Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Oura Ring] Science Based Solutions to Improving Sleep with Dr. Mike Nelson

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

In today's fast-paced world, optimizing our health and performance has become paramount. Sleep, recovery, and performance are integral aspects of our well-being, and understanding and improving them is crucial. This is where the Ōura Ring comes into play. This revolutionary wearable technology aims to unlock your potential by providing insights and data to enhance your sleep, recovery, and overall performance. In this article, we will delve into the goal of the Ōura Ring, explore its functionalities, and uncover how it can help you track and improve your sleep, recovery, and performance. The Goal of the Ōura Ring The Ōura Ring is designed with a clear objective in mind: to empower individuals to take charge of their well-being and unleash their full potential. By combining cutting-edge technology and scientific principles, the ring provides personalized data and insights, enabling users to make informed decisions and optimize their sleep, recovery, and performance. Understanding the Ōura Ring At first glance, the Ōura Ring may appear to be a sleek and stylish piece of jewelry. However, beneath its elegant exterior lies a multitude of sensors and advanced technology. The ring is equipped with infrared LEDs, a 3D accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a temperature sensor, all working together to collect an array of data. The ring's sensors track various physiological signals, including heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), body temperature, and movement. By analyzing these data points, the Ōura Ring provides comprehensive insights into sleep, recovery, and activity levels. Tracking and Improving Sleep One of the standout features of the Ōura Ring is its ability to monitor and analyze your sleep patterns. By measuring key metrics such as sleep duration, sleep stages (including deep sleep, REM sleep, and light sleep), and sleep latency, the ring provides valuable insights into your sleep quality. These insights help you understand how well you are sleeping and identify areas for improvement. Armed with this information, you can take proactive steps to optimize your sleep. The Ōura Ring offers personalized suggestions and recommendations, such as adjusting your bedtime routine, creating a sleep-friendly environment, or practicing relaxation techniques. By making informed changes based on the ring's insights, you can enhance the quality and duration of your sleep, waking up refreshed and rejuvenated. Enhancing Recovery Recovery plays a vital role in our overall well-being and performance. The Ōura Ring recognizes this and provides a comprehensive view of your recovery by analyzing metrics such as HRV, resting heart rate, and body temperature. HRV, in particular, is a key indicator of your body's readiness to perform at its best. With the Ōura Ring, you can monitor your recovery trends over time and identify factors that may positively or negatively affect your recovery. Armed with this knowledge, you can make informed decisions regarding your training intensity, rest days, and stress management strategies. By prioritizing recovery and utilizing the insights from the ring, you can optimize your performance and minimize the risk of burnout or overtraining. Optimizing Performance The Ōura Ring goes beyond sleep and recovery, offering features that help you optimize your performance in various aspects of life. The ring tracks your daily activity, providing data on steps taken, calories burned, and active time. This information allows you to set and monitor your fitness goals, ensuring you stay on track and make progress. Moreover, the ring's comprehensive analysis of your sleep, recovery, and activity enables you to identify patterns and correlations between these factors and your overall performance. By leveraging this knowledge, you can fine-tune your routines, optimize your training schedules, and make lifestyle   Connect with our guests: Dr. Michael T. Nelson on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Shrug family, Physiology Friday. We're back this week on Barbell Shrugged. We're hanging out with Dr. Michael T. Nelson. You guys have heard him on here many, many times. He's also been my coach. He got me super fast. He got me to run a 617 mile. That's pretty quick for an old man like me, like 41 years old, trying to keep things going. I'm pretty cool with being a sub 630. I feel good about that. And he is also the guy that does all of the sleep analysis inside rapid health optimization. We love him having him on the team. And the device that we use to track and monitor people's sleep is the Oura Ring. And in today's episode on Physiology Friday, we're going to be digging into all of the metrics that show up on your Oura Ring app, what they mean, how you can use them, the rolling

averages, and then of course, how to optimize your sleep and make those numbers get a lot better. As always, friends, make sure you head over to aratelab.com, A-R-A-T-E, lab.com. That is the signature program inside Rapid Health Optimization, and you can access all things lab, lifestyle, performance, testing, and analysis that you will be receiving when you join the RTA program. You can access all of that over at rtalab.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Strong. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dan Garner, Dr. Michael T. Nelson. I love it. I got to say your whole name today. I know.

Now that you work with us, I call you Mike. It's just not as cool on the show. We've got to be so official. Yeah, if someone said, you know Mike Nelson, I'd be like, I don't think so. Who? Who's that guy? Mike T. Nelson. I'd be like, oh, of course.

Obviously. Yeah. The T in the middle really is the best. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about Oura Rings. I know that this is hyper-specific to a single sleep band, and there's tons of them on the market. You should be able to garner tons of information about HRV, your sleep in general. We're going to go through lots of ways that you can improve it. Specifically, inside Rapid Health Optimization, we send people Oura Rings.

