An Expert Guide To HRV & How To Improve It - Joel Jamieson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 264

Joel Jamieson is a performance architect. Heart Rate Variability is everyone's favourite new health metric. Joel is one of the world's leading coaches for HRV and today he takes us through what HRV is, why it matters and his best strategies and workouts for improving yours. Sponsors: Get 2 weeks Free Access to the State App at https://apple.co/36nNALG (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Joel's company - https://www.8weeksout.com Follow Joel on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/coachjoeljamieson Check out Morpheus - https://trainwithmorpheus.com Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ #heartratevariability #fitness #joeljamieson - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You've kind of been fed this idea that you just need high intensity all the time. Unfortunately, you need more than that because you can only do high intensity for so long before you break. And you need something in between. And so those lower and more moderate intensity sessions allow you to do more volume, to get more stimulus without breaking yourself. So you need that balance. So average person, if they just spend four or five days a week, up to six for higher levels, and they're consistently doing some form of aerobic training, you know, the majority of the time they're doing lower, more moderate intensity work, thirty, forty minutes, sometimes more, sometimes less. And then they're spending maybe two days a week doing those higher intensity intervals. They are getting their heart rates up towards maximum and they consistently do that. You will see your HRV consistently climb, guarantee you.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  I wanted to dig into HRV today. HRV is like the hot new girl in school at the moment, I think, in terms of the metrics.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  It's funny because I've been using it since like the early 2000s. And I used to go into a presentation and I'd say, who here is using HRV or who's got HRV? And people would look at me like I was asking about an STD or something because they just had no clue what the hell the thing was back then, right? But, but yeah, now it's everywhere. Apple Watches got it and people are talking about it. It's, it's, you know, it's such a, a big change from where it was, like I said, fifteen, 20 years ago when I was first getting into it. So it's, it's, it's exciting to see because it's a valuable metric. It's, it's one of the few pieces of fitness tech that truly can change people's outcomes and have them, you know, get better results.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  You're ahead of the curve, man. Trendsetter.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I was, I was just, you know, I wish I claimed that it was entirely intentional, but I just kind of stumbled upon to it. And once I did, then I immediately saw the value and, and jumped into it. But I would never have predicted, you know, way back then, it would be, get as popular as it is now. So it's, uh, you know, it's definitely been a, a journey to get there for sure.

• 1:39Chris Williamson?

  How did you get started with it?

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so kind of a crazy story. There was a guy named Randy Huntington, uh, whom a lot of people probably are not familiar with. Randy was a fantastic track coach. He worked with Mike Powell. When Mike Powell broke Carl Lewis, it's like 20 year long, uh, long jump world record. And he's a local guy and I just kind of came to meet him as a young coach and asked him some, you know, some tips and things he would advise. And, you know, just general advice from an old guy to a young guy. And he said, uh, you should, you look at this thing called the omega wave. And I was like, well, what the hell is the omega wave? And he just kind of gave me a number and said, call, call this guy. And so, okay, I'm, okay. So I called this, this number, it's just thick accent, sounds like Russian or Eastern European. And I'm like, barely understand the guy, but he's telling me to meet him at an airport the next day. So I'm like, I'm like, am I going to get kidnapped?

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Like, am I going to sell the guy vodka? Like, what's going on here? So I go down the airport and there's this guy in this long trench coat and literally I'm like, is this KGB or just like a practical joke? What the hell's going on here? And he tells me basically in the hotel airport to lay down on the couch and take my shirt off. And I'm, I'm seriously like, this makes no sense, but I trust Randy and if I'm, you know, like, well, okay.

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  If a Russian man in a trench coat says to take my top off in an airport, I'll do it.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. So anyway, so I lay down on the couch, I take my shirt off and he connects a bunch of electrodes to me and, and tells me to be quiet for a couple of minutes and I look over and he's plugging all these electrodes into this big computer and all this shit's happening on the screen in the background. I'm completely lost at this point. I mean, bear in mind, this is like 2000, maybe 2001 ish. So there's no fitness tech, there's no mobile apps, you know, there's no Fitbit. Like none of this stuff exists. So there was nothing. And so all of a sudden, two and a half, three minutes go by and he's telling me like, oh, your cardiovascular condition is shit and your central nervous system is good. Your recovery is very bad right now. He starts just kind of like telling me all these things about my training and, and kind of the, the nature of, I was an anaerobic athlete at that point in time and just power lifted mostly.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  And he's able to tell me all this stuff despite not knowing anything about me. And so I was just like, how in the hell is this working? You know, is this some Russian voodoo or like, what is this? And so essentially he kind of tells me that the, the Russians pioneered this technology called heart rate variability that they'd use it in the original space program with the astronauts or cosmonauts back then. So the interesting thing is he said that basically it had been used in space medicine for, for decades. And then the 1980s, the Russians had tried to figure out how do we make this applicable to athletes? And so they, they started this giant program where they were developing it for their Olympic athletes and for their national athletes. And kind of as they were developing this program, the Soviet Union crumbled and the whole thing fell apart, basically. The program was never completed.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And so, you know, fast forward maybe ten years and a bunch of the original scientists had still kind of been in the sporting world and stumbled onto each other at a track meeting, Eugene, Oregon, of all places. And they'd all just kind of started talking about this project they should have finished and never got to see through. And they formed the Megawave Company and started the project back up and finished kind of the first commercial-grade high-risk variability tech. And it was, you know, it was very expensive. So, you know, I'm sitting there in my early twenties, I'm like, well, how, how much is this thing? I've got to have this damn thing. And he's like, thirty-five thousand dollars. And I was like, thirty-five thousand dollars? Like, Jesus, I didn't have three hundred and fifty dollars at the time. I was, I was, you know, barely out of college and I was totally broke. Uh, but I, I just said, yo, is there any way I can work some payment plans or help you

• 5:07Speaker 00

  sell this thing? Like, what, what could I do? Like, you know, I was desperate to have it because I just saw the potential of it. And so, um, you know, I just kind of wheeled and deal. And fortunately, Russians are, are willing to negotiate a bit. And so I was, you know, I, I gotta, I gotta use system that had, you know, just kind of an old laptop and older one of their models that they were just kind of going to recycle anyway. Um, and convinced that I could introduce it to other coaches and the industry that I knew and help them get it started in North America. Because at that point, they had almost nobody in North America using it. I mean, maybe Randy and a couple other coaches. But they'd primarily been focused on Europe and track and field and, you know, high-level sports. And so, uh, you know, to make a long story short, I was able to, to help them out with that and get, get more coaches aware of it. And then I started using it.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  But the funny thing was, because I had kind of negotiated this discounted rate, there wasn't much training involved. There was like, uh, ten minutes of, here's the thing, here, here's how we connect it, here's kind of how it works, versus a two-day training that I found everyone else got. So, a lot of it was just trial and error and figuring out what the hell this thing was doing. And then I kind of realized, okay, I kind of understand what it's doing now, but I don't really know how to explain it to people. And so I, I kind of became the Russian guy. Like, people come to my gym, like, lady, I'll take your shirt off, right? And they're like, what?

• 6:20Chris Williamson?

  Come, meet me in, meet me in the airport, bring a Kalashnikov.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it was it was awkward days. And then then I kind of had and you had to put six electrodes on and like three were on the chest and then, you know, I had female athletes and clients come in. I'm like, um, I'm gonna put my hand here. But I promise this is this is gonna be valuable for for you. And this is real. This isn't me trying to do something odd. So it was, you know, like I said, back then, there was there was no fitness tech. And so I had this laptop and this little black box and all these electrodes. And it was just, you know, it was the wild west of of early days of fitness tech. But, uh, you know, like I said, now it's evolved to the point where you've got this thing, a million different devices and people know what it is, or at least they have some idea of what it is. But it's it's certainly come a long way from from those days.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, probably for the better as well. If you've got to strap a bunch of electrodes onto someone, it wouldn't be quite as popular, I don't think. Take us through it then. HRV, how do you define it?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  So, you know, in a nutshell, all we're really doing is measuring the pattern of your heart rhythm. So people typically think the heartbeat is like a metronome, which makes sense, but that's actually not how it beats. It's got a natural rhythm to it. And that natural rhythm changes depending on how your body is regulating itself and how your body is distributing energy. So when you're at rest, your body has a certain heart rhythm that's associated with what we call the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the rest digest system. And the stronger that pattern towards that side of it, the more your body is driving energy towards recovery. When you are under a period of stress or your body is producing more energy or that sympathetic system is is more at play, then we see a different pattern in the heart rhythm because again, these two systems influence

• 7:59Speaker 00

  how the heart beats. And so we're just basically looking at that pattern to figure out, okay, is the body in this fight or flight state, or is the body in this recovery state? And where is it in that spectrum? Because it's a spectrum. It's not really like a light switch. It's it's more about a spectrum. It's only light switch on the far, far ends of that spectrum. So what we're really trying to do is to see where is the body distributing the energy that's producing? Is it focusing its energy more on the rest and digest and recovery and rebuilding? Type of things, or is it currently under a period of stress, or is it still in that fight or flight state after workout, or mental stress, or life stress, or whatever the case may be? So, we're really just trying to understand how is the body regulating itself internally? And we're doing that just by looking at how that heart is beating.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Because again, that heart rate, that heart rhythm and that pattern is governed by the autonomic nervous system, which is again, what manages how energy is distributed throughout the body. So, it's a, you know, it's a hugely valuable tool because of that. Because if you could understand where the body is in terms of its recovery versus its stress, and how well it's recovering from everything you're throwing at it, then you can have a whole lot of better information about what's the right choice to do now. You know, do I need more recovery? Or if my body already handling everything well, do I focus, uh, you know, more on this and more on that? It gives us a lot of guidelines as far as what, you know, we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing. And then likewise, the number itself, heart rate variability is mostly a measure of

• 9:24Speaker 00

  that parasympathetic recovery-driven energy system, or sorry, autonomic part of the nervous system. So, higher in general is protective because it's anti-inflammatory, because it's connected to aerobic fitness. Um, and lots of reasons, it's basically a really good marker of overall longevity and overall ability to recover from the stress of life. So, it's, if we look at that single number over time, and we see that number going up over time, then that's telling us our body is getting more resilient, it's getting more durable, it's getting more, uh, robust and able to handle a higher level of stress. If that number is lower, then it's a bad thing, it basically tells us we're going the opposite direction. So, if we look at it on a daily basis, we see these changes up and down as we train and as we deal with life stress.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  And that just gives us this kind of daily roadmap to figure out what's, what's an appropriate level of stress. But if we look at the long term, we can see, is our body getting more adept? Is our body getting more resilient, or are we going the other direction? So, it can kind of give us two big pieces of data that are really important for fitness and health and performance, we look at it either in the daily level, or if you zoom out, and we look at kind of the long-term trends behind it.

