 So welcome to today's podcast you're in for a little bit of a treat where we have got for us an amazing guest Dr Jay Wiles from HANU Health who is an expert in HRV which stands for heart rate variability. He is one of the like the leading guy literally in the world for this was almost amazed that we managed to get him to come onto the podcast. He's going to dive into everything about like why heart rate variability that those of you that have got like an all ring or a loop band or like a some of the Garmin watches there'll be a technology that you've got that is get data for you about your recovery about your how your nervous system is performing. He's going to explain in great detail as to like what that is all about and then how you can use it and get the most out of it. And ultimately one of the things I love about Jay is that he's not only at the depth of understanding that he's got in this area but is also the fact that he is encouraging us to not become reliant on these things but actually only just use these things to be able to understand yourself better so that ultimately like you you we want to get to a place where we understand our bodies this is a tool to help us but ultimately you're listening getting better at listening to body and being able to listen to what your body is telling you in terms of like what your levels of stress like what the what your recovery is like from training what your sleep like and not having to rely on these things but just using these things as tools to help us understand ourselves better so we can live healthier happier lives. One thing is to say Timbo he's on holiday so actually it's just Jaco doing the interview now as exciting and also scary at the same time that is. Obviously I'm talking to a doctor so I try to do my best job at not being too stupid cracked the odd joke made him laugh a couple of times but kept it was obviously a serious conversation so I kept I kept trying to be serious and hopefully you know if you if you if like me you're missing Timbo within being away on holiday do not fear he is back next week with me on the podcast and we can look forward to that but in the meantime we get to look forward to Jay Wells on the the movement of the movement strength and play podcast by the school of calisthenics crikey I nearly butchered that didn't I so sit back relax and enjoy this week's podcast listen players you're listening to the movement strength and play podcast by the school of calisthenics here are your hosts Tim and Jaco so Jay welcome to the movement strength and play podcast excited to have you on and speak to you about heart rate variability and your expertise in that yeah man so good to be here we're gonna dive into some fun topics I'm sure yes we've got obviously the the listeners are avid you know fitness enthusiasts and you know we've introduced them or we've been we've been lucky to get introduced to so many great guests over the over 200 episodes now and you know one area that we haven't gone too far into really is trying to understand what sort of like technology and things that we have available to us now that can help us understand our bodies better so that we can recover better so we can be more resilient so we can make our training more optimized for us and you know you're you're an expert in that field and so it'd be really nice just for there's probably one listener so one one stupid listener that hasn't heard of Dr Jay was born so who just just for that one person a little bit of background to you how did you get you know how did you get into this heart rate variability stuff and and a little bit of a 101 on what actually is HRV sort of a base level and we can sort of take it take a bit of a deeper dive from there yeah indeed so you know my background is as a clinical health psychologist so my my doctoral degree is in clinical psychology and then I specialized in the field of health psychology which is really looking at the intersection between mental health and physical well-being because we know there's a bi-directional relationship right there right you know kind of what's happening with our psychological processes cognitive processes is going to affect our physiology our body and then vice versa what's going on in the body can send a direct signal and affect kind of our psychological and cognitive processes so I was really interested in initially in studying kind of human health and optimization performance especially for individuals who are battling with type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease and chronic pain and utilizing more like integrative strategies for helping with kind of those those related issues and so I when I was doing my residency which was in Richmond Virginia for the Department of Veteran Affairs I was working with in the medical center I was actually exposed on one of my rounds I was actually you know one of my rotations was in an integrative pain center and in the integrative pain center was really utilized for veterans who were kind of sick and tired on being on opioid based medications you know kind of you know there's a huge obviously an opioid epidemic but the problem is within the VA system it's even worse so veterans are pretty bad when it comes to the opioid crisis one of the things that we saw is just that these these veterans were sick and tired of it they were like lived with this now for you know decades among decades and wanted to find new and unique and effective and scientifically backed approaches for chronic pain and within this clinic it was awesome because they they tried to titrate these individuals off of opioid medications through the use of integrated therapies like things like tai chi and yoga and qi gong acupuncture mindfulness meditation you know manipulative therapies all of these things but the other one that was utilized which I haven't mentioned was something called biofeedback and more in particular was heart rate variability biofeedback and that was actually my first exposure to heart rate variability and the utilization of biometrics in order to measure the human stress response and then also to the interconnection that hrb has with chronic pain but the unique thing was is that I saw these veterans who are engaging in heart rate variability training which is really kind of to me just looked like a high-tech way of kind of enhancing breathing or breath work I saw them getting better they were reducing kind of their subjective pain experience they were coping better with it they were becoming more resilient to their pain and then yes they were coming off of opioid based medications and we actually published a study on this when I was there as a resident and presented this at numerous medical conferences where we saw that these individuals were seeing significant reductions in stress when heart rate variability was being increased so they would stress less and then heart rate variability would be kind of like that objective measure that they would see that would coincide and again that kind of just kick started me I was like okay this is fascinating like I like I never would have thought because you know I was conventionally trained as a psychologist I would have never thought that kind of this type of integrative approach would be you know something that could effectively work for reducing pain and that was just the thing that kind of curtailed me into kind of going into research in the field of heart rate variability in the field of psychophysiology and the field of human stress response and you know I kind of just to develop more or less a niche in that I've learned a lot about a little and that's life changing for those