Mike, Dr. Mike, is our sleep specialist on the team, sleep scientist, that kind of monitors everybody's sleep in the background. So who better to get on here and talk about optimizing your sleep than Dr. Michael T. Nelson. Welcome to the show, my man. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on here. This is like number six or something like that of you on here, right? I think so. And this is the most advanced notice I've ever gotten too. 24 hours, 24 hours. Incredible. At the highest level, man, I like to start this. I've used tons of these things. I have a Fitbit on. Sorry, Fitbit, you suck at sleep. We've used Whoop. Now I have this ring on and my wife is very happy because it's on my, it looks like a wedding ring, which is nice. And I don't wear a regular wedding ring until it became functional.

So now I have a wedding ring and she's proud of me for wearing one. Why is Aura like so much more scientifically, like, I feel like we've gone through all of these iterations of what we're going to be tracking for sleep and settling on Aura. Why is Aura like, kind of like the cream of the crop of all of these sleep devices? I mean, I've compared most of them on the market, not all of them and looked at a lot of the research on it. And Aura, when they first started, they were pretty much only sleep tracking. I mean, that was kind of the main thing that they did. Even now, you know, they'll still kind of admit that, yeah, we do activity tracking and it's probably pretty decent, but it's not like the main thing. And the other part that's dramatically different, especially when you consider when they started,

which was many, many years ago, your options were they're the first company to do a ring or like I have a Garmin, you'd have to pull the data off of your wrist and the data they're pulling is via some type of light that gets emitted so it's an optic data and on the wrist you get a lot of noise in that because you're trying to look for where the vessel is and you're looking to the heart rate for example as the blood goes by it turns out on your hand the vessels are much more in a known location and it's a lot easier to get a lot more accurate data off of that spot so that's the main reason they did a ring as opposed to the wrist and then over you know the course of time many many years they've got a lot more data uh they've changed they're on like gen three now

so it's allowed them to kind of get a much better signal and much better algorithms and everything in the background to you know it's not perfect by any means but it's it's pretty decent yeah real quick before we go any further like it's easy to forget to introduce yourself since you've been on the show like like anderson six times now just just give like a high level overview of who you are and your background for anyone that doesn't actually know who you are yet. Yeah, so I did a PhD in exercise physiology, primarily in metabolic flexibility, heart rate variability from University of Minnesota. Did a master's in mechanical engineering before that. Did some work in the PhD program in biomedical engineering. And right now I'm an associate professor at the Keurig Institute.

Teach for Rocky Mountain University. Have some of my own clients under Extreme Human Performance. And then I help all these guys here over at Rapid Health. I totally introduced you as on our team and not the fact that you have an extensive career. Oh, yeah. No, it's all good. There's two main scores. You're going to buy your Oura Ring.

You're going to set all this stuff up, and then there's going to be two main things that show up every single day. And I'd love at the highest level to kind of understand these two main scores of what is readiness and what are these sleep scores. Yeah. So ironically, those are the two things

I don't use that often. But so what Oura is trying to do is they're trying to give you an aggregate score of where you're at with those two main metrics and i think at at face value it's good and do they kind of correlate to all the other actual data itself yeah i think it's good but because they're a combination of different pieces of data from it and over the course of time some of those pieces of data have actually changed and how they're weighted.

And it's not exactly known what exactly it is because it's an algorithm that runs in the background. It's good as a rough overview, but one of the complaints I'll get from people is that, oh yeah, I looked at my sleep score yesterday and it was 74, or I got like an 85 the day before, what's going on? And just looking at one aggregate score,

you can't really tell other than the directionality of, oh, the score says you got better, the score says you got worse. You kind of have to look just a little bit more under the hood to see more specifically what's going on. So what do you think is the most useful data that's coming out of an Oura ring that people should be paying attention to? Yeah, so I think I divide them into two categories, one of just kind of the raw data itself. So when I look at it, I'll look at sleep, because that's the primary thing I'm going to be

using it for. And with that, I'm going to look at total time. And that's going to say what the ring says how much total time you got for sleep. I'll look at what time they went to bed and what time they got up. Usually those are going to be pretty accurate. That's looking at an accelerometer. So it's easy to see you're lying down, you're standing up. So those endpoints are pretty good. I'll roughly look at the sleep stages,

but I'll more or less look at those compared to what they have been in the past because those can vary a lot from one person to the next and then the other part I'll look at is the heart rate during sleep and what you want to see is it'll start a little bit higher it'll kind of go down and then it'll ideally start to come up a little bit right before you wake up so for sleep those are kind of the main things I look at if you're looking at training i'll also look at heart rate variability and temperature which i'm sure we'll discuss um and the key with that is comparing it to what your data normally is right because you always get into these you know pissing matches on the internet of oh i got an hour of deep sleep last night and Bob over here got like four hours and

he's so much better than me. And it's much harder to relate your data to somebody else because, again, you're trying to aggregate stuff from the device itself. So I just generally like looking at it compared to you as an individual. And are you going in a better direction or you tend to go in a worse direction? And then the second part is, do you have any idea better direction or you tend to go in a worse direction and then the second part is do you have any idea why that is if you go with your friends and have like you know eight beer bender at night and you can't figure out why your sleep score is screwed up then you probably need a little bit more education um if you can't figure out what's going on you know then you can do a little bit more of a deep dive and and and see what's going on. Then you can do a little bit more of a deep dive and see what's going on.