• 10:32Chris Williamson?

  HRV is associated with longevity. Higher HRV is associated with people who live longer.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yes. It's associated with VO2 max, which is a huge predictor and a marker of cardiovascular fitness. So, look, you've got to take a step back here and realise that in the US, and it's not a whole lot different in the UK, roughly one out of every three people will die from cardiovascular-related diseases. That's ridiculous, right? I mean, one out of three, so 30-plus percent, are going to die from a cardiovascular-related disease or event. So if a third of the population is dying that, and we're looking at measures that protect against that, then that's naturally going to protect you from cardiovascular disease, which is going to kill a third of the population. So even just from that standpoint, it correlates to longevity well, because you're much less likely to die from cardiovascular

• 11:20Speaker 00

  disease if you have a strong cardiovascular system, which HRV correlates extremely well to. On the other side, it protects against just kind of this all-cause mortality, because as I mentioned, the parasympathetic nervous system is anti-inherently anti-inflammatory. So if you look at the autonomic nervous system, you have those two branches I mentioned, the sympathetic, you know, the fight-or-flight system, and that system is inherently pro-inflammatory. So if you're producing lots of energy, you're under lots of stress, your immune system is naturally kind of on high alert, and you're able to produce a lot more inflammation because of that. It's a protective thing. If you actually are in a survival situation, you want that nervous system, or you want that immune response, because there's a higher likelihood that you're going to be exposed to infection or tissue damage, all these

• 12:03Speaker 00

  sorts of things. So that sympathetic nervous system, that stress system, is designed to be a bit pro-inflammatory. It releases little markers called cytokines. But on the other side, that parasympathetic nervous system, its job is to turn off that inflammation, its job is to repair those tissues. So it's anti-inflammatory. Again, a lot of disease in the modern era is disease of chronic inflammation. It's how we see all kinds of uh different things develop that kill us. So if you can develop that parasympathetic nervous system and you can develop a stronger level of it, then you can be more anti-inflammatory. You can protect against the normal inflammatory damage that we, you know, expose ourselves to across our lifetime.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  So if you can protect, you know, against that inflammation with a better developed nervous system, then your chances of living longer go up. So heart rate variability is the single best measure we have of that parasympathetic nervous system and thereby the single best measure we have of how anti-inflammatory uh we can be and how we can mitigate against just the the stress of life.

• 13:05Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  As a whole, it's a.

• 13:07Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that HRV is associated with greater recovery? Like, what is it that that reduction in the difference between the heartbeats is achieving?

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Well, so it's it's not really reduction in difference between heartbeats. It's it's greater variability in that heart rate pattern. And that just in that basically comes from the parasympathetic nervous system. So if you're at rest, it's mostly the parasympathetic nervous system activating and deactivating with your respiratory uh function that's causing the heart rhythm to change. So the greater parasympathetic nervous system activity, the greater variation in your heart rate we see over the measurement period. So if we see this large variation in one beat to next on average, that's that is what HRV is, heart rate variability. Then again, we know that the parasympathetic nervous system is is stronger, it's more active.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  If we see more of a flat pattern, we see less variability. We know that that the parasympathetic nervous system is less active and sympathetic version uh uh system is a bit more active. So. Again, that's, that's just a telltale sign of the body is able to distribute energy into recovery. The more active that parasympathetic nervous system is, because that's the parasympathetic nervous system's job is literally to drive energy into recovery. It's to increase protein synthesis. And people look at it this way, it's really simple. The parasympathetic nervous system is anabolic. It helps rebuild tissues and the sympathetic system is catabolic. It helps break down tissues for energy and to deal with stress. So again, it's that balance. If we're chronically catabolic and we're chronically, you know,

• 14:45Speaker 00

  we're always breaking tissue down and we're chronically in this inflamed state, we're going to have diseases. We're going to have problems. But if we're able to rebuild through that parasympathetic nervous system and we're able to be more anabolic and tip that scale back the other direction towards growth and repair, then we're much more likely to be healthy and much less likely to have, you know, chronic inflammatory diseases and, and all those things that come with that.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  So high HRV is good. Is that relative or absolute? If I have a HRV of 50 and you have one of 100, are you twice as parasympathetic as I am? Is it all relative within my physiology?

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's a couple of things. The first thing is there's a lot of different ways to calculate it. There's not just one calculation. So the, the difference is if we look at heart rate, it's very simple. It's the number of beats your, your heart's beating per minute. But if we look at heart rate variability, there's multiple types of calculations from what's called RMSSD to SDNN to PNF. There's multiple ways to calculate that actual number. Yeah, so it's, it's just more difficult to compare me to you or the, the reality is it's much more difficult to compare one system's HRV number versus another system's HRV number. Because right now, there's so many systems out there and they all have different calculations. And then they all put them on different scales or different ways to quantify them.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  So the number on one system really is meaningless to say, oh, well, I have a 50 in this system, but you're a 35 in that system. That, that number is not as universally comparable as heart rate itself. So you really can't say, okay, well, you're 50, you're 80. Unless you're looking at the exact same heart rate variability system or the exact same heart rate variability calculation, those numbers to compare against are meaningless, but. If your two people are using the same system, the same exact way of calculating HRV in the same exact scale, then yeah, higher number would be healthier for anybody. It doesn't really matter, but what we see is that age groups have norms. So as you age, you lose some of that recovery ability. You start to decline over time.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  So that's what we see is if you look at someone's average, like if you take a population and you take somebody in their seventies, people in their seventies are going to have lower HRV on average than somebody in their twenties who's going to have higher HRV in thirties, forties. It's going to decline with age. So there are certainly age-driven norms that you want to be at the top of and you want to be as as high as possible given your age. So it's more about where is my HRV in relation to somebody in my age range, given the tech, the exact HRV system I'm using to compare myself against. So and it's also it's not like a two to one, like, oh, I'm a hundred, so I'm twice as, you know, it's not quite that linear. But in general, you want, again, you want to compare yourself against other people

• 17:27Speaker 00

  in your age group on whatever system you're using because it's it's again, it's really the only way to get a a fair comparison to see where you stack up relative to other people. Now, the good thing is if you the other metric you can use that's much more universal is resting heart rate. So resting heart rate and HRV will have an inverse correlation, meaning people with higher heart rate variability are going to have a lower resting heart rate because part of what drives that resting heart rate down is that parasympathetic nervous system. And the other part of it is just the structural and functional changes that come along with aerobic fitness, which is also what drives HRV up. So if you want to compare yourself, you can pretty much look at what is my resting heart rate relative to somebody else.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  And chances are pretty good that if I have a lower resting heart rate, I'm probably also going to have a higher HRV on average than somebody else. So again, we can use just resting heart rate, which is a more comparable number that everyone can look at and compare themselves against, uh, to have a pretty good idea of what our HRV is likely going to be. It's pretty rare that you're going to see somebody with a very low resting heart rate and and also not have a pretty good, uh, uh, HRV. You generally would see those again correlate in the inverse way. So if I'm going to compare two people, I can't really do it with HRV unless they're using the same system, but I can compare resting heart rate and that's where we can have a fair a fair game to see what, you know, what those numbers look like.

• 18:47Chris Williamson?

  Are those the two most important metrics that you look at?

• 18:51Speaker 00

  That they are. Yeah, I mean, so if you dig in the research, I mean, most of the research on not longevity, all that sort of stuff is is done basically on VO2 max, which is kind of the the gold standard of lab testing of of hard cardiovascular fitness. But again, those things are they're difficult to measure. I'm not going to go to the lab and get my VO2 max tested. It sucks. It's a shitty test. People don't want to do it. So we, right, we we can, we can look at resting heart rate and we can look at HRV as a proxy. Because those are going to correlate at such a high level and are much, much easier to measure. Now, the third one, I would say that also correlates extremely well because it's it's all in the same vein, is heart rate recovery. So there's a number of studies and things you can look at where the the faster your heart rate will drop after exertion,

• 19:32Speaker 00

  the better your overall parasympathetic nervous system is, the higher your HRV is, the better aerobic shape you're in. Because ultimately, the faster we can drop the resting heart rate, it means that we're in better aerobic condition and we're going to see all those other characteristics that come along with that. So I use that one all the time for training. You know, we'll look at, you know, a period of exertion, we'll look at some high intensity work. And you give them, you know, even thirty, sixty seconds and you see how fast their heart rate comes down. The faster heart rate comes down, the more likely they are to have, again, high rate HRV and and lower resting heart rate and all that sort of stuff. But those are really kind of the the the you're going to look at, you're not going to look at HRV in workout, this is done at rest. And you're not going to look at resting heart rate in the workout because it's, again, done at rest.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  So from a from a tracking standpoint, we'll use HRV and resting heart rate. From an in-workout standpoint, we'll typically look at heart rate recovery.