that's life changing for those people right like that must be incredible to be part of that experience like how's it how's that sort of how's that make you feel when well you know yeah it's one of those things that it's like for me like there's especially with the veteran population these are a lot of you know obviously predominantly males rough and tough individuals who like are coming to this integrative pain center and like a little bit of them will kind of like listen I have like exercised all my resources and now like I'm going to try this you know yoga and tai chi crap I'm going to try this you know biofeedback crap and they like they talk like that you know like I don't believe in this woo woo stuff but and then they do it right right and then they they engage in it and they're like oh my goodness like I cannot believe this like this is incredible and then they get sold on it and then we see kind of how that impacts their overall life so yes they reduce their pain experience but they increase you know their ability to engage in relationships to exercise to kind of do all these things that they really have been missing out on because chronic pain has held them back man it is just awesome to see it and it's kind of why I've you know kind of you know preaching the gospel now of heart rate variability training heart rate variability biofeedback and breath work because I have just seen it you know not just make like these marginal small changes but really been life changing for these individuals so yeah man it's incredible man you're doing great you're doing yeah amazing amazing work and like you know there'll be some really good stuff that's going to come in in the conversation as we go on further for the listeners to be able to go okay I can take some of this to help improve my my training and you know that's obviously important for those of us that really really passionate about training and exercise and how that makes us feel and how that improves our lives but you know the what you're doing like why doesn't that is obviously you know it's obviously amazing work and valuable within like yeah within within people's lives so like credit to you for that there is so there's like a couple of um terms there that like we're talking about like HRV or heart rate variability and biofeedback and so for you know for late in layman's terms you know I came across probably this and you um initially from um some work you've done with Patrick McKeon at the oxygen advantage and it was like okay this is uh I've never been like I've I've got a garment now to mainly for my um to track my I want to know my pace when I'm running for doing stupid marathons and things like that um but I've never been like mad into into um into tech but sort of coming across what you've uh what you've what you've been doing has made me get obviously more uh interesting I've converted you look at it yeah yeah so um for for me like you know me as a layman um I put myself in that category as I go but we're going HRV it stands for heart rate variability so it's something to do with our our heart rate and very big like how it's changing like because some people will have woot bands or an oar ring or they've got an apple watch and they've got some markers or things but it's like what actually is it and do I want my heart rate to be like the same all the time or like how how is that what what to be and then when you say biofeedback markers like what what are we actually talking about yeah yeah it's it's always great to clarify kind of off the bat what heart rate variability is and then how it relates to kind of our discussion because you know it is so accessible to everybody now right I mean if you get an oar ring or an apple watch or Fitbit or you know a whoop strap or you know whatever tech that's out there right now almost every single one of them at least has one parameter of heart rate variability so a lot of people who have let's say like oar ring they got it for their sleep you know they'll wake up each morning and they'll see that you know their readiness score a huge characteristic of that readiness score that's built into the algorithm is the heart rate variability component and it's the same thing with whoop so a lot of people are becoming familiar with seeing that term but they're still like I have no idea what it is or if they may have a basic understanding or maybe their understanding is a little bit tainted because there's a lot of unfortunate misinformation out there on heart rate variability which you know there's misinformation just about on everything but heart rate variability is one of them but I'll put it in kind of its most technical terms and explain it that way and then I'll explain it and I think a very easy to understand layman's kind of terminology or even analogy so when we think about heart rate variability it as it is as simple as it sounds it's the variability within your heart rate so that is the pure kind of like nitty gritty scientific like easy explanation that probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people so like do you want variance in your heart rate do you not let me explain so most people know what heart rate is I mean everybody probably nowadays has some accessibility to detect your heart rate you can do it one or two ways you can have technology which is you know really fast and simple easy way to do it you also can take your two fingers place them on the carotid artery of your neck and for 10 seconds so that's the classic way everybody has access to heart rate I mean you can put it on the carotid artery count for how many beats happen in a matter of 10 seconds you start a stop watch you times that by six because there's 60 seconds and within a minute and you've got your average heart rate and if you haven't got one of that if you haven't got one you're dead then yeah you're either a vampire and I want to meet you come on my podcast to test this right exactly so so you know that everybody kind of knows how to do that and everybody kind of conceptually understands what heart rate is right so I'll just use easy math well if your heart rate is at 60 right now if your average heart rate is at 60 then that means that for every second because there's again 60 seconds in a minute every one second that means you're on average your heart is beating now to the everyday individual intuitively you would think that okay so the last minute that means that my heart rate beat how I had I had a kind of a time frame in between of one second each time that it beat and what that would actually equate to in terms of heart rate variability is a heart rate variability of zero that means that the heart paced itself the entire 60 seconds at one second you know per or one beat per second that would not be the way it works that would actually be indicative of someone who's in really serious trouble and you wouldn't necessarily see that with someone with a low of heart rate is 60 so what we have to think about heart rate in terms and heart rate variability in terms of what comes before and what comes after each heartbeat so what comes before each heartbeat is a heartbeat and what comes after each heartbeat is another heartbeat the space in between is time and the time varies across the respiratory cycle so when we breathe in and we breathe out the heart rate actually goes up and then it comes down and I'll explain kind of the physiology behind that but that means that the heart is going to vary and it's going to go up to let's say you know up to 70 from 50 let's start at 50 goes up to 70 and then when you breathe out it goes down to 50 that change that that duration of change and that frequency