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

Episode Date: January 2, 2021

Joel Jamieson is a performance architect. Heart Rate Variability is everyone's favourite new health metric. Joel is one of the world's leading coaches for HRV and today he takes us through what HRV is, why it matters and his best strategies and workouts for improving yours. Sponsors: Get 2 weeks Free Access to the State App at https://apple.co/36nNALG (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Joel's company - https://www.8weeksout.com Follow Joel on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/coachjoeljamieson Check out Morpheus - https://trainwithmorpheus.com  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello beautiful people, welcome back. It is finally no longer 2020 and I'm kicking off the new year with a guest I've been looking for us to speaking to for a very long time. Joel Jamison is one of the world's experts in HRV training. Heart rate variability is the most popular new metric everyone's talking about it, you whoop strap tells you it, but what is it? Why is it important and how can we improve it through our training and recovery? Today, Joel gives us a full breakdown, including his history that he's worked with the metric.

What it actually means, how you can manipulate it both through your training, your lifestyle, through breath work, through the different sorts of cardio output that you're doing, absolutely everything. It's such a beautiful way to break down the merciness that has surrounded this metric. Also Joel coached Demetrius Mightemouse Johnson, he was the conditioning coach for the guy with the longest ever title defence in UFC history. So if you're looking for longevity and health across the long term, this is the man for you. But for now, it's time to learn about HIV

with Joel Jamison. Performance architect is the coolest job title in the fucking world. It took me quite a while to like play around some different ones and I'd get some emails back and I'm like, what the hell do you think you are? And then I finally came up with that one and it seemed just stuck around and I haven't had anybody insult me over my title for a while so I like that one. I'm a performance architect. So cool, man. So I wanted to dig into HRV today.

HRV is like the hot new girl in school at the moment as I can terms of the metrics. It is. It's funny because I've been using it since like the early 2000s and I used to go into a presentation. I'd say who here's using HRV or who's got HRV and people would look at me like I was asking about an STD or something because they said No clue what the hell the thing was back then right, but but yeah now it's everywhere Apple watches got it and people are talking about it

It's it's you know, it's such a big change from where it was like said 15 20 years ago when I was first getting into it So it's it's exciting to see because it's a valuable metric It's it's one of the few pieces fitness tech that truly can change people's outcomes and have, you know, get better results. You were ahead of the curve, man. Try and set it. Yeah, I mean, I was just, you know, I wish I claimed that it was entirely intentional, but I just kind of stumbled upon to it. And once I did, then I immediately saw the value and jumped into it. But I would never have predicted, you know, way back then, it would be as popular as it is now. So it's, you know, it's definitely been a journey to get there for sure.

How did you get started with it? Yeah, so kind of a crazy story. There's a guy named Randy Huntington, who a lot of people probably are not familiar with. Randy is a fantastic track coach. He worked with Mike Powell. We Mike Powell broke Carl Lewis, like 20 year long, long jump world record. And he's a local guy that just kind of came to meet him as a young

coach and asked him some you know some tips and things he would advise and you know just general advice from an old guy to a young guy And he said you should look at this thing called the Omega wave and I was like what the hell's the Omega wave and he just kind of gave me a Number and said call call this guy and so came up okay,. So I call this number. It's just thick accent. Sounds like Russian or Eastern European. And I'm like, barely understand the guy, but he's telling me to meet him in an airport the next day. So I'm like, am I gonna get kidnapped? Like, when I get, when I sell the guy vodka,

like, what's going on here? So I go down the airport and there's this guy in this long trench coat. And literally, I'm like, is this KGB or just like a practical joke? What the hell's going on here? And he tells me basically in the hotel airport to lay down on the couch and take my shirt off.

And I'm seriously like, this makes no sense, but I trust Randy and if I'm, you know, like, well, okay, I'll go for a while. If a Russian man in the trench coat says to take my top off in an airport, I'll do it. Exactly. So anyway, so I lay down the couch, I take my shirt off, and he connects a bunch of electrodes to me, and tells me to be quiet for a couple of minutes, and I look over and he's plugging all these electrodes

into this big computer, and all this shit's happened on a screen in the background. I'm completely lost at this point. I mean, bear in mind, this is like 2000, maybe 2001-ish. So there's no fitness tag, there's no mobile apps, there's no fit bit, none of 2001-ish. So there's no fakeness tag, there's no mo-lapse, there's no fake, none of this stuff exists. So there was nothing in it. So all of a sudden, two and a half three minutes go by

and he's telling me like, oh, your cardiovascular condition is shit, and your central nervous system is good. Your recovery is very bad, right? And he starts just kind of like telling me all these things about my trading and the nature of I was an anaerobic athlete at that point in time and just power lifted mostly. And he's about telling me all this stuff despite not knowing anything about me. And so I was just like, how in the hell is this working?

You know, is this a Russian voodoo or like, what is this? And so essentially, he kind of tells me that the Russians pioneered his technology called heart rate variability that they'd use it in the original space program with the astronauts or cosmonauts back then. So the interesting thing is, you said that basically, it had been used in space medicine for decades, and then the 1980s, the Russians, to try to figure out how do we make this applicable to athletes, and so they'd started this giant program

where they were developing it for their Olympic athletes and for their national athletes, and kind of as they were developing this program, the Soviet Union crumbled and the whole thing fell apart basically. The program was never completed. And so, you know, fast forward maybe 10 years and a bunch of the original scientists had still kind of been in the sporting world and it stumbled on to each other at a track meeting, Eugene, Oregon of all places.

And they'd all just kind of started talking about this project that they should have finished and never got to see through. And they formed the Omega Wave Company and started the project back up and finished kind of the first commercial grade on a very, very ability tech. And it was, you know, it was very expensive. So when I, you know, I'm sitting there

on my early 20s, I'm like, well, how much is this thing? I've got to have this damn thing. And he's like, $35,000. And I was like, $35,000. Like Jesus, I didn't have $350,000. And I was like $35,000. Like Jesus, I didn't have $350 at the time. I was very like college and I was totally broke. But I just said, yo, is there any way I can work some payment plans or help you sell this thing?