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. What's the highest HRV that you've ever seen?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, again, it depends on the system, but the the one that people in the UK might be familiar with over there is Athlete, which is a really good one, actually. The first, one of the first companies I worked with was with Simon Athlete over there. And Simon and and Athlete and my first system, BioForce HRV, we worked basically with the same general algorithm, the same general scale. So on that one, you know, if you get up around a hundred, it'd be a very high HRV. You'd see a few people here and there. It'd be like a hundred and five, a hundred and ten. Which was extremely high in kind of the far end of the endurance spectrum. But again, that's there's other systems out there that can show you 200. So it's it's it's all relative. But usually you will definitely see the the endurance athletes and the people that are doing hours and hours of volume

• 21:07Speaker 00

  tend to fall up in that that 100 range. If you're looking at some of the more popular ones like Bioforce, my original one, iThlete and a few of the other ones out there. But again, it's really depends on the system they're using. So it's it's hard to say.

• 21:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, given that 110 is like the absolute top end of what you saw there. I'm in a Whoop team with Ryan Fisher, who's a CrossFit athlete, he works out at CrossFit Chalk. And his HRV regularly hits 200 on that. So there's no way he's

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Yes, it's

• 21:33Chris Williamson?

  it's impossible that he's gonna have double the HRV of that. He'd be beating like once a minute, certain minutes.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not possible. I mean, so again, HRV is not really measuring heartbeat per minute at all whatsoever. So it'll correlate, but it's not always as simple as that. But yeah, you just you can't compare. Every system is using a different calculation. A lot of them are these days are using ARM SSD. But then a lot of them are also not using ARM SSD, like the Apple Watch doesn't use that. Usually they use SDN, I believe. So the calculation itself will drive the number. And then a lot of times after the fact, people do math. So Bioforce and iThlete would take that that raw data and it would basically transform it. So it was a little bit more usable. So it didn't jump around all over the place

• 22:19Speaker 00

  the way that some of the other ones would. So you you gotta be careful. I think too, the differences between a chest strap sensor versus an optical sensor, how it's measured, the time of day, all that sort of stuff. So I'm personally not a big fan of Whoop, to be honest with you, just because it's measuring at very random intervals. You know, if you really want to get consistent measurements, you need to measure at the same time each day. You need to measure it in a standardized fashion. So we compare where were you yesterday at this time to where you are today at this time. Because if I'm just walking around, or if I'm sleeping on my stomach versus my side, or if I have caffeine, all these numbers get thrown out the window because they're just going to reflect that exact situation. But we want to have a comparison of a baseline state. We want to see where's your body in a baseline state at rest.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  So some of them, you know, Whoop and some other ones will try to measure you overnight because they think it's the easiest time to measure. But the problem with that is they're not getting a steady stream of data. They're just taking these random snapshots. Because unfortunately, HRV is battery intensive. It would run your battery into the ground on any strap like that if you had HRV running all night long. It would literally, you'd have to charge it every six hours to keep the thing, or eight hours to keep it actually running. So instead what they do is they take these random little snapshots every couple hours or every six hours, whatever they do. You can't, we can't know exactly how often they measure it. But they take these little snapshots and then they compare that. But the reality is those snapshots are broad. I mean, you could be sleeping on your stomach versus your back and that'll change your HRV entirely.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Will it?

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, you could be, oh yeah, absolutely. Your body position changes your HRV, your your breathing rate changes your HRV, your mental stress. I mean, your HRV is a sensitive number. That's kind of the challenge with it is you can change it. I mean, you could literally cut it in half by holding your breath. So basically like different things you do are going to change your HRV significantly. So your body position, your breathing rate, I mean, I could sit there and mentally think about something stressful and elevate my heart rate and that's going to lower my HRV. You know, all these different things are going to influence it. So these little teen snapshots, you know, are not a very good indicator of your baseline state. They're just kind of showing us what's happening in the moment. So most of the research that's out there that's done, uh, is done with HRV and kind of standardized

• 24:31Speaker 00

  measurement period where it's like usually two to five minutes every day around the same time because that's the best way to see what is this person's baseline state. Uh, the overnight HRV research that typically done is done from like sleep studies where they do use ECGs and they connect a bunch of electrodes and they measure you all night. And they take all this data because they're in a sleep lab. So there's very little research out there that shows good accuracy with kind of random overnight periodic measurements because again, it's really, really hard to extrapolate what a baseline state is when you're getting these kind of random ad hoc measurements throughout different periods. Uh, throughout the day or throughout the evening. So there's like, so there's, there's lots of different systems out there and there's some value to each of them, but

• 25:13Speaker 00

  personally, the way I've always done it and the way the research supports it is, you know, a consistent daily measurement done at the same time. Um, and generally the same fashion to compare again, what is this person's normal baseline state look like and how is that changing daily on a long-term basis?

• 25:27Chris Williamson?

  What's your preferred tool and preferred time of day to achieve that?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, I have my own HRV system. I started with BioForce. 2011 was when I first came out with one and I really just thought the need because it was really early days. There really wasn't HRV systems out there back then except for Athletes and, you know, MegaWave and some really expensive ones. And we measured HRV for, you know, a number of years with BioForce. And then ultimately, I kind of realized people would use it and they would say, well, why would my HRV do this? And why would my HRV do that? And at the time, you know, all we were measuring was HRV. So I'm like, I don't know. Like, it could have been, it could have been, you know, what was your diet like? What was your mental stress like? What was your sleep like? What have you been doing for training? You know, HRV does not really tell you the why. It just tells you what's happening.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  It's up to you as an individual to figure out why is it doing this? And the reality is, it is, it varies a lot, as you probably have seen. It goes up, it goes down, it's all over the map, right? It's not always as obvious what's causing these variations. So I came out with Morpheus a couple of years ago with the idea being, let's track all this other data that's already out there. So we take activity data from any wearable people have, whether it's, you know, a Fitbit or a Garmin Band or an Oura Ring or Polar. And then we do the same thing with sleep. And then we measure heart rate from training from any Bluetooth chest strap or any chest strap really that people are using. And then we basically measure HRV with our own device. And then we turn all that data into recovery score. So we're taking, you know, same way Whoop does. Whoop takes the same, similar data,

• 26:57Speaker 00

  but we're using other devices rather than forcing you to wear just one. So we're trying to be a bit more flexible in the market because not everybody wants to wear a band 24 hours a day. Not everybody's going to buy it. Not everyone wants to pay a subscription, all those sorts of things. So we're trying to use the data that people are already getting from wearables they like. Garmin, Fitbit, Polar, Apple Watch, all those sorts of things. And then we measure HRV using our Morpheus bands and then we show you the whole picture of that. So we make it easier for people to, again, connect those dots. So if you see your HRV is doing something, it's affecting your recovery score, you can generally see, okay, well, I I went 15,000 steps yesterday. It's obvious why it's different versus my average of 8,000. I doubled my steps. Or my sleep's been six hours a night. It's been really shitty. So that's probably what's doing it. So you can actually see all these different pieces connected. Because again, it's going to be your activity level. It's going to be your mental stress.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  It's going to be your training. It's going to be your overall fitness level, your nutrition. All of these things are going to drive HRV on a daily basis. And if you don't see the big picture of that, you're just kind of guessing what your HRV is doing or you're guessing why it's doing that. So. You like the system I developed called Morpheus and we're really developing it for coaches. We're working on a coaching platform and be out here shortly. So the coaches have access to all this data because that's the one thing I would say is, is you know, if you're a coach, your results or your program depend on all these things that happen outside of your control. So if I write a program, this is really what I learned early on with HRV, is I would write a program and I was like, this is great. This is a perfect program. And then it would go to shit and I couldn't figure out why.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  And I'd see all the numbers happening and it made way back in the day, like this person's not recovering well. The program's not having the results I wanted. What's going on? And then you talk to the person like, oh yeah, I was up, I was up till four in the morning last night playing video games. Or we, you know, I work around Seattle or we know we have a product launch at Microsoft. I haven't slept in five days. So you just start to see like my program results weren't really all on me. They were on the person once they left the gym to go do the right thing. So it's, it's really, it's, it's the 23 hours a day outside the gym that drive the results you get from the one hour inside the gym. And the problem I always had as a coach was if I couldn't see that and they couldn't see that and there was no accountability and they were screwing themselves and blaming me for it.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  It's, it's a bad business model, you know, like you're, you're, they're, they're coming in and paying me to give them results. But my program is a small piece of that. It's the potential to have results, but if they don't get enough sleep or they don't eat the right foods, if they don't deal with the mental stress appropriately, they're screwed. They've sabotaged all the hard work that they've done and all the work I've put into their program. So, you know, I realized that as a coach, I was just shooting in the dark without this data, without making decisions because of this data. So I've always seen there's got to be something out there that helps coaches have access to this and it helps coaches sort through it because it can be a lot of data. And so that was really where the genesis and the idea behind Morpheus came from is I wanted to figure out, okay, how can we take all this data because clients are kidding it, right?

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Clients have wearables, clients have Apple watches, they have Fitbits, they have Uber rings, they have, well, they have all these different tools that's collecting this data that coach could be using. But the coach has no access to it, right? It's not exactly like, hey, let me look through your apps when you bring your phone into me. Like, that's not gonna happen. You're not gonna see it. So again, we're really excited because we've been working this damn thing for two years. Um, and we're literally a few weeks or months at this point in time from having it ready to start beta testing and, and launching next early quarter one of 2021. So I'm really excited because as a coach for so many years, you know, I, I wouldn't know how to coach anymore without having access to that data because I'm, I'm so used to being able to see, you know, from, from my own systems and just talking to people and, and dealing with the systems I've built, you know, but

• 30:32Speaker 00

  even now I still have to kind of piece things together because I have to ask them, look, you know, I have to look at their mortgage data and have these conversations. But once we have this tool out there, then it's just gonna make it easy for every coach out there to, to have access to this data. And then we're building in, you know, messaging tools and communication to be able to say, hey, what's going on in your sleep last night?

• 30:49Chris Williamson?