of change is what we refer to as variance in heartbeat or the variance in between the interbeat intervals of the heart and is makes up the score of heart rate variability now and then that's kind of the explanation as to what heart rate variability is but you know what does it actually mean how do we interpret it is a whole another story the best way to think about heart rate variability is that it is the single greatest non-invasive proxy that we have for the human stress response and for the nervous system we know that in order for the nervous system to be resilient which is very much interconnected with our cardiorespiratory health that we want to see a heart and lungs that are extremely adaptive because we have trillions of processes that are occurring in the body at any given moment which means that the heart the lungs and every other part of our body has to respond accordingly to all trillions of processes that are occurring in the body at any moment so basically when a heart starts to regulate itself like a metronome that's a warning sign when heart rate variability goes down that's a warning sign it's saying something is taxing me so much that I have to create some sense of a lack of chaos and pace myself so it's a great way of thinking about it is that the heart is never to act like a metronome unless it is truly trying to save you for something or provide itself as a warning sign one thing that's really interesting jacko is that we see from research in the cardiovascular realm is that when someone is about to have a myocardial infarction which is you know scientific term for a heart attack is that their heart will pace itself like a metronome and hrv will drop almost to zero it will drop that close and that is like the telltale sign so if I for instance if I were to put somebody onto a device and we were looking at them from a clinical grade let's say each ecg and I was looking at their heart rate and I saw that type of pacing in their heart an increased heart rate and then also to a pacing that was almost limited to you know zero I would be very concerned and I would have them do a full workup and make sure that they're not about to have a heart attack I mean that's never happened to me but I am trained enough to know kind of when to make that referral so I don't want to derail us too much but yeah that's what heart rate variability is because I guess like you say like almost when before you've before you've thought about it or actually been talked about it or understood it if someone was like you say that that that analogy of or that example of 60 beats per minute you just think well it's just being every so and you and you you'd almost think that the more regular it is that that would be healthier is is absolutely is that what is that what like doctors and stuff thought before we could actually measure it was it was this quite a bit of a like a whoa we didn't realize that or is it something that people theorize and under thought they knew it but we just didn't have a way of measuring it before yeah you know like with every great scientific discovery and has to start with a hypothesis so you know back what the the earliest writing scientifically that we have is that we we knew that there was a process that occurred across the respiratory cycle that changed heart rate pretty significantly we didn't have it termed as heart rate variability yet because we didn't have ecgs that were able to measure kind of the changes the finite changes because we're talking about milliseconds here you know we're not talking about like seconds minutes of change we're talking about milliseconds of change that make a huge difference and we can you know dive a little more into the weeds but you know what we actually knew and and when one of the primary influencers of heart rate variability or what makes up that metric what mediates that metric is a process in the body called a respiratory sinus arrhythmia or rsa and that is goes back to kind of like the speeding and slowing down of the heart rate across the respiratory cycle so the inhale the heart is always going to speed up where it should and then as you exhale it's going to slow down and as you kind of widen and slow down the respiration rate especially your exhalations we actually see that from baseline your heart rate will start to go lower and that will again increase and influence heart rate variability so i think that they knew about you know the idea of respiratory sinus arrhythmia kind of from the get go but they didn't term this they didn't term heart rate variability as kind of a biometric until later on when the ecg was invented and then we started to see how these finite changes i used to remember but i don't even remember when the ecg was created but it's been it's been a while now it's it's it's it's been within the century not longer but um yeah i don't have that data yeah that's right um cool okay so um and then when you talk about your biometrics what what do you mean by that too yeah so biometrics is any type of metric that's assessing biology so that's gathering any type of data whether it's you know on the surface of the skin so externally looking at something that's going on internally or or capturing something internally um so you know the the most common method like when i refer to biometrics especially within when i'm talking about heart rate variability i'm talking about like wearable technology for the most part because most people aren't walking around with an ecg on or you know with you know some type of medical grade equipment unless they're in a research project funny enough i have you can't see it yeah i have an ecg on right now but that's because i'm a part of of doing some research i've also got some ppg sensors on as well i have three ppg sensors on my hand yeah and then uh and then an ecg strapped my chest right now but that's because again like i'm running a company we're doing a lot of research and that's just like a part of my part of like a road you're like you're like uh you're like robo cop indeed i normally don't have all this stuff on like i try to keep like i'm a really i'm a tech guy that doesn't utilize a lot of tech so i respect a lot of technology but like i don't like to engage too much with tech because it can just be way too time consuming and then you know you can get a little bit orthorexic when you look at too much data like basically like it can scare you off so much that you engage in way too much um and give away too much time and effort so yeah it's sorry sorry to uh you know derail us on that but yeah biometrics is really just kind of capturing data and most people are going to um uh feel or i guess with experience biometrics either through wearables or like another way of getting a biometric is like when you go to your doctor's office they throw the cuff onto your arm and they check your blood pressure that's a biometric as well yeah cool okay so then in terms of um in terms of heart rate variability some people will have devices we'll talk about them about them a bit later some people have devices some people won't have devices want to try and give some advice for for all of us but um just taking that like and we've got that a better understanding now of what heart rate variability is um how is that actually going to how do you use it with yourself with the clients with people how do you use it to help us actually improve um our understanding of like our training and or even just like wider in terms of our health as i think i came across something where there was it was suggesting maybe like in the early uses of heart rate variability it was monitoring babies to give a bit of