Like what could I do? Like, you know, I was desperate to have it because I just saw the potential of it. And so, now I just kind of wheeled and dealed and fortunate that Russians are willing to negotiate a bit. And so I was, you know, I got to use system that had, you know, just kind of an old laptop and older one of their models that they were just kind of going to recycle

anyway. And convinced them I could introduce it to other coaches and then treated what I knew and help and get it started North America. Because at that point, they had almost nobody North America using it. I mean, maybe a Randy and a couple other that point, they had almost nobody North America using it. I mean, maybe Randy and a couple other coaches,

but they had primarily been focused on Europe and track and field and high level sports. And so, you know, to make a long story short, I was able to help them out with that. I didn't get more coaches aware of it. And then I started using it. But the funny thing was because I had kind of negotiated this discounted rate, there wasn't much training

involved. It was like 10 minutes of, here's the thing. Here's how you connect it. Here's kind of negotiated this discounted rate. There wasn't much training involved. There was like 10 minutes. So here's the thing here. Here's how you connect it. Here's kind of how it works versus a two-day training that I found everyone else got. So a lot of it was just trial and error and figuring out what the hell this thing was doing. And then I kind of realized, okay,

I kind of understand what's doing now, but I don't really know how it explains to people. And so I kind of became the Russian guy. Like people come to my gym and they like, like, lady, how take your shirt off, right? Like, what? doing that but I don't really know how it explains to people and so I kind of became the Russian guy. People come to my gym and they go, hey, they don't take your shirt off, right? Like, they do what? What? Meet me in the airport, bring a Kalashnikov.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it was awkward days. Then I kind of had, and you had to put six electrodes on and like three were on the chest and then, you know, I have female athletes and clients come in. I'm like, I'm going to put my hand here, but I promise this is gonna be valuable for you. And this is real, this isn't me trying to do something odd. So it was, you know, like I said,

back then there was just, there was no fitness tech. And so I had this laptop and this little black box and all these electrodes. And it was just, you know, it was the Wild West of early days of fitness tech. But, you know, like I said, but now it's a volatile point where you've got this thing in a million different devices and people know what it is, or at least they have some idea of what it is, but it's certainly come a long way from those days.

Yeah, probably for the better as well, if you've got to strap a bunch of electrodes onto someone, it wouldn't be quite as popular I don't think. Take a start then. HIV, how do you define it? So in a nutshell, all we're really doing is measuring the pattern of your heart rhythm. So, people typically think the heart beats like a metronome, which makes sense, but that's actually not how it beats. It's got a natural rhythm to it. And that natural rhythm changes, depending on how your body is regulated itself and how your body is distributed in energy. So, when you're at rest,

your body has a certain heart rhythm that's associated with what we call the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the rest of the digestive system and the stronger that pattern towards that side of it, the more your body is driving energy towards your recovery. When you are under a period of stress or your body is producing more energy or that sympathetic system is more at play, then we see a different pattern in heart rhythm, because again, these two systems influence how the heart beats. And so we're just basically looking at that pattern to figure out, okay, is the body in this spider flight state

or is the body in this recovery state and where is it in that spectrum? Because it's a spectrum, it's not really like a light switch. It's more about a spectrum. It's only light switch on the far, far ends of that spectrum. So what we're really trying to do is to see where is the body distributing the energy that's producing? Is it focusing on its energy more on the rest and digest

and recovery and rebuilding of things, or is it currently under a period of stress or is it still in that a fight or flight state after workout or mental stress or life stress or whatever the case may be? So we're really just trying to understand how is the body regularly itself internally. And we're doing that just by looking at how that heart is beating because again, that heart rate and that heart rhythm and that pattern is governed by the autonomic nervous system,

which is again, what manages how energy is distributed throughout the body. So it's a, you know, to use your valuable tool because of that, because if you could understand where the body is in terms of its recovery versus its stress and how well it's recovering from everything you're throwing at it, then you can have a whole lot of better information about what's the right choice to do now. You know, do I need more recovery or if my body already handled everything well? Do I focus, you know, more on this and more on that? It gives us a lot of guidelines as far as what, far as what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing.

And then likewise, the number itself, heart rate variability, is mostly a measure of that parasympathetic recovery driven energy system or our autonomic part of the nervous system. So higher in general is protective because it's anti-inflammatory because it's connected to aerobic fitness and lots of reasons. It's basically a really good marker of overall longevity and overall ability to recover from the stress of life. So if we look at that single number over time, we said never going up over time, then that's telling us our body's getting more resilient, it's getting more durable, it's getting more robust and able to handle a higher level

stress. If that number is lower, then it's a bad thing. It's getting more robust and able to handle a higher level stress. If that number is lower, then it's a bad thing. It basically tells us we're going the opposite direction. So if we look at it on a daily basis, we see these changed up and down as we train and as we deal with life stress. And that just gives us this daily roadmap to figure out what's the appropriate level stress. But if we look at the long term, we

can see is our body getting more depth, is our body getting more resilient, or are we going in the other direction? So it kind of gives us two big pieces of data that are really important for fitness and health and performance. So we look at it either in the daily level or if you zoom out and we look at kind of the long term trends

behind it. H.R.V. is associated with longevity. Hi, H.R.V. is associated with people who live longer. Absolutely. It's associated with VO2 max, which is a huge predictor in the market of cardiovascular fitness, which is... Look, you've got to take a step back here and realize that in the U.S., it's not a whole lot different in the U.K., roughly one out of every three people will die from cardiovascular-related

diseases. That's ridiculous, right? I mean, one out of every three people will die from cardiovascular related diseases. That's ridiculous, right? I mean, one out of three. So 30 plus percent are going to die from a cardiovascular related disease or event. So if a third of the population is dying that, and we're looking at measures that protect against that, then that's naturally going to protect you from cardiovascular disease, which is going to kill a third of the population. So even just from that standpoint, it correlates along to you every well, because you're much less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, which is going to kill a third of the population. So even just from that standpoint, a correlates along to every well because you're much less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.