Because I've had many conversations with clients that are like, oh, my deep sleep last night was so bad. And I'm like, what did you do? They're like, well, I went to bed later. I had three drinks. So we stayed up. And I'm like, well, of course it's going to be worse. Like, what did you expect?

And they're like oh okay yeah yeah yeah yeah the drink thing is a funny one to me because a lot of people to uh have drinks and the way in which they rationalize it is that they're reducing stress but the way in which you look at it from the outside in is that it's a stressor so you're actually yeah you're adding a stressor in order to reduce stress which is a very strange concept that we just kind of universally accept as a society because it helps calm us down for the moment but when you think about it it doesn't represent our goal set at all doesn't represent our vision it doesn't represent what we're after it's going to impact our sleep dude

if you are stressed then you probably should sleep well tonight so that you can recover from that stress and overcome it. So the alcohol, even as a psychological concept, is a funny one that we view a stressor's something that the aura will tell me is that your heart rate did not go down a whole lot last night. So you're going to get a bad sleep score. How is the low dip of a heart rate representative of one's sleep quality and or recovery status for the next day? Yeah, it's in my experience, it's pretty decent. So I've cross checked it by using heart rate variability on my fleet, the at home mega wave, a bunch of different systems. And stress. And if you're working with high level athletes who have good health, good aerobic base, pretty strong, the rest of their life is relatively intact. The tricky part is they can buffer a lot more stress than someone whose butt looks like a couch cushion and has got cheese little dust all over their hands. So it depends on what population you're dealing with. And that makes it harder because you can have these kind of time delays and when it shows up. But in general, I'm looking to see our rate dropping

sooner and coming back up. And exactly what you said with alcohol, usually HRV scores will be affected, right? Because it's a stressor. And then you'll see heart rate will stay elevated longer. And then it doesn't reach kind of the the same profile and the other crazy thing is i've noticed that this is massively different from one person to the next and even the type of alcohol will make a big difference and at first i didn't believe that so my my hypothesis at first was okay you know if i'm having you know tequila and whiskey or kind of darker color let's say just hard alcohol that alcohol, that would be worse than something like, quote unquote, cleaner vodka that just basically doesn't have anything else in it. And what I've noticed is, unfortunately, that wasn't really true either.

I've had clients where tequila would be better, whiskey would be worse, vodka would be better or worse. It just seems to be highly individual. Although at a high enough dose, it definitely affects everyone. Like myself, I can have like one or two drinks normally at night. Nah, no real effect. I kind of cross over two, and now I'm definitely seeing an effect. For me, type doesn't really affect it too much. But I've got some clients where red wine would just

they'd have one glass and their their heart rate would be screwed and their hrv would be screwed so it's definitely very individual and i haven't noticed any sort of general patterns other than once you you know definitely get a high enough dose it's going to impact everybody for sure i haven't noticed the difference between different types of alcohol for me but definitely like once i get beyond two drinks and the next day my hrv is way low my my rest heart rate is elevated my respiratory rate is elevated like it seems like every marker that i look at on my dashboard goes the wrong direction and not by a little bit it seems to be like a radical shift and it happens very consistently with when i drink which which is, you know, I drink maybe once, once a week at most, maybe, maybe, you know, two times a month. And when I, when I do granted, I usually, if I'm

drinking, maybe stay up a little bit later than normal. So maybe I don't get also at the same time it's, it's muddied with the fact that I'm getting a little bit less sleep. Um, but yeah, but, but my numbers are always consistently worse. Like, and I'm not, I'm not getting drunk. I'm just having a couple of drinks at dinner like on date night i can't imagine if i was actually getting drunk drunk like like college drop what my numbers would look like which i haven't done in quite some time but maybe i should do it just to get some good data you know yeah and that that's one of the more shocking things the clients that they realize june we'll get you there after the challenge is over we're in

california we'll do it together we'll post the results i'm gonna be such a lightweight i haven't drank in so long but i'm so ready the alcohol aura challenge yeah who can get the worst recovery score one thing i think that's particularly do mike is um i would assume and i actually i don't know this for sure but i would assume that the aura and the way in which they give you scores is largely dependent upon population data so although the algorithms are sophisticated it doesn't necessarily learn you over time whereas a coach, you're going to be able to like, oh, Redwine did this, but Jin didn't. Vaka did that, but this didn't. Or like high intensity interval training did this and aerobic training didn't. I think that having somebody like you, who is very knowledgeable