  Go to fucking bed. It's 5 a.m. Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So I know we're, we're building, we're building little alerts. Exactly. So basically we'll have it. So all, all the data is in there and then we've built in this alert system that'll basically automatically search through the data and give you a little notification. So it could say exactly that. Hey, Chris isn't sleeping. Tell him to, tell him to get his ass to bed. And then you'll be able to send their message and say, hey, what the hell? If you're reading this, go back to sleep. Right? So we're, we're building all these tools in there just to, to make this process easy and seamless and more practical for coaches to use. So something obviously I'm excited about because we've been working on it forever. And I think it'll be hugely valuable just because again, all this data is out there. It's just going to waste. I mean, people are collecting massive and massive billions of data points

• 31:33Speaker 00

  that nobody's actually using in a meaningful way. They're just kind of looking at, oh, that's cool. Uh, you know, but nothing's actually happening in their program. The coach doesn't really know what it is or the coach doesn't know how to make changes in their program. And you have just basically a bunch of data that's being completely used. And I think that's a huge problem that we can solve.

• 31:50Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome, man. I'm happy for you. Where should, if people want to go and have a nosy round, where do they go?

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Just trainwithmorpheus.com. So trainwithmorpheus.com is where we have the, right now, we just have the, the consumer app. So if you're, you know, just wanting to use our, our HRV system for yourself, you can turn the order, order strap as a coach. We will have, we'll have that new system coming out early next year. So once, once we get there, we'll have all kinds of stuff on the website. About it. Right now it's kind of under the radar because we've spent so much time, uh, working on it. But we actually had a huge gym. We had Gold's Gym. Asked us to build this big platform for them initially, and then they declared bankruptcy.

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  Going into administration this year.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, uh, they did. They, they went and they went completely bankrupt and sold the company to a German company, actually. So that whole thing kind of went, uh, went by the wayside, but by the same point in time, they, they gave us a significant investment to start building this thing out a lot faster. We wouldn't have been able to without that. So we were able to basically get the whole thing built on their dime.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, are you saying that you hastened the bankruptcy of Gold's Gym?

• 32:54Speaker 00

  I think we were a very, very small part.

• 32:55Chris Williamson?

  They repurposed all of their profits into your app.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wish it was that simple. There was, there was quite a few months where they owed us a very large sum of money. So I don't think we, uh, they didn't pay us what they were exposed to for a long time, but we finally were able to get that once things went all the way through. But, uh, you know, they saw the need. They basically wanted to build a gym concept where you had live heart rate training classes, but the heart rate training and all this stuff was built around the individual and not just built on, you know, some static heart rate screens up on the wall that weren't individualized to you. So concept was basically, we're going to have, everyone's going to get their recovery measured through HRV and all these other things. And then they were going to have a range of classes from lower intensity recovery classes up to your high kick your ass and classes. And the system would basically make a recommendation about which classes were appropriate for you each day. So if you were already smoked,

• 33:42Speaker 00

  it would say, hey, you should probably go to this recovery class today. Or if you looked like you hadn't been working hard enough, you needed to get good ass kicking, it would say, hey, go to these classes today. So I think we're, we're starting to see this recognition in the industry that maybe telling everyone to go in the gym every day and crush themselves is, is, is not a long-term, sustainable approach. For most people, and it's why fitness doesn't work, you know, unfortunately very well for most people because they go in, they bust their ass for a few weeks or a couple of months, and then they get burnt out, or they get injured, or just don't, you know, eventually they plateau, and they get frustrated, and then they go try something different. And you kind of just get this merry-go-round of trying different things, but the reality is, it's not the, it's not the thing that's going to make the difference in results, it's, it's how you put all these pieces together. It's, it's how much sleep you can get, it's how much nutrition or what your nutrition

• 34:25Speaker 00

  looks like, it's can you manage intensity on a daily basis, can you manage the, the stress in your life? You put all these things together because all of those things ultimately drive results because they all take energy. And there's one thing people don't understand, it's that your body's capacity to produce energy is, is limited. It does not have this unending pool of energy to deal with everything you throw at it, so it has to prioritize and make choices. So if I'm extremely mentally stressed, that takes energy. If I'm walking around twenty, thirty thousand steps just working on a daily basis, that takes energy. If I'm not getting sleep, that takes away from my energy. And recovery, first and foremost, takes a ton of energy because if we're going to break muscle tissue down and break down all these things as part of the workout, well, we have to put energy back into rebuilding them.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  We have to turn on metabolic processes and protein synthesis, and we have to put energy into making ourselves bigger and stronger and more efficient and all these sorts of things. But there's a limited amount of energy we can produce in a day, so the body has to make choices, and the, the last place it actually wants to put energy is into recovery if it has to just fight for survival. So, again, people have this idea that I'm going to be stressed out from work, I'm going to go take it out of the gym, and then I'm going to slam a Red Bull or some caffeinated drink and get six hours of sleep and repeat that. And they, they try it, and that does not work because, again, sooner or later, the body's going to take energy away from recovery and just direct it into survival mode, and your fitness isn't going to get better, and eventually you're going to get a shoulder injury, or you're going to get a, your hips are going to start bothering you, or you're just not going to feel like going to the gym for a week, and then you're going to miss

• 35:53Speaker 00

  another week, and then you're just going to start to kind of fall off and being inconsistent with your training. It's consistency over the long term that produces results. It's not how many times you can smash yourself in the gym in a week. And unfortunately, that's what people try, and, you know, that's why people often don't, don't succeed.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for sure. So getting into HRV training, what are the ways that we can help to increase that number in the gym?

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the biggest thing like I mentioned is it's correlated to aerobic fitness. So not, I don't want to put it out that the anaerobic and strength and power aren't important. Those play roles and they facilitate metabolic changes that help us in multiple ways in body composition. But ultimately, you've got to improve your aerobic system. So like I said, if you look at HRV, the highest people out there are the endurance athletes because they have the greatest levels of cardiovascular fitness and they also have the greatest longevity. So there was a few papers out there, but there was one study that looked at a meta-analysis that looked at basically a huge variety of papers, a huge variety of athletes, I meant, to see how their lifespan compared to the average. And the scary thing was, a lot of athletes, especially on the anaerobic side, their lifespan was either the same or worse than the average person. Right? That's bad.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  If I'm going to spend my whole life training this sport, it should at least help me live a little bit longer or stave off disease a little bit. But it doesn't. So the only athletes it consistently found that lived longer than the average person were the endurance athletes. And some of them, some of the endurance athletes live an average of eight years longer than the average person, which is a lot, right? I mean, it's like 10% longer than the average lifespan. So you basically have to develop the aerobic system, which, you know, it can take a, you know, a whole year to explain to you how to do that. But the simplest version, again, if you really want to boil it down to the easiest version is if you spend 80% of your time, this is contrary to what most people think, but you spend 80% of your time doing lower and moderate intensities, below, I would say about, you know, below 90% of your maximum heart rate, and then you spend 20% of your time in those

• 37:44Speaker 00

  higher intensity zones, 90% above, and you do that consistently, five, six days a week, you will see your HRV go up. You will consistently see your aerobic system improve. And it sounds simple, but the reality is, it isn't that difficult. It's just most people, again, they don't follow that guideline. They spend three days a week trying to do the highest intensity for the shortest duration possible. They neglect those lower and moderate intensity zones, and they're not consistent. They don't, they don't get enough consistent work in. So if you look at all endurance athlete training, it's not two days a week. I mean, there's a difference between, you can get stronger on two days a week. You can do two full body workouts and most people can gain, gain or maintain strength on that. You're not going to see much fitness improvement at the aerobic side beyond a certain point at two days a week of training. It just isn't going to happen. So.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  You've got to be more consistent with aerobic fitness and aerobic conditioning. That's got to be four, five, six days a week consistently. But again, you want only about 20% of that to be what we'd call real high intensity, which I would define as above 90% of your max. And you want the rest of that to be below that. So you want your combination of more moderate, longer volume days. And then you want your higher intensity, shorter days, but you've got to have both. And unfortunately, we've kind of been fed this, spoon fed this idea that you just need high intensity all the time. Like unfortunately, you need more than that because you can only do high intensity for so long before you break. And you need something in between. And so those lower and more moderate intensity sessions allow you to do more volume, to get more stimulus, without breaking yourself. So you need that balance. So, you know, again, your average person, if they just spend,

• 39:11Speaker 00

  you know, let's say four or five days a week, up to six for higher levels, and they're consistently doing some form of aerobic training. You know, the majority of the time they're doing lower, more moderate intensity work, 30, 40 minutes, sometimes more, sometimes less. And then they're spending maybe two days a week doing those higher intensity intervals. And they are getting their heart rates up towards maximum and they consistently do that, you will see your H R V consistently climb, guarantee you.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  What's the lower bound on that heart rate that you were saying?

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, like 75, 80%, you know, for most average people, like 130 beats per minute, 120 is probably the lower end of where we're going to see the benefit of that. And so like, most time I'll tell people somewhere between like 120, 150, 160. You're going to be in that, in that range for that 70 or 80% of the time. And then that other 20% of the high intensity, now you're going to be up in that 89 or 85, 90, 90% or more of your max heart rate, which is going to depend on what your max heart rate is. But that's where you're seeing your heart rates in the, you know, the 160s, 170s, 180s, that sort of stuff. So again, people think you need to go in there and do this high intensity every day. Even our fighters, even the best fighters in the world that have trained for 20 years at this point, two days a week of sparring is kind of been our recipe for success.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  You know, Dimitrius Johnson, the longest, uh, the world record holder in title defenses now, he sparred Tuesdays and Saturdays. He wasn't in there five days a week banging it out and being an idiot, like two days a week of high intensity sparring. And most of the other stuff was technical drilling and just developing the skillset and strategizing, you know, building strength, that kind of stuff. But he wasn't in there five days a week trying to kill himself. And that's part of why he had such a, you know, he's had such a long career and he's avoided massive injuries. And he was able to sustain such a high level for so long. Because again, we, we realize that if you sit there and beat the hell out of yourself or. Four or five days a week, there comes a price for that. You can sustain it when you're 20 years old for a couple of years. But what happens when you're 25, when you're 30, when you're 35, you know, now you're paying the price. So I think the biggest thing is people

• 41:06Speaker 00

  just have this misguided notion that the harder they train, the better results are going to be. But it's more about the consistency, the more consistently you can train, the better results are going to be. So you've got to ask yourself, is your training going to be sustainable? And if your answer is, well, I beat the hell out of myself every week, I'm feeling tired every time I leave the gym, then probably not sustainable for that long, to be honest with you.