If you have a strong cardiovascular system, which HIV correlates extremely well to on the other side, it protects against just kind of this all cause mortality. Because as I mentioned, the parasympathetic neuro system is anti inherently anti inflammatory. So if you look at the autonomic nervous system, you have those two branches that I mentioned, the sympathetic, the fighter flight system, and that system is inherently pro-inflammatory. So if you're producing lots of energy, you're under lots of stress, your immune system is naturally kind of on high alert,

and you're able to produce a lot more inflammation. Because of that, it's a protective thing. If you actually are in a survival situation, you want that nervous system, or you want that immune response, because there's a higher likelihood that you're going to be exposed to infection or tissue damage, all these sorts of things. So that sympathetic nervous system, that stress system is designed to be a bit pro-inflammatory and it releases little markers called cytokines. But on the other side, that parasympathetic nervous system, its job is to turn off that inflammation and its job

is to repair those tissues, so it's anti-inflammatory. So again, a lot of disease in the modern era is disease of chronic inflammation. It's how we see all kinds of different things develop to kill us. So if you can develop that parasympathetic nervous system and you can develop a stronger level of it, then you can be more anti-inflammatory. You can protect against the normal inflammatory damage

that we expose ourselves to across our lifetime. So if you can protect against that inflammation with a better developed nervous system, then your chances of living longer go up. So heart rate variability is the single best measure we have of that parasy some thickness system. And thereby the single best measure we have of how anti inflammatory we can be and how we can mitigate against just the stress of life. Why? As a whole, it's a why is it that H RV is associated with greater recovery? Like what is it that

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

If we see more of a flat pattern, we see less variability, we know that the parasympathetic nervous system is less active, and the sympathetic version of the system is a bit more active. So, again, that's just a tell tell tell sign of the body is able to distribute energy into recovery. The more active that parasympathetic nervous system is because that's the parasympathetic system's job is literally to drive energy into recovery. It's the increased protein synthesis and people are looking this way. It's really simple. The parasympathetic nervous system's anabolic. It helps rebuild tissues and the sympathetic system is catabolic, it helps break down tissues for energy and to deal

with stress. So, against that balance, if we're chronically catabolic and we're constantly, you know, we're always breaking tissue down and we're chronically in this inflamed state, we're going to have diseases, we're going to have problems. But if we're able to rebuild through that parasympathetic nervous system and we're going to be more anabolic and tip that scale back the other direction towards growth and repair, then we're much more likely to be healthy and much less likely to have crying inflammatory diseases and all those things that come with that. So hi HIV is good. Is that relative or absolute? If I have a HIV of 50 and you

have one of a hundred, are you twice as parasympathetic as I am? Is it all relative within my physiology? Yeah, so there's a couple things. The first thing is there's a lot of different ways to calculate it. There's not just one calculation. So the difference is if we look at heart rate, it's very simple, it's the number of beats

you're at, your heart's being permitted. But if we look at heart rate variability, there's multiple number of beats you're at, your heart's being per minute. But if we look at heart rate variability, there's multiple types of calculations from what's called RMSSD, to SDN, to PN fifth. There's multiple ways to calculate that number. Yeah, so it's just more difficult to compare, meet you or the reality, it's much more difficult to compare one system's HIV number versus another system's HIV number

because right now there's so many systems out there and they all have different calculations and then they all put them on different scales or different ways to quantify them. So the number on one system really is mean this to say, oh, I'm a 50 in this system, but you're a 35 in that system. That that number is not as universally comparable at heart rate itself. So you really can't say, okay, well, you're 50 and 80 unless you're looking at the exact at heart rate itself. So you really can't say, okay, well, you're 50 or 80. Unless you're looking at the exact same heart rate variability system or the exact same heart rate

variability calculation, those numbers to compare against are meaningless. But if you're two people were using the same system, the same exact way of calculating HIV, the same exact scale, then yeah, higher number would be healthier for anybody. It doesn't really matter. But what we see is that age groups have norms. So as you age, you lose some of that recovery ability.

You start to decline over time. So that's what we see is if you look at someone's average, if you take population and you take somebody in their 70s, people in their 70s are going to have lower age or be an average in somebody in their 20s, who's going to have higher age or to have higher HIV than 30s for it's going to decline with age. So there are certainly age driven norms that you want to be at the top of and you want to be as high as possible given your age. So it's more about where is my HIV in relation to somebody in my age range given the exact HIV system I'm using to compare myself against.

And it's also not a two to one, like all my hundreds, I'm twice, it's not quite that linear, but in general, you want to, again, you want to compare yourself against other people in your age group on whatever system you're using, because it's really the only way to get a fair comparison to see where you stack up to other people. Now, the good thing is, if you, the other metric you can use, that's much more universal, is resting heart rate.

So, resting heart rate and HIV will have an inverse correlation, meaning people with higher heart rate variability are gonna have a lower resting heart rate because part of what drives that resting heart rate down is that parasympathetic nervous system and the other part is just the structural and functional changes that come along with the rope of fitness which is also what drives HRB up. So if you want to compare yourself you can pretty much look at what is my resting heart rate relative to somebody else and

chances are pretty good that if I have a lower resting heart rate I'm probably also going to have a higher HRB on average than somebody else. So again, we can use just resting heart rate, which is a more comparable number that everyone can look at and compare themselves against to have a pretty good idea of what our HRV is likely going to be. It's pretty rare that you're going to see somebody with a very low resting heart rate and also not have a pretty good HRV. You generally would see those again correlate in the inverse way. So if I'm going to compare

to people, I can't really do it with HIV unless they're using the same system, but I can compare rest and heart rate, and that's where we can have a fair game to see what those numbers look like. Are those the two most important metrics that you look at? They are, yeah. So if you dig in I mean, most of the research on that longevity, all that sort of stuff is done basically on VO2 max, which is kind of the the gold standard lab testing of hard cardiovascular fitness. But again, those things are difficult to measure. I'm not going to go to lab and get my VO2 max tested. It sucks. It's a shitty test. People don't want to do it. So we can look at rest in heart rate and we can look at HIV as a proxy, because those are going to correlate such a high level, and are much, much easier to measure.