an idea of their overall overall health did it did it start in a process of just looking at health and we've the sporting world has like taken it to use it for other things that is that is that the sort of case yeah yeah absolutely so where it came from initially um and and really kind of the the bulk amount of the research even today when you look at and if you go to pub med and you search or hrb studies more recently i would say it's becoming more on the mental health slash you know performance um and and sports optimization like that's that's kind of where a lot of the research has gone but the original research in heart rate variability goes back to um cardiorespiratory fitness and especially cardiovascular fitness and and is used uh still as the gold standard um for looking at overall heart health especially after someone has had a heart attack it's actually the greatest predicting biometric that we have for future heart attacks now i don't want people to get confused with that because then they'll try to start make interpretations based off their oro ring um the the metric that is used or the gold standard for cardiovascular respiratory fitness um and and detecting future or potential myocardial infarction or heart attack is a metric called sdnn which is a is a great longer term 24 hour measurement that's really captured by ecg or ekg so um that's that's again like the category one would be like you know cardiovascular health category two um would be where the most research kind of has been performed would be in the stress resiliency anxiety depression more or less the mental health field and i can talk about kind of its use there and then the third one that i can talk about its use would be in the sports performance and health optimization category which i would say probably has the most limited research but plenty of research there so let me talk about like why people would actually utilize this metric kind of how because i'm all about like brass tacks like like the science is great like talking about the psychophysiology is great but how could we practically use this is is the most important thing so again let's go back to that operational definition that we have of heart rate variability is that this is a the single greatest non-invasive proxy that we have for the human nervous system and for the human stress response so what does that actually mean in practicality well the first thing to really remember is that you need to have kind of a captured baseline in order to know where you start and so when if someone were to peruse kind of the literature someone went to peruse like the different biometrics of heart rate variability like there are a ton of them like there are a lot of metrics that are heart rate variability so heart rate variability is not just a singular score it can be an aggregate of scores but it also too can be just different metrics so people may have heard of like the one i mentioned just a second ago sdnn may have heard of rmssd pnn 50 low frequency high frequency bands very low frequency bands like there's all these different metrics um that mean different things and give us different interpretations of what's going on within our nervous system now i think one good clarification before i get in into the practical use of heart rate variability is just to give a really really quick primer on what i mean by nervous system and what i mean by a proxy of the nervous system so if anybody is not familiar um we have um kind of two predominant branches of our nervous system so we have the central nervous system which is our uh which is our brain and spinal cord and then from kind of all the nerve endings they innovate out to what's called our peripheral nervous system and one of the branches of our peripheral nervous system which is where we kind of hang out in in the hrv realm is the autonomic nervous system autonomic is is is synonymous with automatic it are there these physiological processes that occur without us having to think about it so when you think about that you think about kind of like what's going on in your intestines and your gut what's going on with your heart what's going on with your lungs you don't have to think about your heart beating you have to think about breathing you're going to naturally do that however what we do know is that we can influence kind of our nervous system by taking control of our heart by taking control over our lungs by taking control over kind of the influence of all the nerve endings that innovate our gut and you know again we can parse those out here in just a minute but I like to just kind of like talk about the two branches that make up this autonomic nervous system that's our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system when we think about sympathetic nervous system that's our fight or flight response that's kind of like the gas pedal that's kind of when we're ready to utilize energy to either fight or flee whatever's in front of us or just to perform actually for athletes we want to engage that side of our nervous system it's not to be demonized it is the thing that is going to save your life if the mountain line jumps out at you you know on a hike like you need that sympathetic nervous system because otherwise you should be like yeah I'm good to go or like you know you're walking across you know the highway and you're like I don't care cars are flying you know 90 miles an hour like I'm okay like you need something that's going to inhibit you but then also too something that is going to help you to utilize energy when needed and then that yeah and then kind of on the the opposite side of the spectrum even though I would say it is absolutely a spectrum would be your parasympathetic nervous system you can think of parachute it helps to bring you down it's all about conservation of energy it's your relaxation response it's been referred to as the rest and digest response and these two they're not working competently with one another it's not like a seesaw they actually can be engaged at the same time I like to think of this as two-footed driving there's a guy's named Dr. Ron Garbo who created kind of this concept of two-footed driving very similar to like Formula One racing so in Formula One racing like if you've got the gas pedal down and you're hitting a curve you don't relinquish the gas pedal and then press the brake you keep the gas pedal down you may relinquish it a little bit and then pull the brake and then you drift through the curve so around the around the corner or corner turn so our nervous system works very similar to that as in we can engage the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system at the same time kind of separately or modulate them to back and forth now the intent especially if somebody is experiencing a significant amount of stress if they're experiencing a kind of chronic anxiety is that that sympathetic nervous system is probably likely turned on too often and then the parasympathetic nervous system what we call the vagal break which is referring to our tenth cranial nerve or vagus nerve is probably not being activated nearly as efficiently as it should now again when you think about someone who is encountering a stress response when someone is really stressed or when they're really anxious again it may make sense for them to have their sympathetic nervous system on in order to kind of help get them through that scenario it can help us perform again we don't want to demonize it the problem is is in that modern day society it's not like we turn on kind of you know the the sympathetic branch and then just directly turn it off it's like we have all these