• 41:27Chris Williamson?

  One of the things I've definitely been red pilled on this year, especially from Ben Greenfield, is that if you are not a professional athlete, you should be training for longevity in one form or another. Like, the number of people

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 41:40Chris Williamson?

  that I know that are so religious, like completely dogmatic, ideological about whatever particular training methodology is, whether that be CrossFit, or BJJ, or mixed martial arts, or bodybuilding, or powerlifting, or weightlifting, whatever it might be, you think, why is it that you're completely dedicating yourself to this one particular mode of training? When it would appear, as you've said, and multiple other guests on this show, that so many downstream benefits come from just turning over, getting your heart rate into a good place. Yeah, if you can do that during, let's say that you enjoy cycling outside and you live somewhere that's got a great cycle track, fantastic, like, that's a cool thing to do. But, you know, if it means that you've got to just turn over on an assault

• 42:24Chris Williamson?

  bike, or on a spin bike, or on a rowing machine, or whatever it might be, you should get into that. But people seem to sacrifice an awful lot of what would make them not only be able to do the sport that they love for longer, but also generally across their entire lifespan, just be healthier on all markers.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think we're, as human beings, we're, we're, we have two problems. We're obsessive about things, or we see an immediate feel good about. So we love BJJ, we love something, we just get obsessive about it, a lot of people at least. Especially the fitness industry. And then number two, probably our biggest downfall is we're incredibly short sighted. Like, most people out there are looking for the next workout next week, or the next four weeks, or the next six weeks. I mean, we don't look beyond the short term to think like, okay, what is, what is, what is six months or six years from now? Look like, because the reality is those things are gonna, that time's gonna happen, you're gonna get there. But if we focus literally on the next six days versus six months or six weeks or six years, we make bad decisions.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Because we're so focused on right now. We're not, we're really not good, at least most people are not good at making decisions now. They're gonna pay off later. We like to make decisions now we think are gonna pay off now. We don't like to make decisions now that really aren't gonna pay off for down the road, six years, six months, sixteen years, or whatever the number may be. We're just not long-term strategic thinkers or action takers. We tend to be very focused on in the moment. And we don't really think about the long-term consequences of our actions, because we just think, God, I don't feel that's not for years from now.

• 43:54Chris Williamson?

  Future, future Chris will look after it. Future Joel will sort it out.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately, you know, by the time that happens, they, they've already made their mistakes. I can't tell you how many athletes I've worked with from a variety of sports, and they're all, you know, the, the, once you get to their thirties, maybe late thirties. They're like, God damn, I wish I knew in my twenties what I know now, I would still be playing. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. If I, if I knew in my twenties, what I figured out over the course of my career, I would still be playing the sport. I would still be.

• 44:23Chris Williamson?

  What are those, what are those insights? What are they saying when, what do they mean when they say that?

• 44:28Speaker 00

  A lot of it, they just realize the importance of taking care of themselves, right? Like, talk to Major League Baseball players, they're out drinking two, three nights a week after games. They're sitting there chewing tobacco, they're not getting enough sleep, they're stressed out of their minds. I mean, a lot of them just don't realize the importance of taking care of themselves outside the sport. And eventually, they start to fall apart, you know, they start to lose their, their game and everything goes to shit, so. They start to, no, eventually start looking for ways. That's, that's kind of funny because you start to see the, the athletes that really embrace technology are the ones that are, are older and have been around a while and they start to realize like if I'm going to keep trying to compete with these younger guys, I gotta do something because I'm, my game's going to shit and these guys are all beating me now. So, like I said, most of it is they just start to realize that again, you, you can't just go into the,

• 45:09Speaker 00

  the training with the idea that you've got to outwork everybody. You've got to go into the training with the idea that you've got to be smarter than everybody. And that comes with taking care of your body and, and not just abusing it. So, again, you, you kind of see the younger athletes, they'll just, they won't get any sleep and they'll, they'll have a bunch of caffeine or stimulants and they'll just beat the shit out of themselves. Like, especially the MMA fighters. You look at the young MMA fighters are sparring four days a week, five days a week, six days a week. That's like half what they're doing. And then they, they're, they do great for two, three, four years, maybe five at the most. And then they're out of sport. If they even last that long. So you just kind of over time, you just realize, maybe I should have taken a bit different approach and you know, now it's maybe too late. So, you know, unfortunately it's just kind of the, the nature of the game, but there's enough.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  I think there's more and more education out there. There's more emphasis on recovery now than ever before. There's more tools, right? There's, there's all sorts of uh, things are coming out now from, from hyperice and hypervolt to normitek boots to all these different modalities are starting to be more widespread. And I think it's because people are starting to actually realize how important these things actually are to sustainable performance, to sustainable health.

• 46:15Chris Williamson?

  What are some of your go-to workouts when you're in the gym? And you've got an hour, you've got an all right amount of time. And you think, right, I want to do something that I know is going to positively affect my HRV over the long term. What are some of the go-to workouts that you do?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, I kind of do a, a variety of things. I, I, I like going outside and riding my bike. So I, I do get outside in bikes. There's, there's benefits to being outside. Uh, for my high intensity work, I typically play racquetball, pre-COVID at least. I played racquetball, just to get my heart rate up and have a little more fun than, than just sprinting on a treadmill. So I tried to get in the racquetball court twice a week. And then the rest of the time, I just do a variety of cardiovascular work. So I tend to do circuits. I'm more of a lifter by nature, so I don't like monotony. Like, I hate the, I'm just not the kind of guy who's gonna do 90 minutes of the same shit. So I might do five or 10 minutes of a versa climber, then I might jump rope for five minutes. Then I might do some shadow box or something like that for five minutes, and then I might jump back on a versa climber for another five or 10 minutes.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  So I tend to do like a, you know, I call like a roadwork circuit, if you will. So I'll just use a variety of movement patterns and a variety of things. And then, like I said, in the summertime, I'll get out, ride my bike, I'll go swimming, I'll try to be, you know, hiking, that sort of thing outdoors. So I just like the variety of it. You know, some people are the exact opposite. They want to do the exact same thing. They want to be extremely monotonous. You tend to find the endurance athletes fall in that category of people that are naturally predisposed to the endurance side of things. They're very monotonous based and they want to just do the same shit. And then you find the power lifters or the strength athletes who are more anaerobic, they tend to hate that sort of thing. So you just kind of figure out what people naturally gravitate towards too, and find something that, again, they enjoy doing. So if I was forced to be in a treadmill for 90 minutes, I would kill myself.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  But other people, that's all they want to do is get on something monotonous, elliptical, and they want to just go for it and they want it to zone out. And that's their, their way of, of training they enjoy. So, you know, again, like I said, pre-COVID, I was playing racket ball about twice a week. And then I would do a variety of circuits, you know, another three to four days a week. And I generally would do about three days of lifting, kind of mixed in there as well. So usually I'd do like a upper body, lower body, and total body spread across three different strength workouts. And then a variety of the circuit-based training in between, and then, then the racket ball.

• 48:19Chris Williamson?

  A little bit of sport to distract you as well. And you found

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:22Chris Williamson?

  over your long career of training and being a trainer, you found that that's like an optimal split for you, something that you can sustain? And that gives you the results that you need?

• 48:32Speaker 00

  For, for me, yeah, that's exactly right. So I tended to, again, I'd fall in the same trap. So when I started playing a bit more racket ball, I started getting more competitive. I'd start playing, try to play a bit more. And I'd start, you know, play a little bit longer. And then I'm like, god damn it, now my shoulders bother me. Like, I just kind of fell into my own trap, right? So I could see it coming and I was still doing it. But then I learned, I'm like, okay, I basically kind of realized as I hit 40, about two days a week of high intensity. Because racket ball is high intensity. It's a lot of sprint work. It's a lot of change of direction. And it is a lot of, lot of load on your body. So I realized, okay, I can really only play high intensity about two days a week. And if I'm gonna go in there and play any more than that, it's gonna be just technical drilling and trying to get better at the sport and just learn how to play the sport better. But Yeah, it's kind of evolved over time. And like I said, the summertime, Seattle's, you know,

• 49:16Speaker 00

  a beautiful spot to be. So I'll go, I'll ride a bike down a trail to work and, uh, you know, not, not fast, but I'll squat and get my cardio into the bike and hiking and that kind of stuff. So, and I'm going to Hawaii here in a couple of weeks. So same thing. I'll get some light work on the beach and, you know, be outdoors and train and just, uh, I, I enjoy the, the outdoor aspect of it. So I try to do that when I can. And then I enjoy, like I said, for my high intensity stuff, I like the sport aspect of it because I just, uh, I, you know, I enjoy that side a lot more.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  There's going to be a lot of bodybuilders and powerlifters and weightlifters listening who don't like the fact that they're going to have to jump on a

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  a bike and do some cardio now.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Well, they, they, they won't unfortunately, but the, the unfortunate part about the sport is if you look around the sport, there's been a lot of them that have died incredibly young, right? There's, there's been a number of bodybuilders and number of powerlifters who are not exactly in the best health, you know, and I respect the fact that, look, if you want to beat the living shit out of yourself to squat a thousand pounds, be my guest, right? I mean, that's, that's your choice. You can certainly do that. But if you, if you look at the guys, even like the Dave Tates and the Louis Simmons, I mean, I think they, you know, as, as they've aged, you can see them taking a different perspective. And Dave, Dave's been vocal about his injuries and has been vocal about wanting to rehab himself. I mean, uh, the first, the first strength coach I worked with, a guy named, uh, Bill Gillespie, incredibly strong guy, bench press 700 pounds, um, I believe at 50 plus years old, and he's just an absolute monster. Um,

• 50:41Speaker 00

  and a lot of these guys, again, as they age, you know, you see the wear and tear on them. They can't move very well. They can't, they can't get out of bed half the time. They're just in pain a lot of the time. And the reality is, you know, they're, they're, they're probably not going to live any longer than the average person. They certainly might live a less, uh, you know, shorter than the average person.