Now, the third one, I would say, that also correlates extremely well, because it's all on the same vein. It's heart rate recovery. So there's a number of studies and things you can look at where the faster your heart rate will drop after exertion, the better your overall parasympathetic nervous system is, the higher your HIV is, the better aerobic shape you're in, because ultimately the faster we can drop the rest in heart rate, it means that we're in better aerobic condition and we're gonna see all those other characteristics to come along with that. So I use that one all the time for training. You know, we'll look at you know a period of exertion, we'll look at some high intensity work, and you give them, you know, even 30, 60 seconds and you see how fast their hardware comes down. The faster a hardware comes down, the more

likely they are to have, again, high rate, HIV and lower rest and heart rate and all that sort of stuff. But those are really kind of the, the, the, the, you're going to look at, you're not going to look at HIV in workout. This is done at rest and you're not going to look at rest and heart rate in the workout because it's, again, done at rest. So from a, from a tracking standpoint, we'll use HRV and Reson heart rate from an in workout standpoint, which typically look at hardware recovery. That's cool. What's the highest HRV that you've ever seen? You know, again, it depends on the system, but the one that people in the UK

might be familiar with over there is Ithleet, which is a really good one, actually. That first one of the first companies that worked with us was Simon Ithleet, which is a really good one actually. That first, one of the first companies that worked with Simon and Ithleet over there. And Simon and Ithleet and my first system, BioForce HIV, we worked with basically the same general outrhythm, same general scale. So on that one, if you get up around 100, it'd be a very high HIV. It'd be a few people here and there, it'd be like 105, 110, which was extremely high in kind of the far end of the endurance spectrum. But again, there's other systems out there that can show you 200.

So it's all relative, but usually you will definitely see the endurance athletes and the people that are doing hours and hours of volume tend to fall up in that, that 100 range. If you're looking at some of the more popular ones, like BioForce, my original one, I Threaten a few of the other ones out there. But again, it's really dependent on the system that you're using. So it's a bio-force, my original one, Ithlete, and a few of the other ones out there. But again, it's really dependent on the system that you're using, so it's hard to say. Yeah, given that 100 and 10 is like the absolute top end

of what you saw there, I'm in a Woop team with Ryan Fisher, who's a CrossFit athlete, he walks out of CrossFit chalk, and his HRV regularly hits 200 on that. So there's no way, he's... Yeah, it's impossible, he's gonna have double the HRV of that. He'd be beating like once a minute, certain minutes. Yeah, that's not possible. I mean, so again, HIV is not really measuring heart beat permitted at all whatsoever.

So it'll correlate, but it's not always as simple as that. But yeah, you just you can't compare. Every system is using a different calculation. I mean, a lot of them are these days are used in ARM SSD, but then a lot of them are also not using ARM SSD. Like the Apple Watch doesn't use that. Usually they use SDN and I believe.

So the calculation itself will drive the number and then a lot of time after the fact people do math. So BioForce, I think, would take that raw data and it would basically transform it. So it was a little bit more usable. So it didn't jump around all over the place, the way that some of data and it would basically transform it so it was a little bit more usable So it didn't jump around all over the place the way that some of the other ones would so you got to be careful I think too that you the differences between a chest wrap sensor Versus an optical sensor the how it's measured a time of day all that sort of stuff

So I'm personally not a big fan of whoop to be honest It's just because it's measuring it very random intervals You know if you really want to get consistent measurements, you need to measure it at the same time each day, a new measure in a standardized fashion. So we compare where were you yesterday at this time to where you are today at this time, because if I'm just walking around or if I'm sleeping on my stomach versus my side or if I had caffeine, all these numbers get thrown out the window because they're just going to reflect that exact situation.

But we want to have a comparison of a baseline state. We want to see where is your body in a baseline state at rest. So some of them, you know, whoop and some other ones will try to measure you overnight because they think it's the easiest time to measure. But the problem with that is they're not getting a steady stream of data. They're just taking these random snapshots because unfortunately, HIV is battery intensive. It would run your battery into the ground on any strap like that if you had HIV running all night long. It would literally, you'd have to charge it every six hours to keep the thing or eight hours to keep it actually running.

So instead, what they do is they take these random little snapshots every couple hours or every six hours or whatever they do out, we can't know exactly how often they measure it, but it takes these little snapshots and then they compare that. But the reality is, those snapshots are broad. I mean, you can be sleep on your stomach versus your back and that'll change your HIV entirely. Will it? You know, you could be, oh yeah, absolutely.

The body position changes your HIV. Your breathing rate changes your HIV, your mental stress. I mean, your HIV, it's a sensitive number. That's kind of the challenge with it is you can change it. I mean, you can literally cut it in half by holding your breath. So basically, like different things you do are going to change your HIV significantly. So your body position, your breathing rate,

I mean, I can sit there and mentally think about something stressful and elevate my heart rate, and that's going to lower my HIV. All these different things are going to influence it. So these little key snapshots, you know, are not a very good indicator of your baseline state. They're just kind of showing us what's happening in the moment. So most of the research that's out there that's done is done with HIV

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

periods throughout the day or throughout the evening. So there's lots of different systems out there and there's some value to each of them. But personally, the way I've always done it and the way the research supports it is, you know, a consistent daily measurement done at the same time, in general, the same fashion to compare again, what is this person's normal baseline state look like and how is that changing daily and a long-term basis? What's your preferred tool and preferred time of day to achieve that? Yeah, so I mean, I had my own HIV system. Now, I started it with BioFORce. 2011 was when I first came out with one, and I really just thought the need because it

was really early days. There really wasn't HIV systems out there back then except for Idleetes and megawave and some really expensive ones. And we measured HIV for a number of years with BioForce, and then ultimately I realized people would use it and they would say, well, why might HIV do this? Why might you be do that? And at the time, you know, all your measurements HIV is like, I don't know, like it could have been It could have been, you know, what was your diet like? What was your mental stress like? What was your sleep like? What he'd been doing for training? You know, HIV does not really tell you the why it just tells you what's happening?