compounding things that cause it to be on all the time and then when we try to engage the parasympathetic break it's just not listening like it's not very effective and a very efficient so what HRV biofeedback is and we talked about this is just a second ago but I want to kind of make the practical you know position for it it's all about teaching you better control of relinquishing the control that the gas pedal has the sympathetic nervous system and engaging the break and the way that we do that is through over time we increase kind of your resiliency to stress predominantly through changing respiration through changing breath work and we utilize HRV as the objective measurement to see whether or not we have truly made physiological change because when someone's stressed and the gas pedals down HRV is going to be lower and then when someone engages the break and relinquishes control of the gas pedal HRV is going to go up that's just data that's just information what we want to see it coincide with is someone saying I actually feel subjectively less stressed I feel less anxious it's because I tell people all the time like I truly do not care like if you make all these significant changes in your HRV it's great like from a physiological perspective that's really good for the system but if you're still feeling like really subjectively stressed then there's some level of disconnect and there's a lot of room for growth there so I'm sorry Jaco I've been talking way too long but I wanted to kind of clear clarify that side no no no that's really really really helpful um so in terms of um things that affect and we've already you've already touched on like a few things but if we're thinking about um people wanting to like we're on board I'm like okay I need to um I want to improve my heart rate variability it immediately makes me think of like two things it's like what are the things that are going to help improve it the most but then equally what are the things that are actually damaging to it like my diet maybe or like what things can I make sure that I avoid doing and what things do I actually need to spend more time doing what are some of those things for people yeah it's such a holistic question and and because there are so many variables that are at play uh one thing to clarify off the bat because I get this question so often is that you know people will see myself um or others post like my you know readiness score whatever my heart rate variability score like on social media and then they'll reach out and be like what like I see that your HRV is like you know a 140 or a 150 and I'm waking up at mine's a 20 like am I about to die and I always and I always have to clarify them I listen listen when it comes down to baseline HRV as it stands right now from a nervous system resiliency stress resiliency and human optimization and performance there is no research right now that says we have any reason to provide a normative comparison or in other words and non scientific talk that we have any reason to compare to others within our age you know same sex like we we just don't have there there's no research for out there for it we are all about comparing to our baseline up or down significant changes in in either direction that's really going to be the focus here so when we start to examine the how different factors or variables affect HRV know that we're not trying to get everybody to a certain HRV of 100 or 120 whatever it may be no we're trying to increase your ability to modulate HRV or control the parasympathetic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system at will with volition like that's the key component here is not like trying to raise the score it's trying to raise the score at will but really again what are we talking about we're talking about control of the nervous system that's the key component but back to your question there's so many variables that that we need to look out here for so we have to remember too that if we're talking about heart rate variability being one of the key proxies for nervous system functioning then anything that affects nervous system functioning for good or for bad is going to affect that metric of heart rate variability so you know you mentioned one thing one key component here because I see this in different pillars but one of the key pillars is nutrition so what are we putting into our bodies and one of the things that we know from literature is that highly inflammatory foods especially if they're highly inflaming the nervous system we're going to significantly impact and impair heart rate variability and again more specifically your ability to control your nervous system and hence your stress response so what does that look like that looks like highly processed foods that are really high and overly kind of confounded sugar highly processed foods that are rich in like rancid vegetable oils and high linoleic acid all of these things that we know can cause significant damage to the epithelial walls of cells which would again rancid oils high you know inflammatory sugars highly processed foods in general just overeating also in general all of these things can significantly influence and impact HRB and we've seen people that have made all the changes in the world to their overall ability to engage in breathwork to engage in meditation all of these kind of more stress resiliency practices they're including exercise which I'll get to in a second they're doing all these great things but they don't really make a lot of changes in their nutrition they make that change and that variable is kind of the key component to where we start to see kind of that ability to control the nervous system go up because one of the things that you have to remember is that if we're receiving a highly inflammatory signal by what we're putting in our body through food then our nervous system is going to respond accordingly this is a foreign invader this is something that is not supposed to be here and so therefore like turn on the stress response the body's getting damaged like it's getting roughed up so your stress response is needed in order to activate the immune system so that then therefore it can repair so I am always kind of like keen on like making sure that people are engaging in at least a more or less like I don't you know everybody responds differently to food so you know I don't care if it's you know ketogenic you know carnivore low carb you know vegan high carb you know vegetarian whatever your body responds to like that's that's what I'm a proponent of but more or less I'm a proponent of Whole Foods diets and reducing kind of like highly refined sugars and then also to like you know I think that the literature is pretty like I won't say it's clear clear but I would say that you know I could argue that you know a reduced or at least compared to a standard American diet from which over here in America we I mean it is standard is a really highly processed carb diet which is to way too many carbohydrates and you know we see that with you know a lot of weight gain and you know metabolic conditions that that happen here it's worldwide but you know specifically here in the in the U.S. yeah so exercise is a big one the the other big one that I mentioned sorry that's the exercise that's going through nutrition is a big one exercise is the next one and I would say that other than breath work and meditation and biofeedback that we probably see the most literature for changes in the nervous system and overall health and well-being with exercise and so a lot of people ask me so what does that mean so that should I engage in you know high intensity interval training