• 50:58Chris Williamson?

  And definitely an unfulfilled life, right? Like it's going to be painful. Anyone who's seen the Ronnie Coleman documentary, like it's

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Ronnie Coleman.

• 51:04Chris Williamson?

  very uncomfortable to watch.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  It's not fun.

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  No, but that's a

• 51:07Speaker 00

  But, but you know what?

• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  That's the sacrifice that people make to get to the top, top, top of the sport. If you've got Jay Cutler breathing down your neck, you have to go and squat 700 solid ass pounds like for reps and scream, yeah buddy. But the vast majority of athletes aren't getting to that stage. They may be competing at a local or a regional level or perhaps a national level, but they're not going to do that. So it's a really difficult pill to swallow and a bunch of my buddies who've competed at Worlds for powerlifting have had to take this on. They've had to realise, look, like I need to concede, this is not my job. This is not where my earnings comes from. Yes, it's where my passion is, but just because I'm passionate about something doesn't mean

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  that I should give it everything at the expense of my life. And it's such an uncomfortable, you know, it makes people viscerally feel, and rightly so, you care about this sport. You genuinely care about your performance, you want to do well, but you've got to let it go. You've got to make some sacrifices for you in 20 years' time.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. I think, look, I think it's valuable for people to see the Ronnie Coleman documentary because it's valuable if people see like, shit, I'm going to become like that, but I'm not making that kind of money or I'm not having that level of success. I mean, what exactly am I destroying myself for? So, yeah, I mean, look, if people understand the consequences and they make the decision to do it anyway, you know, more power to them. It's their life, they can do whatever they want. And I think if you ask Ronnie Coleman, he doesn't regret it.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  He says the only thing he regrets is not trying to go for five instead of two with that 800 pound squat.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. You know what? Hey, that's Ronnie Coleman is one of the best to ever do in the sport. You respect that. I mean, that's, that's what it takes, you know, to get to that level. But again, if you're going to put in all that time and effort, then hopefully it pays off for you and you end up like Ronnie Coleman. Because if you put in that much time and effort and you pay that price and ultimately you're just some guy sitting on his couch at home talking about his squat five years ago, you know, then you're the Al Bundy of the world and you, you, you're reminiscent by the past that really was never anywhere near what these guys were at. And the reality is, look, there's only one Ronnie Coleman, there's only one Demetrius Johnson. I mean, these guys are one in a million or one in a billion that get to the very top of these sports. And I hate to say it, but a lot of them, they're, they come down to really good genetics and lots of drugs and lots of sacrifice.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  And if you're not willing to have. You know, you don't have all that combination. You're probably not going to get to the top of a lot of these sports. So, look, you just got to make a decision for yourself and people need to have those conversations with with themselves, you know, is is what I'm sacrificing worth what I'm getting?

• 53:47Chris Williamson?

  You know? Is the juice worth the squeeze, man? Yeah, we uh.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  We have a concept that we've come up with over the last few years called the fitness menopause. And it's precisely what you're describing there. You, for us, it was as we approached our 30s and we realized, I'm getting a little bit out of breath, going up a set of stairs. And I've done bodybuilding, like bro lifting for the last sort of eight years. And I've been overeating protein and under eating micronutrients. And I haven't looked after my cardio system and I haven't got any mobility. And you see people that might be brought on by an injury. It might just be brought on by the monotony boredom of training. And they start to, oh, I'll have a look at yoga. I'll have a look at CrossFit. I'll have a look at functional fitness or triathlons or BJJ, whatever it might be. And um, that's what happens, man. And it, you know, it comes across, hopefully for most people, not too late.

• 54:36Chris Williamson?

  Um, I want you to ask about the role of breathing and breath work in affecting.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  Hugely valuable.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  HRV. What can we do? What's some of the strategies?

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, like I said, that your respiratory function and your respiratory capacity is closely tied to your parasympathetic system because it's just kind of how the two systems are intertwined. So they're like, there's, there's a million ways to roam on that one. There's lots of different breathing strategies out there. But most of them are built around, you know, a prolonged exhale, a slow controlled breathing pattern and just learning how to mentally disconnect yourself from the stress around you. So, you know, I go online, you can look at Mike Robertson and Bill Hartman. They've got courses on breathing. There's, there's other people out there, Brian McKenzie, a bunch of people have started digging into breathing. There's Wim Hofens. Look, there's, there's lots of different ways and people are talking about breathing out there. And again, there's lots of. There's lots of different ways to accomplish more or less the same thing, but what it all comes

• 55:29Speaker 00

  down to is just improving your breathing pattern efficiency, improving your ability to activate that parasympathetic nervous system through your breathing techniques, developing again, so breathing is like a squat or it's like a lunge. You have a breathing pattern that you fall into based on your physiology and based on these these trained attributes you you get over time. So a lot of it, again, just kind of comes down to recognizing am I a very, uh, they call it, you can basically call it a sympathetic or parasympathetic breather and different strategies around those things. But you really kind of, if you want to dig into it, you can dig into it. There's lots of rabbit holes you can go down to, but for most people, literally just kind of spending three to four minutes a day focused on full inhales and full slow exhales where you're getting a complete exhalation of the the respiratory

• 56:11Speaker 00

  system, the pattern, and spending time mentally relaxing, just doing that is going to break a lot of the stress cycle that we see on a daily basis. So there's, again, there's so many different techniques. It's like asking what's the best exercise, you know, it depends on what you need. It depends on what you're going to do. So if you want to dig into breathing, you know, go find those guys that I just mentioned. But by and large, it's again, it's just learning how to take full inhales, full exhalations, and then being able to mentally relax at the same time. If you can spend five minutes a day doing that, you will, I guarantee you'll see your HRV go up a little bit just because you'll learn how to to take a break for a second, activate that parasympathetic system through that process.

• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Brian was on the show a year ago. I had Mr. McKenzie on and we're now actually sponsored by his state app. So anyone that wants to get some breath work and add it into their daily routine, bit.ly slash state wisdom, and you can get two weeks for free. Just download it on the App Store on iOS.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Those things are hugely, hugely valuable. I mean, literally, if you, if people do nothing else, spend five minutes a day just relaxing and going through some of those drills, I guarantee you will see your HRV go up because again, it's just we're, we go through our day and we're kind of in this chronically stressed out state, dealing with work, dealing with life, especially now COVID has has made that even worse. And not only that, people are sitting at home doing, doing jack shit because you can't go anywhere else, right? So it's this bad combination of stress plus lack of movement is, is equalling, you know, we're going to see repercussions of, of COVID long after the virus itself has gone from this, you know, almost a year of, uh, this change in behavior that's negative. I mean, gyms are shut down. Uh, you're going to have to order out and get food or, you know,

• 57:46Speaker 00

  deal with a whole different nutritional strategy half the time. And then you're just sitting around stressed. So again, we'll see the price of that, but spending like I said, five, 10 minutes a day, just learning how to breathe and relax, it just kind of resets the switch and it can make a huge difference.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  That five, five or 10 minutes will, will expand out into affecting an aggregate across the day.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  I thought, I honestly thought that the dose would be so low that it would cause a state change, but the, uh, elongated trait change would be like pretty tough to achieve.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  No, you absolutely see it. It depends on the people. So the people you'll see the biggest impact with are the type of people who just like can't relax. They're just always on, they're always going, they have shitty HRV, uh, you know, they're just go, go, go, go, go. Like those people, just there's something about learning how to turn that, that relax switch on and learning how to shut that, that go, go, go switch off. Even if it's for five minutes, they just develop, they develop the quality to learn how to do it better throughout the rest of the day or throughout other times, um, in the evening. So I tend to tell people, if nothing else, learn how to do this because you'll sleep better and that better sleep will translate to a million things. So you'll see oftentimes, so you've taken a powerlifter and you say, okay, I want you to spend five minutes in the middle of the day and I want you to do this breathing exercise and I want you to try to drop your heart rate. So the easy thing people can do is just,

• 59:05Speaker 00

  go to these breathing drills and look at their heart rate and your goal is to get your heart rate as low as possible. I mean, just watch your, look, just sit there and get your heart rate as low as possible because that's the indication that you're relaxing and that you're getting that parasympathetic system turned on. So it's a really simple biofeedback tool as you're doing these breathing exercises and trying to relax. And you'll find people suck at it at first because they're trying too hard to get their heart rate down. And it's, it kind of counterproductive, but they'll eventually learn how to do it and they'll learn how to relax and learn how to see their heart rate come down. And then again, that process of learning how to do that will carry over into just a better response to stress and a better ability to control that. That's also something I would recommend in the gym. So probably one of the easier things you can do that's gonna be more valuable than anything

• 59:47Speaker 00

  else is as we're doing intervals, okay, a lot of times, I would say 99% of the time, what do people focus on the interval? They focus on driving their heart rate up and going as intensely as it can, right? They never focus on actually bringing their heart rate back down as quickly as they can in between intervals. So whenever I'm coaching intervals or doing conditioning work like that, it's not just about the work, it's about the recovery in between the intervals. So I want people to learn how to not just drive their heart rate up, I want people to learn how to drive their heart rate back down. And so that's, again, a big part of what I talk about, heart rate recovery. So I want athletes or people focused on how quickly can my heart rate come back down in between interval, and if they can develop that skill, because part of it is just fitness, the aerobic system, and then part of it is the mental processes and the mental skills that drive that. So

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  you can learn how to bring your heart rate down faster by practicing it, because, again, part of that is an actual skill, and it's being able to turn that stress system off as quickly as possible and allow the heart rate to come back down. So if you're in the gym and you're doing intervals, just literally spend the time after your interval, seeing how quickly your heart rate comes down in 60 seconds, or if you're doing a shorter interval, 30 seconds, whatever the case may be, see how quickly you can get your heart rate to come down and focus on that. Make that part of the goal of the workout, is to try to drop your heart rate as fast as you can in between those intervals, and the better you can get at that, the better you're gonna get at just being able to activate that parasympathetic system, you know, outside of the gym as well. It's a val- it's hugely valuable skill. I just call it, I call it dynamic energy control. It's learning how to control that energy expenditure, not just by going as hard as we can, but actually

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  recovering as quickly as you can. So it's just a, it's, it's, it's another thing to add to your conditioning, your aerobic work, that makes it a bit more interesting than just go as hard as I can and then repeat. Well, try to actually learn how to go as hard as you can, recover as quickly as possible, and then repeat that process. And just adding that layer in, people often find makes it a little more exciting, and it adds a hugely valuable component to it as well.