It's up to you as an individual to figure out why is it doing this? And the reality is it is it varies a lot as you probably have seen it goes up it goes down. It's all over the map Right, it's not always as obvious what's causing these variations So I came out with more fears a couple years ago with the idea of being let's track all this other data That's already out there. So we take activity data from anyable people have, whether it's a Fitbit or a Garmin Band or a Urring or Polar, and then we do the same thing with Sleep, and then we measure heart rate from training from any Bluetooth chest strap or any chest strap

or the people are using. And then we basically measure each other on device, and then we turn all that data into a recovery score. So we're taking, you know, same we whoop does, whoop takes the same similar data, but we're using other devices rather than forcing you to wear just one. So we're trying to be a bit more flexible in the market

because not everybody wants to wear a band 24 hours a day. Not everybody's gonna buy it, not anyone wants to pay subscription, all those sorts of things. So we're trying to use the data that people are already getting from wearables, they like Garmin, Fitbit, Polar, Apple Watch, all those sorts of things. And then we measure HRV using our more PSPANs, and then we show you the whole picture of that.

So we make it easier for people to connect those dots. So if you see your HRVs doing something, it's affecting your recovery score. You can generally see, okay, well, I went in 15,000 steps yesterday. It's obvious why it's different versus my average of 8,000, double my steps, or my sleep spend six hours a night. It's been really shitty. So that's probably what's doing it. So you can actually see all these different pieces connected because again, it's gonna be your activity level

It's gonna be your mental stress. It's gonna be your training. It's gonna be your overall fitness level your nutrition All these things are going to drive HRB a daily basis and if you don't see the big picture of that You're just kind of guessing what your HRB is doing or you're guessing why it's doing that. So you know, like the system I developed called Morpheus and we're really developing it for coaches. We're working on a coaching platform and being out here shortly so that coaches have accessed all this data because that's the one thing I would say is if you're a coach, your results or your program depend on all these things that happen outside of your control.

So if I write a program, this is really what I learned early on with HRV, is I would write a program and I'd like, this is great, this is a perfect program. And then it would go to shit and I couldn't figure out why. And I'd see all the numbers happening and it made way back in the day. Like this person's not recovering well. The program's not having the results I wanted,

what's going on? And then you talk to the person and go, oh yeah, I was up to 40 more in the last night playing games. Or we, you know, I work at around Seattle. Or we have a product launch at Microsoft. I haven't slept in five days. So you just start to see like my program results weren't really all on me. They were on the person once they left the gym to go do the right thing. So it's really, it's the 23 hours of the day outside of the gym that drive the results you get from the one hour inside the gym.

And the problem I always had as a coach was if I couldn't see that and they couldn't see that. And there was no accountability and they were screwing themselves and blaming me for it. It's a bad business model. You know, like, you're, you're, they're coming in and paying me to give them results. But my program is a small piece of that. It's the potential to have results, but if they don't get enough sleep, if they don't eat the right foods, if they don't deal

with mental stress appropriately, they're screwed. They've sabotaged all the hard work that they've done and all the work I put into their program. So, you know, I realized that as a coach, I was just shooting the dark without this data, without making decisions because of this data. So, I've seen there's gotta be something out there that helps coaches have access to this and it helps coaches sort through it because it can be a lot of data. And so that was really where the agenesis

and the idea behind Morpheus came from was I wanted to figure out, okay, how can we take all this data clients are kidding it, right? Clients have wearables, clients have Apple watches, they have Fitbits, they have Uber rings, they have all these different tools that's collecting this data that the coach could be using, but the coach has no access to it. It's not exactly like, hey, let me look for your app so you bring your phone into me. That's not going to happen, you're not going to see it. Again, we're

really excited because we've been working as damn thing for two years and we're literally a few weeks or months at this point in time from having it ready to start beta testing and launching next early quarter one of 2021 So I'm really excited because it's as a coach for so many years You know, I I wouldn't know how to coach any more without having access that data because I'm so used to be able to see You know from from my own systems and just talking to people and and dealing with the systems that are built You know, but even now I still have to kind of piece things together because I have to ask them look Yeah, I've looked at more the mortgage data and how these conversations.

But once we have this tool out there, then it's just going to make it easy for every coach out there to have access to this data. And then we're building messaging tools and communication to be able to say, Hey, what's going on in your sleep last night? Go to fucking bed. It's 5 a.m. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we're building a little alert. Exactly. So basically're building a little alerts, exactly. So basically we'll have it.

So all the data is in there. And then we've built in this alert system that'll basically automatically search through the data and give you a little notification. So it could say exactly that. A Christian isn't sleeping. Tell them to get his ass to bed. And then you'll be able to sit there and message

and say, hey, what the hell, if you're reading this, go back to sleep, right? So we're building all these tools in there just to make this process easy and seamless and more practical for coaches to use. So something obviously I'm excited about because we've been working on it forever. And I think it'll be hugely valuable just because,

again, all this data is out there. It's just going to waste. I mean, people are collecting massive and massive billions of data points that nobody's actually using in a meaningful way. They're just kind of looking at it. Oh, that's cool. You know, but nothing's actually happening in a program.