you know zone 2 training you know weight resistance training and I would say like probably all of them and mix them up and then assess kind of again how they affect you you know one thing to remember from a sports performance perspective is that the intent of exercise is to increase stress it's to it's to utilize exercise as a means of hormesis or hormetic stress it's stress that helps to build better resiliency so it is you should expect that if you're engaging in hardcore workouts that initially and maybe even 24 to 48 hours after hardcore workout you may see heart rate variability drop it's not a bad thing it's just again a warning sign to say the body has taken a beating but when it builds back and it builds resiliency then we again we see these numbers start to strengthen especially when we are engaging in you know really just high quality workouts and not doing a lot of overreaching and over training and I know that's that can be really hard for some like high performance athletes who are doing like long endurance type training you know they're running ultras they're running you know frequent marathons is that it's taxing on the body it is just really taxing so you have to balance that you know with other things in life because some things got to give sometimes like some people like they're all about like endurance training and running ultras and I'm cool with that they just have to realize too that it's really taxing on the body and it may equate to a little bit less resilience in nervous system functioning and the last two that I'll hit on real quickly would be oh can I can I just make a point just something on that I think that that's for a lot of people whether they're like I used to play professional rugby whether you are like a professional athlete or whether you were amateur but if we're just like really engaged in our training and really passionate about it really enjoy it one of the biggest challenges not for everyone but for a lot of people can be that they we just keep that the the gas pedal on too much and having a marker like hey this is where I would see for someone like myself heart rate variability being very useful to be able to go like actually Jaco your system whether you like it or not whether you want to train today or not your system this marker is telling us that you are already like a susceptibility to stress do do we really want to then do a really hard training session and add more stress on top of that or actually can we use this to go no today is going to be a bit more of a recovery day we're going to do we're going to do some lower level exercise or whatever this that you're there so that then you can do then better training like the next day or whenever those whenever those things have changed because I found very interestingly on my I'm trying to show whether you can see those are watching on YouTube but the actual yeah yeah the the garment I've got it's like not an expensive one or anything but there's a there's a body battery which is out of 100 and like every I don't always wear I I don't wear the the the stuff a lot I just use it for really when I was running sure when I did my when I did my marathon like we're in we turn our Wi-Fi off at night we're that type of family is it Jackson you too so rather than having tech on whilst I'm trying to sleep I'd take it off but the interesting whenever I'm like on holiday or a weekend I'm not thinking about work or anything like that at all the stress number is zero like it's it's fairly good at all but the body battery would always seem to be 100 at the start of the day and I was like well what even is that is it really it's a bit of a crack marker and the Eve I did my marathon a couple of weeks ago on the that was on the Saturday Saturday night I felt absolutely dead Sunday morning I was like feeling pretty bad Sunday night Sunday night I was starting to feel good and Monday morning I was like I feel like I'm back I feel pretty much back to normal that's how my body how I felt I was like oh just wonder what the watch would say like I always wake up with a 100 on my body battery the body back it was at it was at 45 like so clearly there was still some recovery going on but I thought I felt okay so I would have potentially gone out and done a stupid run or something if I'd have not had some of that so I do think that's what it and out yeah go on yeah so you know with exercise what I tell people is it always comes down to kind of managing both the objective kind of experience and subjective experience because one thing too that people could get wrapped up with and I'm not I'm certainly not saying that you did this is that the data that we're being provided by these wearables can sometimes unfortunately serve as like a self-fulfilling prophecy because I've noticed that if I wake up and I feel like oh man I feel rested I feel really good to go like let's do this and then you know an hour later I check my aura ring score and I'm like oh yeah I'm at a 60 or whatever it's not looking super good then sometimes I'm like oh well yeah maybe it's right maybe aura is correct maybe I'm not you know ready for the day and I don't feel super you know energetic and I feel taxed and and so I have to always watch out for that so for me I kind of have like you know a bit of parameters that I said you know I'm a scientist so I have some objectives that I like to meet in order for me to kind of didn't kind of make let's say like informed consent as to what I'm going to do for the day so for me it comes down to when I look at my heart rate variability score from a straight for a performance perspective and sports optimization perspective is I'll look to say okay from my baseline I'll use a really simple you know numbers for everybody let's say my baseline is 100 I'm looking for two different parameters am I up or below within 20% or am I up or below within 40% and what I say is if I wake up and let's say again my baseline is 100 and I wake up and mine is you know 80 or 78 79 for heart rate variability that's the rms sd value which is the best short-term measurement that's used in like aura and whoop and a lot of other devices then I'll say okay that's a signal for me to be like okay like let me check in with the body let me kind of see how I feel you know not not a means like a red flag to say don't work out but you know it's saying like you know I might take it a little bit easier day maybe add some more breath work maybe more some more kind of just like slow movement throughout the day but then you know if I feel good around the gym time go hit it like I'm good to go if I see it drop by 40% then that's a pretty big red flag that means the nervous system compared to normal it's been pretty taxed and so again it doesn't necessarily say that oh I'm writing off working out but I check in normally if I've dropped 40% in my HRV I normally feel it like I wake up and I'm like oh man like I feel rough or the body sore like I just don't feel like I have a ton of energy compared to normal and then that's where I'm kind of like okay maybe that's an off day or maybe at a minimal like I'm going to get into like some light yoga moves like really focus on breath work like really focusing on activating the parasympathetic nervous system so you just have to watch out for it so always marry the subjective experience like how do you feel and then marry that with the objective data well what does the objective data say because one thing that I got locked into and again because I'm just so scientifically focused is that like initially like I was all about like whatever the data says goes like I trust the data and I do I really do trust the