• 1:01:36Chris Williamson?

  What is some of the physical traits that people can do to achieve that controlled breathing, calm thoughts?

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, all of it. So generally speaking, if we're in an extended position, a hyperextended position, it slows down our recovery and it slows down that recovery from the respiratory function. If we can get a little bit more of a flex, a little bit more diaphragmatically advantageous position, and we can work on expanding, getting full expansion of the rib cage in full breath, and then again a complete exhale, while mentally being able to relax and turn that switch down a bit, that's the combination that will work really well. And then positionally, it makes a big difference. So if you have someone that just can't get their heart rate down, they just suck at it, the first thing you can have to do is just sit, or even lay down. Just positionally, your heart will come down a lot faster if you're laying down or you're seated versus you're standing. So it's kind of the remedial 101. Like you cannot get your heart rate to come down, have them lay down, have them

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  close their eyes, and have them really focus on just that full relaxation in the laying position. Okay, well now they've got that done really well, they can get that down. Okay, now have them do it seated. Okay, now they can do it seated, now have them do it standing. So you can go through this progression of where it's easiest to recover is laying, it's, you know, then seated, then standing, then moving. You can go through this progression of letting them get that. But so in general, I'll just kind of give you guys some general guidelines. If you're going to 90% more of your max for, you know, any length of time, generally speaking, use a 60-second recovery after that. You want to be able to recover between 30 and 40 beats per minute from your max. So if I'm doing something, let's say my max is 190. If I get in the 180s, I should be able to do a 60-second recovery and consistently

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  drop it 30 beats per minute. Now, if I do 20 of them, obviously that's going to change, and I'm going to have a hard time towards the end of the beginning, but that's kind of our hallmark, because we want to hit 30 beats per minute in terms of a recovery from a max intensity exercise. That's a kind of a generic prescription, but if you can shoot for that, you know, chances are you're in pretty good condition, and you're able to control it pretty well. Most people hit like 10, 20, you know, at the most, and they can't do it consistently. But we want consistently to be able to drop 30 beats per minute across at least three to five reps of high-intensity work. If you can get there, you can do that, that's a pretty good sign that you're on the right track.

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  I'm thinking tomorrow, I've got a cardio session in the gym tomorrow and I'm thinking, got tons and tons of different ideas about what I'm gonna do. I was also reminiscing about spending time on my morning routine seat there, doing the state app and thinking about some of the places that I've put myself in when doing some of those exercises, because it gets progressively overloaded over time. And the discomfort that you can come up against there is really, really challenging. It doesn't surprise me that people don't like doing breath works. It feels like you're drowning whilst not being underwater.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  But the, the impact afterwards, and this kind of goes back to what you were saying before, is your training methodology making you feel like shit when you leave the gym? Or is it making you feel good? The things that make you feel good, make you feel good for a reason. A good night's sleep, a nice, healthy meal that doesn't make you feel inflamed or tired or grumpy afterwards, a good training session that makes you feel recovered, whatever it might be. And the way that you feel after having done breath work as well is just so at peace, present, it's.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, and those, that, those carry, and those carry over. I mean, again, those carry over because they're breaking that cycle of stress and they'll translate into better sleep, they'll translate into better recovery, they'll translate into better health in general, because you're feeling good for a reason, because your body is doing something that's beneficial and it's an important thing. So, I mean, that's, look, it's a really simple guideline for, for good people. If you don't measure anything whatsoever, you know, if you don't, if you walk out of the gym, again, I kind of like to use 80/20 rule, if it does apply. If you walk out of the gym 80% of the time and you feel at least as good as you went in or better, and then 20% of the time you feel like shit, you're probably in the right track, right? But if you, if you flip that, and 80% of the time you walk out of the gym feeling like shit, and only 20% of the time you feel the same or, or better, you're probably screwed.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  So you can just kind of use it, like if you, if you don't use any technology, ask yourself how you feel as you walk out of the gym. And if more often than not, you feel worse, you're probably gonna break sooner or later because of it.

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  Who is the best conditioned athlete in the UFC at the moment, do you think? Are there any conditioning monsters in there?

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  Um, you know, now DJ left, I can't, I don't think anyone's kind of come up to this level, but you get some of the, yeah, I mean, we haven't, you know, I hit, we haven't seen a lot of the, the five round wars, I think in the UFC that we used to see as option for whatever reason. I think people have, I think that you saw a lot of people realize that you can't go as hard as you possibly can for five rounds without gassing out, and most athletes can't. So they'll, there are people more strategic now about it. I think they're, they've become smarter with their energy. You do see less athletes or fewer athletes gassing out really bad early rounds because people just realize eventually that you have to be a bit more strategic in it. So, you know, I can't think of anyone off the top of my head that I think is anywhere near what DJ was, Demetrius Johnson, when he was still fighting in the UFC. So I still think he's, in my mind, you know, set the standard as far as.

• 1:06:32Chris Williamson?

  Best conditioned athlete.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, DJ absolutely was best conditioned athlete in the UFC. I think, I haven't seen anybody in there that, that can, that, you know, that I would say has been able to take that from him, even though he's not in the UFC anymore.

• 1:06:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is interesting, man. Especially watching, I was thinking back to Tyron Woodley's fight, like a couple of his most recent ones, and he was so strategic with his energy. Super, super slow, you know, he looks like he's walking through mud sometimes, but yeah, I'm going to guess it's a big dude with a lot of muscle mass. He's probably focusing very, very heavily on conserving that, that energy.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's again, that's another skill you have to learn. And it's not just the, the actual skills of throwing punches and kicks and, and all the things along with it. The skill is conserving energy and knowing when to use what you've got. Because if you use it the wrong time, you use it for too long, you're going to pay the price. I mean, look, Khabib was always well-conditioned because he's just a mentally tough bastard, and I think he's also extremely well-conditioned. You know, I think it's both. I think he was the, the guy who was also, he, he was very well-conditioned and he was like DJ, he was extremely mentally tough. You, you were never going to see him fall apart because he had both the fitness and the, the mental side of things locked down. That's why he could just take people and pound the shit out of them for five rounds or, or usually didn't last that long with them.

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  Just an angry, angry little Russian-associated man, isn't he?

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. But he was, he was, I love watching him fight. He was, he was fun to watch because he's beat people mentally and physically. He was, he's kind of like a throwback to the, the older wrestling crowd. I mean, it's so, it's so funny because the UFC has gone to this weird evolution where. Early on UFC was specialists, you know, it was the guys that were really, really, really good at one thing that ultimately won. And first it was the BJJ guys from the Hoist Gracie era, and then it became the wrestlers who basically just took everyone down, and then it was strikers again. And then there was this point where people became, had to become really well-rounded. And then now you've kind of like, if everyone's well-rounded, then it's back to like, someone who's well-rounded and has a specialty.

• 1:08:26Chris Williamson?

  Ah, that's interesting, yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of the way it's evolved. So everyone, everyone now has to be well-rounded enough, they don't have a big hole in their game, because you will get exploited. If you suck at wrestling, if you suck at striking, if you suck at grappling, somebody will beat you because of that. So you have to at least have pretty baseline competency, uh, you know, against all of those things. But then you still now have to have something that you're

• 1:08:50Chris Williamson?

  You also need to be a freak in something as well.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  You need to be a freak, I mean, yeah, Khabib was a freak in wrestling, right? He could take you down and beat the hell out of you. Uh, again, I think, I hate to go back to DJ again, but I think DJ is the most well-rounded from my perspective, because he was good at striking, good at wrestling, uh, good at grappling, and really, he was, he was pretty equally amazing at all three of those, and he was extremely well-conditioned mentally tough. So I think that's why he was, you know, able to have a dominant run in UFC. I mean, I was, I was in his corner for the very first title, uh, he won against Benavides, whatever year that was, 2008 or 9, or whatever, whatever it was, and, uh, you know, to watch him consistently perform at the level he did was just a testament to the, the athlete he was. But yeah, it's funny to, to see that game kind of come almost full circle in a weird way, but everyone's, everyone's skillset's raised, but, you know,

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  it's kind of come back to this, like, hey, you, you can't suck at anything, you've got to be good at everything. But then, if you have one thing that you're just amazing at, you're going to be able to use that, because, you know, that's your, your advantage. So it's, it's, it's been a crazy, uh, thing to watch the sport evolve for the last 20, 20 years or so now. I mean, I think I started watching it, uh, you know, I started training him, guys in 2003, so 17 years of watching UFC's and Pride and Dreams and 1FC and the whole, the whole thing in between. So it's, it's been, been a fun ride.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  I bet it has. Uh, what about the world of weight cutting? Is it still as brutal as we used to hear about a few years ago, or is the recent rules and warnings?