about this kind of thing, that adds an extra element of sophistication to someone's data set, because it's not just an algorithm that is giving you certain outputs, but it's somebody who's learning more about you in addition to the algorithm. Yeah, and that's where I think coaching is always going to be useful, right? Because even now with AI and everything else, people are so worried of like, oh, we have all this data, it's going to eliminate coaches. I like probably not one people are going to want some human connection and two like you said it's going to be quite a while before we're able to replicate all the knowledge and experiments and background like high level coaches have because there's so many things that could affect it from you know sunlight and food and alcohol and stress levels and breathing and all these things. But a good coach, you know, having worked with a lot of people would be like,

okay, in this particular case, it's probably this thing or this thing or this thing, right? They can take 17 options and narrow them down to maybe like the top three. So you might have been able to get to it on your own, but it's going to cost you a lot of time and probably a lot of headache of, you know, going down the wrong road. Or if you have someone who can look at it and be like, okay, I but it's going to cost you a lot of time and probably a lot of headache of going down the wrong road. Or if you have someone who can look at it and be like, okay, I think it's this, so let's do the short experiment. Let's have only one drink per night and let's limit it to, my favorite is dark beer, so

we'll say dark beer. And let's see what happens with that. Oh, everything looks pretty good. Or oops, still not as good. Let's try no alcohol. Is that even better? Oh, it looks, you know, pretty good or still not as good. Let's try no alcohol. Is that even better? Oh, it is. OK, so now if you still want a beverage, what would be your second choice?

Let's try that. Let's see what happens. All right. So you can set up these very N equals one experiments to figure out what is best for that particular client. And to me, that's like the most useful thing of coaching, because, you know, that I've often joked that the person sitting in front of me doesn't give a rat's ass about the 17 studies i may have read last week about it

they care that they can get to a result faster even if their results potentially invalidate all 17 of those studies doesn't mean the studies are wrong it's just that person is paying coaches a lot of money to get the result for them that much faster. And that's where I think it's most useful. Yeah. What does the body temperature mean to you when you're looking through these things? You mentioned it earlier. I'm kind of, as you're talking, thumbing through the last month or so of data.

What are you looking for in that? At first, I didn't use body temperature that much. But it turns out it's actually super accurate on aurum and the really nice part they do is that they they show you the deviation from normal right because if you surprisingly look at population data like body temp everyone's like oh it's 98.6 so i don't inherently trust a lot of facts and figures. So I found a huge study showing it's actually closer to 97.7. And it can vary. We've been getting lied to our whole lives.

I know, I know. And could be related to, you know, some metabolism stuff, some thyroid stuff. Definitely can be related to if you had a large meal in the evening, alcohol, etc. So when I look at it, the first thing I'm going to look at is, is it significantly elevated or below about half a degree? That's kind of my threshold. If it is, then I'm like, okay, what went on? So if you're all of a sudden zero, zero, you haven't deviated from normal, and you ping like 0.8, my first thought is there's probably a significant stressor going on. So is that an acute stressor? Did you go out and have five beers with your friends last night? If you're like, nope, I didn't do that. I just did my normal thing. I'm going to then cross-check

and look at your heart rate variability, right? Because heart rate variability is a very good marker of stress on the autonomic nervous system. Ooh, that's also down a little bit. Okay. I'm going to ask about, how do you feel? Is your throat scratchy? Is your performance still pretty good? Because what I've noticed is temperature, if it's not related to a large meal or alcohol or some of these acute things, it's a pretty good marker for stress or even like kind of an immune system hit. And we know that if we put a whole bunch of stress on you, it's going to upregulate your immune system. Dan's talked a lot about this.

And that will show up in a little bit of an elevated temperature. Everybody knows if you get really, really sick, what can happen is your temperature is going to be elevated. Also, on the other side, I've noticed that if their mealtimes are consistent, because if you do have a huge, you know, protein, large meal before bed, that is going to artificially bump up your temperature but if it's trending down a lot like 0.3 0.4 0.5 or even 0.6 in some rare cases now i'm wondering if your calories are probably too low for where you're at now again if you're doing a cut or you're doing something aggressive on purpose cool that may line up with exactly what you're trying to do but if you're not again i'm going to going to ask you, how do you feel? How's your performance? How's everything else going? And if you're like, yeah, the last time I hit a PR was, you know, George Bush was in office, then, okay, maybe we don't want to have you in this caloric deficit. Keep going. Let's bump up