data because the data doesn't lie but again because there are so many confounding and competing variables that can make up heart rate variability then one thing that I always mention is that you have to marry that objective data that you get with subjective data because you don't want every day to go about and you're just kind of living the self-fulfilling prophecy where you know you're just kind of like well I'm just going to base what I do on the aura score but it can be a really good or or whoop you know I'm you know not I'm not I'm agnostic when it comes to wearables on that end but you know I really think that you just have to trust your gut instinct at sometimes as well but you know some days like it's really going to be the telltale sign like pump the brakes like you are at high risk for injury for over taxation of the nervous system for you know over training like you need to just chill like go do some yoga go do some breath work which you know again even yoga sometimes can be a little bit more taxing than than you would want on those days so you just got to be cautious and you got to know thyself it's different for everybody I think it's basically you make a really good point because otherwise we're potentially like not trusting ourselves and putting too much trust in technology and going yeah but actually who what your body is that I would believe our body is like far greater than than than anything else that man would try and actually make exactly and so not losing your trust in your own body and actually trying to engage more in feeling your own body and listening to what it's trying to say to you and use the HRV as a guide as part of that it's a silly analogy it's making me think of and it obviously this won't necessarily do it justice but I'm almost as you described thinking of people following following a sat nav in your car and actually there's people have like driven into rivers and things where it's like they just follow the sat nav no matter what and it's like but look out of the window and if there's a river there like don't drive into it you know it's like we've got it we can't just yeah don't just follow technology I think it's blindly I think it's such a great analogy because it's true like the last thing we are already like I say globally as a society we are pretty freaking mindless and it's bad like and we trust too much in technology it consumes too much of our life I utilize it as a tool as a means of proxy as kind of information and data and data alone the biggest thing that I tell people especially if you're gauging engaging in hurry variability biofeedback training if you're measuring hurry variability the biggest point of concern in my opinion is that we are utilizing it to increase our interoception to increase our ability to detect changes in the body subtle changes because I don't want people to overly overly rely on technology and this is funny because like I'm kind of like the fox guarding the henhouse in some sense I own a health technology company in the biometric space like I should be like no objective data goes like you should be really only putting your full trust in technology like if I wanted to sell devices I could do that but I don't believe that and we as a company at Hanoi we don't believe that what we believe is that we can help people to become more aware of their bodies through technology but then if the technology is removed you're better at and you're more able to sense direct changes increase that level of interoception that's what I want people to engage in not the other way around like if you use technology if you're really good at detecting change in your body and then you put on technology and you become less sensitive then I want you to like get rid of that technology like it's not helping you like the first line of defense for you should always be what you naturally innately have which is your body your ability to recognize change the problem though is is jacko is that we disconnect from that so often because we're mindless and so other so many other areas that sometimes we need a little bit of extra help and a little bit of kind of like a push to say let's reconnect to the body let's reconnect to your ability to detect change and I think that technology can be a great avenue for that but it should not be the thing that you say oh I'm going to rely on it from now on out and then only that's going to be my means of determining where I'm at from a nervous system perspective from a stress or recovery perspective like you're going to fail that way like it's not going to be good on the backside love your perspective on that and and actually and you know I'm sure everyone listen with like appreciating your your honesty about about that like it despite it being you know something that you're using and doing this like going well actually like I want you to be able to use it to be able to to be able to understand yourself better not become reliant on this thing that I or someone else is going to sell to you so let's finish off them with a talk you've mentioned about the tech side of things we need to cover that before we to finish things off around you've mentioned aura rings you mentioned a wood band I've done my wife where she works is they've got heart math yeah we've got all these different types of things some are a little bit more accessible and affordable than others what are some of the what are some of the differences or what are some of the pitfalls like I I always wonder where if my heart rate is a little bit dubious on my watch how is an earth is it pretending it can detect the changes every millisecond within it that I question sort of that and so and then you know what have you what have you got in the pipeline for for hannah health in terms of like what you bring into the space there yeah yeah it's a great question you know we have seen such an evolution in these wearable excuse me these wearable tech technologies ability to detect heart rate and then also filter that data in order to calculate heart rate variability so heart rate is relatively even with movement heart rates pretty easy to capture like we've had that technology around forever heart rate variability is actually a lot more nuanced because there are certain parts of the heart rate that we're detecting and then the time difference between one part of the heart rate and the next part of the heart rate we have to get that pretty precise because again milliseconds off makes the world of difference I mean it's it's very very sensitive so what that means is is that a lot of technology out there right now that's detecting heart rate variability is getting better at it but really more so getting better at it when people are extremely still they add no other variables like they don't regulate their breathing like they just stay as calm as can be to remove artifact which is artificial data from movement from light from electricity from all these other areas so you know I have trust in faith in pretty much every device that's out there right now and it's ability to calculate at rest basic heart rate variability metrics and that's because heart rate variability metrics are actually based on algorithms that are open source that are the same exact thing so when you calculate let's say rmssd which is one of the main values that I utilize in heart rate variability it is calculated the exact same way on aura as it is with whoop now they may collect data a little bit differently but the calculation or algorithm has to be the same that is a known open algorithm now you know again I like all these devices you know I think that one of the major pitfalls of some of these