The coach doesn't really know what it is or the coach doesn't know how to make change their program. And you have just basically a bunch of data that's being completely used. And I think that's a huge problem that we can solve. That's awesome, man. I'm happy for you. Well, I should, if people want to go and have a nosey around, where they go. Just train with Morpheus.com. So train with Morpheus.com is where we have the right now, we just have the consumer app. So if you're, you know, just wanted to use our, our, our each of you system for yourself. You can turn it over or just wrap as a coach. We will have, we'll have that new system coming out early next year. So once, once we get there, we'll have all kinds of stuff on the website about it right now. It's kind of under the radar because we've spent so much time working on it. But we

actually had a huge gym. We had goals. Jim asked us to build this big platform for them initially. And then they declared banks. Going to the administration this year. Yeah, they did. They went and they went completely bankrupt and sold the company to a German company, actually. So that whole thing kind of went by the wayside. But to a German company actually. So that whole thing kind of went by the wayside, but my same point in time, they gave us a significant investment to start building this thing out a lot faster. We wouldn't have been able to without that. So we were able to basically get the whole thing built on their dime. I was going to say, you saying that you hastened

the bankruptcy of Gold's gym? I think we were very, very small part. They repurposed all of their profits into your app. I wish you were that simple, but there was, there were quite a few months where they were just a fairly large sum of money. So I don't think we, uh, didn't pay us what they were exposed to for a long time, but we finally were able to get that once things went all the way through. But, uh, you know, they saw the need. They basically wanted to build a gym concept where you had live heart rate training classes, but the heart rate training and all this stuff was built around the

individual and not just built on some static heart rate screens up on the wall that weren't individualized to you. So concept was basically we're going to have everyone's going to get the recovery measure through HRV and all the other things. And then they were going to have a range of classes from lower intensity recovery classes up to your high kicker ass classes and the system basically make a recommendation about which classes were appropriate for you each day. So if you were already smoked, it would say, hey, you should probably go to this recovery class today, or if you look like you hadn't been working hard enough, you needed to give that kicking.

It would say, hey, go to these classes today. So I think we're starting to see this recognition in the industry that maybe telling everyone to go in the club gym every day and crush themselves is not a long-term Sustainable approach for more most people and it's why fitness doesn't work You know unfortunately very well for most people because they go in they bust their ass for a few weeks or a couple months And then they get burnt out or they get injured or just don't you know eventually plateau and they they get frustrated Then they go try something different and you kind of just get this mirror around trying different things But the reality is,

it's not the, it's not the thing that's gonna make the difference in results. It's how you put all these pieces together. It's how much sleep you can get. It's how much nutrition or what your nutrition looks like. It's can you manage intensity of the early basis? Can you manage the stress in your life? Can you put all these things together

because all of those things ultimately drive results because they all take energy. And there's one thing people didn't understand, it's that your body's capacity to produce energy is limited. It does not have this unending pool of energy to deal with everything through added. So it has to prioritize and make choices. So if I'm extremely mentally stressed, that takes energy.

If I'm walking around 23,000 steps just working on a daily basis, that takes energy. If I'm not getting sleep, that takes away from my energy. And recovery, first and foremost, takes a ton of energy because we're going to break muscle tissue down and break down all these things as part of the workout. Well, we have to put energy back into rebuilding them. We have to turn on antibiotic processes

and protein synthesis, and we have to put energy into making ourselves bigger and stronger and more efficient and all sorts of things, but there's a limited amount of energy we can produce in a day. So the body has to make choices and the last place it actually wants to put energies into recovery if it has to just fight for survival. So again, people have this idea that I'm going to be stressed out from work and I'm going to take it out of the gym and then I'm going to slam a red bull or something caffeinated drink and get six hours of sleep and repeat that. And they try it and that does not work because again sooner or later the body is gonna take energy away from recovery and just direct it into survival mode and your fitness isn't gonna get better eventually you're gonna get

a shoulder injury or you're gonna get a your hips gonna start bothering you or you're just not gonna feel like going to gym for a week and then you're gonna miss another week and then you're just gonna start to kind of fall off and being consistent with your training. It's consistency over a long term that produces results. It's not how many times you smash yourself in the gym in a week. And unfortunately, that's what people try and you know, that's why people often don't don't succeed. Yeah, for sure. So getting into HIV training, what are the ways that we can help to increase that number in the gym? What are the ways that we can help to increase that number in the gym? Yeah, so the biggest thing like I mentioned is it's correlated aerobic fitness So not I don't want to put it out that the anaerobic and strength and power are important those play roles and they they facilitate

Metabolic changes that help us in multiple ways and body composition But ultimately you've got to improve your aerobic system So if you look at HIV the highest people out there are the endurance athletes because they have degrees levels of cardiovascular fitness and they also have the greatest longevity. So there was a few papers out there, but there was a one study that looked at a meta-analysis and looked at basically a huge variety of papers, a huge variety of athletes, I meant, to see how their lifespan compared to the average. And the scariest thing was a lot of athletes, especially on the anaerobic side, their lifespan was either the same or worse than the average. And the scariest thing was a lot of athletes, especially in the anaerobic side, their lifespan was either the same or worse than the average person, right? That's bad. If I'm just fit in my whole life, training and sport, it should at least help me live

a little bit longer or or stay off disease a little bit, but it doesn't. So the only athletes who consistently found that lived longer than the average person were the endurance athletes. And some of them, some of the endurance athletes lived an average of eight years longer than the average person, which is a lot, right? I mean, that's 10% longer than the average lifespan. So you basically have to develop the aerobic system, which you know, like, to take a, you know, a whole year to explain you how to do that. But the simplest version, again, if you really want to boil it down to the easiest version,

is if you spend 80% of your time, this is contrary to what most people think, we spend 80% of your time doing lower and moderate intensities below, I would say, about the low 90% of your maximum heart rate, and then you spend 20% of your time in those higher intensity zones, 90% above, and you do that consistently, five, six days a week, you will see your HRB go up, you will consistently see your aerobic system improve.

And it sounds simple, but the reality is, it isn't that difficult. It's just most people, again, they don't follow that guideline. They spend three days a week trying to do the highest intensity for the shortest duration possible. They neglect those lower and more moderate intensity zones, and they're not consistent. They don't get enough consistent work in.