your calories a little bit more. Let's have you get some performance in the gym. And a lot of times the temperature will start to normalize them too. Yeah, I got a lot of things in the gym and a lot of times the temperature will start to normalize them too yeah i got a lot of things in the negative right now dan's got me on this diet i'm not eating at all i'm drinking protein shakes if it's as if it's a steak it's not it's not working out well minus 0.7 last night kids freezing to death over here trying to get shredded like dan garner yeah time to eat we got two weeks time to eat in that case it matches though right and that's the hard part because people will send data and they're like oh my god it's like point you know 0.7 is bad and like are you trying to aggressively cut they're like yeah yeah probably okay right i mean it's just a reflection of what's going on with your physiology now if you weren't trying to do

that and performance was your goal now you're like, now we got a mismatch. We got to figure out what's going on. Yeah. So in the context of, say, stress, HIV recovery and performance, just take myself as an example. If I am under stress, then that should represent itself in my HRV and probably reduce my HRV score, which would give an output of a recommendation that I should take it easier. I'm not exactly been accused as Mr. Stable. So when I am stressed, when I'm actually stressed, I actually feel great euphoria from releasing that stress and putting it into frickicking something. So and I think a lot of people would actually side with me on that. So how would you communicate to an athlete

if I am currently under stress, nothing feels better than letting it out and having an incredible session. But the stress induced HRV reduction told me not to what kind of net gain or loss or communication strategy would you have with an athlete in order to deal with a situation like that? Yeah, that's a great question. The first question I would ask is, are they aware that they are modifying their response to stress by training? If they're like, no, then okay, we probably have to have another higher level of conversation. If they're aware of it, then I'm like, okay, cool. So that's one of your coping strategies. And if you look at the literature, you look at physiologic responses, high stress, you should kind of couple some type of movement to it.

So that works. Over time, though, I would have a conversation to see, can they also pick a non-movement strategy to try to modify their stress, breathing, meditation, you know, lower forms, walking, et cetera. But if they're like, no, I got to go lift some heavy stuff. Okay, cool. Number one, are you aware that this is what you're doing to modify your stress? If they're like, yep. Okay, cool. The second thing is then chronically, we want to see what's going on if your hrv is just constantly going down and you're like yeah man i don't know what happens but like four weeks into every program like just the wheels fall off of the thing and it's just a disaster i'm like okay so

maybe you're doing a little bit too much for too long and your stress over time is just accumulating you get a short-term relief from it, but kind of like the alcohol, you're also adding more stress to the equation too. If they don't want to modify their training split, then I might actually just slice their volume in half. I'm like, okay, does it feel good to you to do 30 minutes all out, kind of quote, high intensity? you're like yeah i'm like cool but instead of 60 minutes i want you to do that for 30 minutes so you still get some relief you still get to do the thing you love but i'm going to modify that uh stress response so again it's

back to coaching you know talking to that client and saying okay you know what are your goals we're also going to modify and look at your goals long term over multiple weeks, multiple months. I'm a bigger fan of what I call the eustress distress model. Eustress meaning enough stress applied to the system where that can recover within a couple days and go again. Distress would be like a very large competition day. You got a big powerlifting meeting on Saturday. Who cares how long it takes you to recover? Doesn doesn't matter. The goal is just all-out performance on that day. Don't care about how much stress we accumulate. So that's kind of the model I like to use. And within that, if I see HRV is constantly going down, I know that acutely they might be okay, but that's going to limit how much stress we can apply to the system over the course of six, eight, you know, 12 weeks.

So we'll have to try to find a way to modify that. Last part two is, depending on their aerobic system and depending upon where their HRV is at, some people I've worked with, I've just let their HRV erode to what they thought was a horrible level because it was too high for their goals. If they're like a power lifter and their hrv is like in the stratosphere their vo2 max is crazy i'm like bro you just need to train more and you have the capacity to handle a lot more stress so we're just going to start you know doing the travis mash just stress the shit out of you as long as your performance is still good i don't care that your hrv is a power lifter has a great hV? There's a few freaks.

There's not very many. It's usually the inverse. Imagine AJ Roberts running around. And they fire me. AJ Roberts running around with a great HRV. Back in the day when I didn't have access to any of this kind of information, I was a personal trainer at Gold's Gym when I first started in the industry. And I kind of just intuitively, I created something called a what you want day. Because I work, I work with a lot of people who you know who you're working with, when you're brand new in the industry, you're working with mom and pop trying to lose some

weight. We've all done it, right? So what would happen is they would have a terrible sleep or be in a fight with their significant other or have work stress. And I would see it on their face the moment they came in the door because you get to know these people. And I would call it a what you want day. And what I found was that their readiness self-selected what they could do. Like they just thought we'll do lat pull downs for easy three sets of 15.

