had never heard of it. I wasn’t even sure if it was a thing. Now there are a lot more folks who are becoming aware of it. It’s being used in all sorts of wellness centers, recovery clinics, cryo clinics, and chiropractors’ offices. We’re at the beginning of a growth phase for this technology and an awareness phase.
I’ve heard of the superhuman protocol. People hear about that and call for this exercise with oxygen. It’s starting to become more well-known. You’re the first company I’ve seen that produces something direct to consumer, that’s easy to purchase. Get it in your home within a week or two, have it set up, and use it on a daily basis. Hopefully, there will be more of that. Where can people find One Thousand Roads? How can we get this technology into our homes now?
You can go to our website. It’s OneThousandRoads.com. If you want to learn more, you can also find our YouTube channel. It’s @OneThousandRoadsHQ, where we do a weekly video talking about both EWOT and red light, how to use them together, results people are seeing, and all the goodies. If you’re looking to dive deeper, that’s a great place to go as well.
The Mission Behind The Name: The Meaning Of One Thousand Roads
I’m curious. Last question. What is the name of One Thousand Roads? How did you come up with that? Is there a meaning behind it?
There is. When I was getting better, I was talking to a lot of folks, doing a lot of listening, and doing a lot of research. What worked for one person didn’t necessarily work for somebody else. I realized everyone had to have their own road to recovery. That’s what this was about. It was a road to recovery, but it was also an act of gratitude, as I said. I just wanted to help. The goal at the beginning was to be able to help 1,000 people who are in a situation like I was and get them to a better place. Long ago, we passed that marker. The goal is to help people improve their health and their wellness and either recover or maintain their quality of life as long as possible.
Everyone has to have their own road to recovery.
It sounds like you’re living your passion and changing people’s lives. You’ve changed your own life. Thank you so much for the great work that you’re doing. Thanks for sharing this with us and with our audience here. OneThousandRoads.com, we definitely need to check that out. I can’t wait to get this going in my house. Thank you so much, Brad. It’s wonderful to meet you and great to have you on.
You, too. Thank you so much, Zach.
Have a great day.
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What a fascinating conversation with Brad Pitzele from One Thousand Roads. It’s amazing. As you have probably guessed by tuning in to this show, if you have, I love hearing people’s stories. His is one that’s remarkable. As a young father, he could barely walk. He was told he would never walk again. Now, he’s exercising, walking, running, and is in amazing shape for a person who is age 50. He has developed his lifelong mission, passion, and purpose out of what was a difficult, potentially life-ending situation.
I love this idea of exercise with oxygen therapy. It’s being well promoted in the biohacking space. I’m sure you’ve heard of it before. We can significantly increase our VO2 max a few times a week, doing this for fifteen minutes on any kind of exercise equipment, even if you’re just doing hand pedaling or foot pedaling, anything that elevates your heart rate. You don’t have to be in good shape. I’m excited about this myself, and then pairing that with the red light therapy. We’ve had other episodes talking about red light therapy as well. Do some research on that.
Check out Brad’s website, OneThousandRoads.com. I’m excited to pair this in my own little mini biohacking lab in my house with my CAROL Bike and do that every other day. We’ll probably see drastic improvements as well, reversing inflammation, increasing our VO2 max, and our conditioning will significantly improve, but will help us live more fully. That’s what this is all about. It’s to live as healthy as we can for as long as we can and enjoy meaning and purpose as long as we can in our lives. Thanks so much for tuning in with Brad Pitzele, OneThousandRoads.com. Check him out. We’ll see you back here next time on Fully Alive. Have a great day.