So if you look at all endurance athlete training, it's not two days a week. I mean, there's a difference between, you can get stronger on two days a week. You can do two full body workouts, and most people can gain or maintain strength on that. You're not going to see much fitness improvement through aerobic side beyond a certain point at two days a week of training. It just isn't going to happen. So, you've got to be more consistent with aerobic fitness and aerobic conditioning than that. It's got to be four,

five, six days a week consistently. But again, you want only about 20% of that to be what we call real high intensity, which I would define as above 90% of your but again, you want only about 20% of that to be what we call real high intensity, which I would define as above 90% of your max, and you want the rest of that to be below that. So you want your combination of more moderate, longer volume days, and then you want your higher intensity shorter days, but you've got to have both. And unfortunately, we've kind of been fed this spoon fed this idea that you just need high intensity all the time. Like, unfortunately, you need more than that because you can only do high intensity for so long before you break and you need something in between.

And so those lower and more moderate intensity sessions allow you to do more volume to get more stimulus without breaking yourself. So you need that balance. So, you know, again, your average person that they just spend, you know, let's say four or five days a week up to six for higher levels and they're consistently doing some form of aerobic training You know the majority time they're doing lower more moderate intensity work 30 40 minutes Sometimes more sometimes less and then there's been maybe two days a week doing higher intensity intervals And they are getting their hard reach up towards maximum and they consistently do that. You will see your HIV consistently climb guarantee you

What's the lower bound on that part right that you were saying? Like, like, like, yeah, like 75 80 percent, you know, probably for most average people, like 130 beats per minute, 120 is probably the lower end of where we're going to see the benefit of that. And so, like, most time I'll tell people somewhere between like 120, 150, 160, you're going to be in that, in that range for that 70 or 80 percent of the time. And then that other 20 percent of the high intensity, now you're going to be up in that 80 for that 70 or 80% of the time. And then that other 20% of the high intensity, now you're gonna be up in that 85, 90, 90% or more of your match heart rate,

which is gonna depend on what your match heart rate is, but that's where you're seeing your heart rates in the, you know, the 160s, 170s, 180s, that sort of stuff. So again, people think you need to go in there and do this high intensity every day. Even our fighters, even the best fighters in the world that trained for 20 years at this point, two days a week of sparring has kind of been our recipe for success. You know, you meet your choice, Johnson, the longest, the world record holder

entitled to penches. Now, these sparring two days and Saturdays, he wasn't in there five days a week banging it out and being an idiot like two days a week of high intensity sparring and most of the other stuff was technical drilling and just developing the skill set and strategizing, you know, building strength, that kind of stuff. But he wasn't in there five days a week trying to kill himself. That's part of why you had such a, you know, he's had such a long career and he avoided massive injuries and he was able to sustain such a high level for so long. Because again, we, we realized that if you sit there and beat the hell yourself for four or five days a week, there comes a price for that.

You can sustain it when you're 20 years old for a couple of years, but what happens? You're 25, when you're 30, when you're 35, you know, now you're paying the price. So I think the biggest thing is people just have this misguided notion that the harder they train, the better results they're going to be, but it's more about the consistency, the more consistently you can train, the better results they're going to be. So you've got to ask yourself, is your training going to be sustainable? And if your answer is, well, I beat the hell of myself every week, I'm feeling tired, you're trying to leave the gym, then probably not sustainable for that long to be honest with you. One of the things I've definitely been readpilled on this year, especially from Ben Greenfield, is that if you are not a professional athlete, you should be training for longevity in one form or another. The number of people that I know that are so religious, completely dogmatic, ideological

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

on a spin bike or on a rowing machine or whatever it might be, you should get into that. But people seem to sacrifice an awful lot of what would make them not only be able to do the sport that they love for longer, but also generally across their entire lifespan just be healthier on all markers. Yeah, I mean, look, I think we're as human beings, we're we're we're two problems. We're obsessive about things where we see a immediate feel good about so we love G BJJ.

We love something we just get obsessive about it. A lot of people at least, especially in the finish industry. And then number two, probably our biggest downfalls, we're incredibly short-sighted. Most people out there are looking for the next work out next week or the next four weeks or the next six weeks. I mean, we don't look beyond the short term to think like, okay, what does my, what does six months or six years from now look like? Because the reality is those things are going to, that time is going to happen.

You're going to get there. But if we focus literally on the next six days versus six months or six weeks or six years We make bad decisions because we're so focused on right now We're not we're really not good at least most people are not good at making decisions now They're going to pay off later. We like to make decisions now. We think you're going to pay off now We don't like to make decisions now that really aren't gonna pay off for down the road, six years, six months, 16 years, or whatever the number may be. We're just not long-term strategic thinkers or action-takers.

We tend to be very focused on in the moment and we don't really think about the long-term consequences of our actions because we just think, God, I don't feel that it's not for years now. But years? Future crystal look after it. Future jewel will sort it's not for years now. Future crystal. Future crystal look after it. Future Jolal sorted out. Yeah, exactly.

And unfortunately, you know, by the time that happens, they've already made the mistakes. I can't tell you how many athletes I've worked with from a variety of sports. And they're all, you know, once you get to their 30s, maybe late 30s, they're like, God damn it, which I knew my 20s would I know now, I would still be playing. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard that if I If I knew my 20s what I figured out over the course of my career I would still be playing the sport. I would still be one of those what are those insights? What are they saying when what do they mean when they say that a lot of it