Then we'll go over, maybe do some lunges because I like those. And then we're going to go over and do a little they would actually kind of get a lot of you stress out of it because they're picking the movements they liked in the rep ranges that they felt like doing. And in hindsight, I look back at that. And I was like, you know what, that was actually a decent strategy to accommodate for the readiness of that individual on that given day. To what extent would you do something like that? Or do you think that it veers off of what would be considered the specificity of the current phase? It just depends on their goals and their overall schedule, right? So some people, especially in a one-on-one situation it's easy to modify because you can see the look on their face like i had a medical line years ago

when i was doing more in-person training here throw 40 minutes all the way across town opens the door to my townhouse because i have a gym in my garage and literally passes out flat on my floor and goes oh i don't feel so good and i, dude, why did you drive all the way across town just to pass out on my living room floor? And I'm thinking, what am I going to do with this guy? He's already here, you know. So I'm like, okay, well, let's do a little mobility. You know, I just started to turn up the intensity. And same thing.

I said, what do you want to do today, man? Like, what sounds good? He's like, I want to bench press. I'm like, okay. And in my head, I head i'm thinking okay we're just going to modify intensity let's just let him do some some bench press stuff and it turns out he just kept working up to heavier and heavier loads looked good ended up hitting a pr and like skipped out of here and went hey this is great the thing that was interesting though is when him, I said, why the hell did you drive 40 minutes across town just to pass out on my floor? He's like, because I know when I leave, I'll feel better. And he didn't even know like what he was saying at the time, because my whole goal, especially in person, was exactly what you said.

As long as they leave feeling better than when they came in, we're hitting some semblance of their goals. Like I did my job. And so I had trained with him for like two years at that point so he unconsciously just figured if i get to this crazy guy's house and pass out on his floor all will be better and turns out it was so in those situations i would just modify to whatever they can do and get out of it if it's someone who's more competitive and they have like a set goal they're trying to achieve my general go-tos are i'll slash their volume by like 50 but i'll leave all the intensity the same so if you

were going to do like we talked about the beginning of the show 10 sets of three on some heinous front squats i'm going to leave that by triples still on there but you're only going to do five sets because i want the intensity i want that adaptation that we're trying to strive for. I don't want to stress you out so much with the volume. Or a lot of times I'll write Monday, Wednesday, Friday is lifting. Saturday is kind of an optional day. Tuesday, Thursday, again, Saturday is kind of a wild card is cardio. If you can, I might flip your days. If you're super stressed Monday, take Tuesday's cardio session, do that Monday and then lift Tuesday and lift Wednesday. So I might flip them because in the grand scheme of things, I'm still doing the same amount of work, especially if they're competitive and have a goal to hit.

But I'm trying to match the stress a little bit better to where their capacity is on that particular day. Yeah, I'd love to dig into respiratory rate a little bit. Very recently, call it like 10 days. I really have started digging into like a bunch of energy system work. Heart rate monitors on its way. I've been doing this hypertrophy thing for like six months now and your boy needs a little break. And seems like a good time just because I'm kind of a burnout on the same, same stuff. Um, my HRV has almost doubled in the last 10 days. And my respiratory rate has like the, it's a very steep, uh, down into the right graph over the last two months of using this. One, what does respiratory rate, kind of like, what does that mean as far as this app goes? And then scaling that back up, like, is a lot of this stuff really as easy as the last 10 days have kind of shown to improve your sleep and how reactive it is? Yeah. so for simple terms, respiratory rate is another good marker of stress, right? So a simple example is, if you go to do more acute exercise, what's going

to happen, right? We can look at something fancy called your minute ventilation, but your respiratory rate, how fast you're breathing is going to go up as your system becomes more stressed. If we go all the way back to just a simple baseline, if your respiratory rate is higher, again, looking at you compared to you as an individual, you're going to be under a little bit more stress. I mean, in general, body temp is going to be up a little bit. HRV score is going to be down a little bit. Those three tend to move together, but not always the same rate or the same amount. But I'll look at those kind of moving in aggregate. If I have a new client and their respiratory rate is skewed higher, but their HRV is pretty good, their resting heart rate is good, the shape of their heart rate is good at

night. Let's say their respiratory rate is like 17 or 18 breaths a minute. Now I'm really starting to think of a mechanical efficiency issue either they've got the vo2 max of a field mouse and they're just incredibly deconditioned and stressed out even though their hrv and temp isn't moving much um i'm still thinking mechanically something's off so i'm gonna email and be like hey all right is the back of your neck tight are your upper traps tight all the time you know like in like in rapid, we've used the CO2 tolerance test. You can do that test. There's some other stuff you can look at.