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think, I think the rules, yeah, I think it's, it's probably, it's been down a bit. I mean, I think people are Part of it is, you know, sooner or later you realize cutting a massive amount of weight maybe isn't the advantage you thought it once was. It's not, I mean, when you had Conor McGregor dropping down to 145, I mean, Jesus, that guy had a huge advantage there. But aside from those situations, you know, a lot of guys are realizing that you're so drawn out and you're so depleted that you don't always perform very well because of that. And then you also had UFC and Matt Healy, I've worked with for several years, UFC's kind of changed their entire structure. Like, they have hydration tests, and their weight classes are actually a step above where they normally are. So the 135 has actually fought at 145, and they've

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  kind of re-engineered the whole process of cutting weight and what weight classes are. And I think, you know, that's been successful for them. They've had very few issues over there. So if you don't, if you don't actually make hydration, you can lose your purse. It's a totally different thing than making weight. So you actually get hydration checks, and you have to stay within certain, certain guidelines of that, or you can be fined for it. So I think we, yeah, it's, it's changed things in the UFC world entirely. And I think the UFC eventually, you know, kind of started to realize it's not good to have athletes missing weight, not good to have athletes going to the hospital before they, because they can't fight. So, and I think the athletes themselves have kind of realized that maybe actually just being really, you know, well-conditioned and coming in in shape and not having to drop

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  20 pounds is a, is a better recipe for success than trying to have this, you know, five or eight pound weight advantage over your opponent when you actually step in the octagon. So I think it's gotten better. I mean, the, the old days were crazy. I mean, I can tell you, and the stories of walking into, you know, of, we'd be in the hotels together, you'd walk into a sauna, the hotel had one, the gym had one, and you'd just see these guys just murdering themselves five days out. I'm like, man, you're five days out and you're trying to drop weight in a sauna, you're screwed. Like, you could just see this prolonged draw, and you could see the torture that they had ahead of them. So, we always focused on, you, you want to drop as much as necessary, but you want to drop it over the shore as time possible. Like, literally, you, you're better off dropping as much weight for, you

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  know, the last day than you are dropping a moderate amount of weight for five days, because it's that prolonged depletion that just crushes you. And so, again, guys should make this mistake. Of going into a fight week, you know, let's say fifteen pounds of other fight weight, and they try to drop that fifteen pounds over five days or more, twenty pounds, whatever it is, over, over the last four or five days of the camp before the fight. And again, that's just a stupid thing to do because you're, you're chronically depleted for five days and you just traveled probably across the world or across the country at least in a different time zone, you're eating different foods, you're stressed out your mind because of the fight, like you're throwing all of this shit at yourself and then you're trying to drop all this weight on top of it. It's just a terrible, terrible recipe. So we wouldn't try

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  to drop really any weight until the last twenty four hours. You'd, you'd want to be in position from a, from a camp standpoint to where the last twenty four hours and the last, you know, really it's two, four, five hours, you, you would drop as much as you needed to, but you wouldn't spend the entire fight week trying to drop weight for God's sakes. So that's, you know, it's a mistake people made, but they hope, some of them learned from it, some of them didn't.

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  I've never had to do it, thankfully, but I've watched a bunch of different documentaries. There's this famous clip that keeps on getting reshared on UFC of, from one of the Ultimate Fighter seasons where this guy's so, so far over and he's trying to escape and his two coaches have got their foot on the edge of the sauna. He's like trying to open the sauna door and they're like, no, no, no, no, five more minutes, five more minutes.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:41Chris Williamson?

  And then he's got his sweatsuit on and they, he's like, just crawls out onto the floor and they peel his sweatsuit off him. There was a BBC documentary about a, a Liverpool MMA fighter, watching him in his hotel room, hot bath, covered in towels, uh, putting ice in his mouth and then spitting it back out, like every trick in the book. And he just looked, it was just so much suffering. And you think, right, okay, and now you need to get yourself from that place into a position where everything is firing. You've got absolutely everything figured out and you can step into the ring with someone who's trying to take your head off.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Like I said, you want, you want to go, basically weigh-ins would be, you know, the, the Friday morning and then you're fighting sometimes Saturday afternoon. I mean, you, sometimes you don't have less than twenty four hours. You know, like you said, you go from the, the, the doorsteps of death to trying to fight for your life and, you know, in a day. So it's, it's, it's stupid, honestly. Like I said, the, the thing is, You have to, you're not gonna have that big of a weight advantage. Like, let's say you cut five pounds or eight pounds or whatever, more than the extra guy. Like, those five or eight pounds are rarely the difference in the fight. It's, it's, it's about so much more than this, this moderate weight advantage you think you can get over your opponent by cutting more weight than he did. Like, it, you know, it's, it's rarely going to be the difference maker compared to, the difference maker is the conditioning, is the, you know, when, what your state is and you actually can

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  get in the octagon. So I think people were, uh, kinda stupid, honestly, for, for taking that approach for so long and thinking that, you know, this, this one weight class difference or this five pound weight advantage or whatever was the deciding factor in the fight of their career when there's so many other things that, that go into that, uh, that process that are ultimately driving success far more than that. So, I mean, I, I'm not, I'm not betting, man, but if I was, I had, I watched all these guys over the years, I could pretty much tell you who was gonna lose the fight and who was at halftime because you'd see them in the sauna practically dead on Tuesday. You know, you gotta, kinda figure it out who was probably not gonna win their fight. You'd, you'd see it, you know, at the hotels, uh, before the fight.

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I don't know, man. Given the choice between being 5% heavier in the ring or 20% more positive and 10% mentally sharper, I'll, I'll take the, having a little bit less mass, but feeling great and firing on all cylinders.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yep. It was just this mistaken thought that bigger was always gonna be heavier, was always gonna be the advantage. And really, it's not always the case. I mean, there's fights that were won and lost because of it, but there are more fights lost because of lack of conditioning, poor weight cutting and all the other things that come along with that mentality. So I just think it was, you know, it's, again, this, this, this unfortunate idea that pain and suffering somehow leads to success. So we kind of have built in somehow that people thought like, oh, if I can drop more weight than the other guy, I can, I can have an advantage or I'm gonna beat him because I'm gonna be five pounds heavier on fight day. But it's just not that. Not that simple, especially as people's games have evolved. I mean, it's the the skill side and the conditioning side and the mental side are driving this, not the five pounds that you might have on your opponent or the six pounds or whatever.

• 1:16:38Chris Williamson?

  It's a a common thread that I know I've heard you talk about it a lot to do with our belief that more is always going to be better, that bidding ourselves in the gym is going to lead to more results. And we're seeing that as well, as you say, this extremist mentality, humans are absolutists. And it's the same as well when you find your new racquetball, BJJ, whatever the next physical obsession is, you just go all in. And finding that messy middle is precisely where it works, right?

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so there's a there's an experiment done, I don't know, decades ago with these these rats. And they repeated some other animals, but they basically would take these electrodes and they would kind of tap into the dopamine centers in the brain and they could press the press the little lever, a little button. And that button would basically send a direct current into dopamine response centers and you get this dopamine spike. And they could self-control this, right? So they could press this button, this little lever, and it would just constantly send the spike into the dopamine centers and and cause this elevation. And what they basically found is that these little bastards would lever press to their own detriment, to the point they would stop taking care, they'd stop eating.

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  They would stop taking care of their young. They would basically stop doing everything, like they would just sit there and lever press and lever press and lever press and lever press and lever press until they would fall apart and die, more or less. So basically, if you look at what we're doing, I mean, that's kind of these these sports and these extreme things, they they kind of give us that little dopamine spike of like, oh shit, it's novelty, it's it's it's this this whole thing driven around how our dopamine system rewards things. And so we're just seeing this this constant mentally stimulating dopamine spike reward from from these different things. But again, we're doing it to our own detriment and we're doing it to our own long term, you know, sacrifice and and we're going to pay the price. But again, these these mice and these other, they did monkeys, they actually did human beings, for God's sakes.

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  And this study would never be approved today. But basically, they would find that if you if you tap directly into that dopamine center and you gave somebody a button that you could press to get there, they would do nothing else. Like I said, they would stop nursing their young, they would stop eating, they would stop doing anything. They would just sit there and lever press themselves into oblivion to get that dopamine spike. And I think in a lot of ways, that's what we do as human beings. We we get we get so focused on whatever it is that causes that little dopamine hit, you know, whether it's a high intensity workout, or it's getting in the gym and sparring or doing something, or it's, you know, racquetball in some stupid sense. I mean, we just kind of get these little these little hits.

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  And we just keep pressing that damn lever until sooner or later, we we break and something pays the price for it. But it's just kind of, it's interesting how we're we're wired to seek reward. Like, that's gambling. It's you think about gambling. So why do we? Why do we gamble? Because the uncertainty of gambling and the potential to win makes us get put in those dollars and pull that lever, even though people are smart enough to realize you're gonna lose. I mean, have you been to have you been to Vegas? Right? People have spent billions of dollars playing games. They know they're going to lose. And it's the same reason. It's it's how our dopamine system was wired to seek reward and to seek these things and to continue to do things at the immediate idea of reward rather than the long term idea of reward. So

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  I, you know, it's a it's just kind of a byproduct of biology. And the only thing we can really do is be aware of it and try to protect ourselves against it and try to shift our thinking a bit towards longer term goals and decision making. But it's it's hard. It just kind of goes against human nature. And, you know, we're we're meant to we're meant to be here for a certain amount of time and die. So it's we're not really meant to be here and definitely we're meant to be here for, you know, a certain number of years before we're all gone. And we just kind of live in the moment half the time and and pass our genes on to next generation and the whole process repeats.

• 1:20:23Chris Williamson?

  Totally right, man. I had a guy called Andrew Steele. He's written a book about longevity and the cure for aging. Getting older in an ageless society and this longevity, whether it be through transhumanism, whether it's enhanced through drugs, whether it's uploading our brains into computers, it's like a fascinating ethical discussion to think about what a life would be like, whether it's it's infinite. It's it's got no no end to it. And until that happens, people need to stop fucking the shit up by doing stupid workouts. Look, Joe, man, I've I've loved today. It's been really, really cool. It's everything that I wanted to get out about HRV. If people want to find out more or follow you online, why should they go?

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so eightweeksout.com the main site, just the number eight and then weeksout.com. You can jump on the old Instagram, just Coach Joel Jamieson, J A M I E S O N and post on, post everything in IG and Facebook. You can find me on there, but eightweeksout's the main site and other than that IG is probably the two best places to find me. Perfect. Thank you, man. Awesome. Good talking to you.

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