devices is they give you one singular data point they give you rmssd and they don't give you you know frequency band data they don't give you other time domain indices frequency domain or non-linear indices and all this is just scientific jargon for more data and more information but the more data and more information can actually paint the bigger picture and can paint the story I like getting into the nuances of things and so what we're creating at Hanoi Health is really an all-inclusive closed loop system for training and so we are going to be obviously and I can't say a ton ton but I'll be a little bit cryptic about it is that we are solving some of the problems that these wearables have on collecting heart rate variability data their ability to do it continuously and accurately but also provide appropriate training based on your individual biometrics and so we've put together a team of individuals who have been here for a long time doing this type of work and developing the most comprehensive scientific algorithms to accurately detect heart rate variability but then also allow an engagement of training resiliency in the nervous system so our product that we're developing is really intended for somebody who is either a biohacking health wellness optimization nerd who wants to know anything and everything about their heart rate variability metrics at any given time and then also too for the person who's just like I am freaking stressed to the max and it is inhibiting sports performance and it's inhibiting relationships like it's inhibiting my decision making like work all of those things I just need help with something that can tell me you know when am I experiencing kind of like these significant changes and shifts and nervous system and stress and then like what do I do about it like how do I close the loop because what I tell people again is that these aura rings these whoops like these other wearables they're great devices for providing biometrics and providing data but data and information stops there because it's just data it's just information it's useful in the sense that like it's it's informative but without following up and doing something about it and engaging in behavior kind of closing the loop like what good is that data it's not really it's just information like you're paying you know three four hundred bucks for a device just to tell you a little bit about your biometrics you doing something with it that makes for all the difference in the world and that's what Hanoe's trying to solve in the stress resiliency anxiety space yeah well man um you know I and I'm sure thousands of people that are very appreciative of all the work that that you've done and you are continuing to do and very excited about um what that tech is is going to be and so if like me people are excited about what that's going to be how can they how can they find more out about about you and as well as Hanoe health and and potentially the tech when it comes out yeah absolutely so you know one of the biggest things um is that those who are going to be privy um to all the information the soonest and have access and get a significant discount on our v1 um product is going to be those who are who have gone on to our wait list which is growing immensely and we're so excited and happy about it so it's Hanoe health and Hanoe is Hawaiian for breath and it's H-A-N-U that's H-A-N-U so HanoeHealth.com slash wait list or you can just go straight to our website HanoeHealth.com you can sign up learn a little bit more about there yeah it's going to look a little bit cryptic but and it will be a cryptic for a little while longer um until we are like hey we're dropping this thing um which you know we'll be at some point next year uh we don't know exactly when it's going to be but sooner rather than later obviously it's any businesses you know and then we'd love to make promises but you know it's the health tech world so sometimes kind of moved 2022 absolutely you know without a doubt and what I will say is that again like go on that list we have our podcast the HanoeHealth podcast which we are obviously we featured you on um and it's really kind of and our co-host there's Patrick McEwn you know author of oxygen advantage I'm sure most of your followers are going to know Patrick is uh he co-host all the co-host all the Q&A episodes and then we you know interview kind of more stress resiliency breath work you know heart rate variability experts people are really in that space on the podcast so you know you can you know follow us at HanoeHealth's website and on the podcast also follow us at HanoeHealth on Instagram I'm at Dr J Wiles on Instagram um and hopefully you know if you go there you'll you'll get a lot of great content and education in our field all for free obviously awesome uh we'll make sure in the show notes we'll put links into into the website into uh the podcast and into both your social media so um we'll make sure that people can if you're listening to this um or watching on YouTube then see the links in the show notes for for any of them um so other than that from for me and all of the listeners Jay massive thank you for coming uh onto the podcast and uh we look forward to to well look forward to next year when uh when the when the condom when the uh when the product drops and uh get excited to to to see what we can do with it absolutely thanks so much man for having me on again like I really just strongly encourage maybe even challenge people to go sign up on the wait list HanoeHealth.com slash wait list like when when you see what we're working on I think you will you will you will be it'll be well worth the five seconds it takes to sign up for the wait list I promise yeah awesome all right man thanks so much I appreciate it thanks for joining so there we have you hope you are far more uh educated in understanding what the wearable tech that you may or may not have is uh is actually telling you about your body and now when we're talking about heart rate variability or HRV you actually know what it is and how it can be useful for you so a huge thank you to Jay for being on the podcast and if just to encourage you like I said at the end if you uh if you've got any questions for him or if you're interested a little bit more in about in heart rate variability and some wearable tech then do check it out HanoeHealth.com for you better got links for the wait list for his product that's got and obviously listening to some of the amazing episodes that he's got on his podcast and yeah if you haven't yet given us a review on iTunes then please or wherever you listen to your podcast then we'd really love you to review the podcast and give us as many stars as you think it's appropriate if you thought today don't worry you know if you're a little bit like whoa hold on a minute Timbo wasn't on this one don't worry it's back next week so you can give us if you if you were like oh that was only four stars because or three stars because Timbo wasn't here then wait till next week next week's what we've got an absolute crackerjack next week um so uh we'll be back to we'll be Timbo will be back with this and uh you can then give us the full five stars so it helps you if you want to give us them five stars now head over we obviously you can wait but why wait just you know you know it's good unless this is a course this is the first time we listen to the podcast right well hold on a minute what's going on I thought yeah yeah it's the it is the Timbo Jacker show we're back next week and we look forward to seeing you uh or hearing oh yeah no seeing you if you if you're 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