And most of the time, the rib cage is just stuck, right? So their ability to inflate and deflate is being compromised. The body's solution is, well, shit, we still got to get oxygen in. We got to get CO2 out. So we're going to bump up that respiratory rate, even though we're at rest and we're not doing anything under load at this point. Gotcha. Yeah. The doubled is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it really has gone from mid-60s, 70s on a regular basis to now I'm tapping over 100. When I first saw triple digits on there after four days of consistent like

just breathing and practicing breathing and moving blood in a good way intentionally um seeing triple digits on that thing it's pretty cool yeah and what score was that you received change the most uh hrv and the um respiratory rate my respiratory rate. My respiratory rate has changed crazy. And it's the only thing I've really changed in the last... It's a very short time window, but it's really the only thing that I've intentionally changed recently. Yeah, that's great. So with Anders' improvement over the past 10 days, and then you're also talking about things that... All these metrics, they can either improve or reduce. But you're also talking about things that all these metrics, they can either improve or reduce. But you're also looking at looking at trends, talking about looking at

trends over months and weeks and stuff like that. At what point do you deem a metric worthy of notifying a client, whether it's a win or a loss, like acute versus chronic? At what point have you accomplished something? Is it two weeks? Is it a month? Or at what point is this person degrading? Is that two weeks or a month? Yeah, again, it goes back to what are their goals and what do I expect for what phase they're in? So if they're doing a very aggressive cut, so an example is like fizzy competitors right so extremely competitive they have a set date they've you know got to be on stage they have to be pretty extreme in their nature so for years i've argued heart rate variability is perfect to use with physique athletes and i've even presented different conferences on this and about a third of the

people are like hey that's cool like two-thirds are like that's so stupid like no one gives a shit about our hrv when we're up there you know and standing in our underwear i'm like true however if let's say you're 16 weeks out and your hrv is just in the absolute shitter you still have 16 weeks to go like what are you gonna do right are going to try to correct now or are you just going to, you know, pour more gas on the fire and wait for the wheels to come off? Like, I would rather know as a coach. Hey, here's this sign. Again, you're not being graded on this. It's your physique. But, you know, it's like the RPMs on your car. Like, did you know you're redlining your car and most of the time they're like no compared to someone else whose hrv doesn't go off a cliff until three weeks out at some point it's it's just gonna go off a cliff it's just gonna happen right yeah but if we can push that off farther odds are their stress is gonna be better the recovery is gonna be better they can do more volume all those things are gonna be better better. So again, it's an individual basis. And I always back up and look at, okay, what is the overall goal? And if you don't have a hard date, it's a little bit easier because you have

more flexibility, right? So for even the general population client, you can say, you know, hey, Bob, like the last week, your temperature is really low. Your HRV is kind of wonky. Your respiratory rate's kind of high. Maybe we were a little bit too aggressive pulling calories out. Like we look at your scale weight, you're losing like a pound and a half, two pounds. I just did as a client literally yesterday. He's losing about two pounds a week. I'm like, dude, let's just back off a little bit for a couple of weeks. You know, performance was okay. Wasn't amazing. And then he'll kind of normalize those scores will recover a little bit okay and now we can kind of go again so i like it especially online because i don't get the advantage of seeing them walk in the gym i don't hear their their vocal

tones how they look like their gait pattern like i used to stare out the blinds and watch clients walk in because nobody knows you're watching them walk at that point. I don't have any of that metric. But I can ask them, like, how do you feel? Most of the time, they're like, fine. Like, that's not that useful, right? You can do, you know, palm score. You can do all these other quizzes and questions, which is good if they have some level of awareness and they're dedicated to filling them out accurately.

But I like having an actual physiologic measurement. And then I can actually go back to them sometimes and say you know hey look your hrv has been really goofy these last couple days like everything i can see your nutrition train everything is fine you know what's going on right because when you you do it enough like especially on aura if you're losing hrv by like even around five that's that's significant right so i can say in my experience something is going on um and a couple times it's like oh yeah i had an argument with my spouse the other day um i had one happen to me years ago like everything was fine went away to a conference got a new airbnb and i'm there and my hrv is just just going in a shitter i can't figure

out what's going on long story short i come back home boom everything goes back to normal and i think what it was is the place kind of smelled kind of moldy which i didn't realize until later yeah i think it was a mold that i was having some reaction to because it was significant enough where it something was going on and the second i got back home within two days, it normalized. So I think it allows you, one, to have conversations you wouldn't have had otherwise. And two, it does allow sometimes to reveal these kind of unconscious stressors that they didn't even know were affecting them. So they could not answer it because they just didn't even know that that was the thing going on. Yeah.

Do you think that seasonal allergies would have a similar effect they can in my experience yeah i've had a couple people where they've never had allergies before and they've kind of developed allergies and we've seen their scores kind of change um doesn't always happen but i've seen that happen a couple times are you able to pick up on any of the mechanical pieces of it like um i Like I'm square in the crosshairs right now for hostage tape on all social media platforms. I cannot get on Instagram without the some scores, like someone did get seasonal allergies and now they're breathing out of their mouth all night long because they just can't breathe out of their nose. Are you able to kind of pick any of those things up? Because the mechanical changes can, if it's not allergy related, but those changes can happen quickly just to get people back on track. A little bit. Like you would want to look at like what andy gilpin's talked about

like their float like what is their weight at night versus their weight in the morning are they getting up to pee during the night or not right normally if you're mouth breathing right you're going to be giving off a lot more water vapor in general um and the really simple question i'll ask him is like hey uh was your mouth dry in the morning they're like yes it feels like a bird died in it okay you're probably mouth breathing yeah um i'll look at their respiratory rate if the respiratory rate spikes up generally that's geared more towards mouth breathing um sleep patterns etc so it's hard to pick up exactly but you can kind of estimate it and a lot of times when you ask clients like like, hey, do you breathe through your nose or your mouth most of the time during the day? They don't really know.

So I've gone to asking them, OK, tomorrow, just see and notice during the day. Do you breathe more out of your nose or out of your mouth? Because it's usually an unconscious thing where they don't know they're breathing out of their mouth. And I can almost guarantee if they're doing it during the day there's a really really good chance they're they're doing it at night and i'd love to dig into one of the one of the ones that comes up to me read all the time is latency why is it so hard for me to fall asleep yeah so latency can go either way i'm tired as hell when i lay down i promise and then it comes up every day and i'm like how do you have a lot of thoughts kind of going through your head like on the monkey mind yeah I'm tired as hell when I lay down, I promise. And then it comes up every day and I'm like, how?

Do you have a lot of thoughts kind of going through your head? Kind of the monkey mind thing still? Yeah, I got kids and a business. What else am I going to do? Sit there and think about tomorrow already. Yeah. So do you do any breathing drills at all? Yeah, it's actually...

So Brian McKenzie's app, I have it downloaded. And the breath work that I do through his app, anytime I go out for a walk, I have some like breath hold step count stuff that I do. And then I think that's why it comes up is because I lay there. And that's when I try to do that, like actual down regulation, like meditative style breathing. It's like I own this 10 minutes right here. And I may not any other time in the day. So that's typically when I try to do just some sort of meditative state, slow breathing, just preparing to go to bed. And I always wonder if that's what it's picking up. I also noticed the other night I was watching the Oilers game at like one o'clock in the morning, because Connor McDavid was supposed to win. And, um, it noticed that I was basically asleep with my eyes open on the couch. Like I was so still and so out. Um, and it was so late at night, um, that it was like, you were asleep, but awake for an hour and a half. And I was like, yeah, that was the third period. That was it. That was, I was, I was supposed to

be awake or asleep a long time ago. Um, so it, I guess when I woke up that morning, I was like, yeah, that was the third period. That was it. I was supposed to be awake or asleep a long time ago. So I guess when I woke up that morning, I was like, man, is it really able to calculate? Is it just based off of your heart rate lowering to a rested state? And what does that latency kind of actually mean if it's calculating when you're awake? It seems like it's not a variable that you want to give too much credit to yeah it's definitely an approximation right because there's no eeg like i used one of the old old devices years ago where you had this little headband that would look at eeg uh at night so or is just looking at approximations um for that and so if you're just doing say 10 minutes of breathing after you lay down so it's going to see positional change, right? It says, oop, this person's down. Now we're going to look at all these other metrics that we use from this huge database to try to determine, are they awake or are they asleep?

So that latency, if you're doing breathwork for, say, 12 minutes, it's probably going to say your latency could be 12 or 15 minutes. Again, that goes back to the context. If a client's like, oh man, why is my latency always getting dinged it's 15 minutes but the breath work was scheduled for 15 minutes and that's when they're actually doing it yeah i don't really care that much about it did the job right we had these 15 minutes where you're doing the thing and then boom right after that it was lights out um so again it just depends on where you're at and then also if it's accurate and it's like a couple minutes like every single night that tells me that you're chronically sleep deprived because some people will send me their And then also if it's accurate and it's like a couple minutes, like every single night,

that tells me that you're chronically sleep deprived. Because some people will send me their scores and be like, look at my latency. It's like two minutes every night. Like, bro, you just need more sleep. Right? Because the second your head hits the pillow, like you're out, I can guarantee that you're just overtired.

Yeah. So it can go both ways. Killer, man. Where can people find you? Best place? Website, which is mike t nelson.com i also have the flex diet cert which opens again june 5th through the 12th at flex diet.com and flex diet podcast so the website mike t nelson.com is probably the best place and you can hop onto the newsletter for free send me a note you heard me here and we'll send you something cool. I love it.

They can also find you creeping on everyone's sleep scores at rapid health optimization. Just monitoring from afar. Dan Garner. You can find me at Dan Garner nutrition on Instagram. There you go. Doug Larson. Also on Instagram.

Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. And we are barbell shrug to barbell underscore shrug. Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a lifestyle performance and lab analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization gets. And, of course, all four of us are a big part of that program as well. So make sure you get over there, set up a call with me. We will get you in and make sure you get an aura ring over there

so we can make sure you optimize your sleep here. RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week. I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to ArateLab.com. That is the signature program inside Rapid Health Optimization where you can go and experience

all the lab, lifestyle, performance, testing, analysis, and coaching to help you optimize your health and performance. And you can access all of that over at aretalab.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.