They just realize the importance of taking care of themselves right like doctor major league baseball players They're out drinking two three nights a week after games. They're sitting there chewing tobacco They're not getting enough sleep, they're stressed out their minds. I mean, a lot of them just don't realize the importance of taking care of themselves outside the sport. And eventually, they start to fall apart, you know, they start to lose their game and everything goes to shit. So they start to, no, eventually start looking for ways. That's, that's kind of funny because you start to see the, the athletes that really embrace technology are the ones that are older and have been around a while and they start to realize,

if I'm going to keep trying to compete with these younger guys, I've got to do something because my game is going to shit and these guys who are all beating me now. So, like I said, most of it is they just start to realize that again, you can't just go into the training with the idea that you've got to outwork everybody. You've got to go into the training with the idea that you've got to be smarter than everybody and that comes with taking care of your body and not just abusing it. So again, you kind of see the younger athletes,

they won't get any sleep and they'll have a bunch of caffeine or stimulants and they'll just be the shit of themselves. Especially them and May fighters. You look at the young and May fighters are sparring four days a week, five days a week, six days a week, that's a half what they're doing. And then they do great for two, three, four years,

maybe five, very most, and then they're out of sport. You know, you have to leave the last that long. So you just kind of over time, you just realize, maybe I should have taken a bit different approach, and now it's maybe too late. So, unfortunately, it's just kind of the nature of the game. But there's enough, I think there's more and more education out there, and there's more emphasis on recovery now

and every four, there's more tools, right? There's all sorts of things that are coming out now from hyper ice and hypervote, to norm attack boots, to all these different modalities are starting to be more widespread and I think it's because people are starting to actually realize how important these things actually are to sustainable performance, to sustainable health. What are some of your go-to workouts when you're in the gym and you've got an hour, you've got an alright amount of time and you think, right, I want to do something that I know is going to positively affect my HIV over the long term.

What are some of the go-to workouts that you do? Yeah, so I kind of do a variety of things. I like going outside and riding my bike, so I do get outside and bike. So there's benefit of speed outside from my high intensity working to play racquetball pre-COVID. At least I played racquetball just to get my heart rate up and have a little more fun than the sprinting in a treadmill. So I tried to get in the racquetball court twice a week. And the rest of the time I just do a variety of kind of asset works. I tend to do circuits. I'm more of a lifter by nature. So I don't like monotony. Like I hate that.

I'm just not the kind of guys who do 90 minutes of the same shit. So I might do five or 10 minutes. The first of climber, they might jump rope for five minutes. They might do some shadow box. And there's like that for five minutes. So they might jump back in the first climber for another five or 10 minutes.

So I tend to do like a, you know, I call it like a road work circuit, if you will. So I'll just use a variety of moving patterns and a variety of things. And then like in the summer time, I'll get out, right by a call, go swimming, I'll try to be you know, hiking, that sort of thing outdoors. So I just like the variety of it. You know, some people are the exact opposite. They want to do the exact same thing. They want to be extremely monotonous. You tend to find the endurance athletes fall in that category of people that are

naturally predisposed to the endurance side of things. They're very monotonous based. They want to do the same shit. And then you find the power lifters on the strength athletes are more anaerobic. They tend to hate that sort of thing. So this kind of figure out what people naturally gravitate towards to and find something that again they enjoy doing. So if I was forced to be in a treadmill for 90 minutes, I would kill myself. But other people, that's all they want to do is you get on something monotonous, elliptical, and they want to just go for it and and they want to just don't out, and that's their way of training they enjoy. So, again, like I said, pre-COVID, I was playing the racquetball about twice a week, and then I would do a variety of circuits, another three to four days a week, and generally you do about three days

of lifting, kind of mixed in there as well. So, you should do like an upper body and lower body, and total body spread across three different strength workouts and then a variety of the circuit based training between and then the racquetball. A little bit of sport to distract you as well. And you found over your long career of training and being a trainer, you found that that's like an optimal split for you, something that you can sustain and that gives you the results that you need. Yeah, for me, yeah, that's exactly right. So I tended to again, I fall in the same traps. So when I start playing a bit more acroball, I start getting more competitive. I start playing

and trying to play a bit more and I start, you know, playing a little bit longer and then I'm like, God damn it. Now my shoulders are bothering me. I could just kind of fell into my own trap, right? So I can see it coming and I still do it. But then I learned from like, okay, I basically kind of realized as I hit 40 about two days a week of high intensity, because we're at the ball, it's high intensity. It's a lot of sprint work. It's a lot of change of direction. And it is a lot of load in your body. So I realize, okay, I can really only play high intensity about two days a week.

And if I'm going to go in there and play any more than that, it's going to be just technical drilling and trying to get better at the sport and just learn how to play the sport better. But yeah, it's kind of evolved over time. And like I said, the summertime Seattle's, you know, a beautiful spot to be. So I'll go out, I'll ride a bike, then I trail the work. And I know not not fast, but I'll just go out and get my cardio into the bike and hiking and that kind of stuff. So then I'm going to Hawaii here in a couple of weeks.

So same thing, I'll get some light work on the beach and, you know, be outdoors and train and just, I enjoy the outdoor aspect of it. So I try to do that when I can. And then I enjoy, like I said, from my high intensity stuff, I like the sport aspect of it, because I just, I enjoy that side a lot more. There's going to be a lot of bodybuilders and powerlifters and weightlifters listening who don't like the fact

that they're going to have to jump on a bike and do some cardio now. Well, they won't unfortunately, but the unfortunate part about the sport is if you look around the sport, it's been a lot of them that died incredibly young, right? There's been a number of bodybuilders and never power lifters. We're not exactly in the best health, you know, and I respect the fact that if you want to beat the living shit out yourself to squat thousand pounds, be my guest, right? I mean, that's that's your choice. You can certainly do that.

But if you look at the guys, even like the Dave Tates and the Louis Simmons, I think as they've aged, you can see them taking a different perspective. Dave has been vocal about his injuries and he's been vocal about wanting to rehab himself. The first strength coach I worked with, Bill Gillespie, I think, is incredibly strong. I've been to about 700 pounds. I believe it's 50 plus years old and he's just an absolute monster. And a lot of these guys, again, as they age, you see the wear and tear on them. They can't move very well.

They can't get out of bed half the time. They're just in pain a lot of time. And the reality is, you know, they're probably not gonna live any longer in the average person. They certainly might live a less, you know, shorter in the average person. They certainly might live a less shorter in the average person. And definitely an unfulfilled life, right?

Like it's gonna be painful. Anyone who's seen the Ronnie Coleman documentary, let it's very uncomfortable to watch. It's not fun. No, but that's a... But be not... That's the sacrifice that people make to get to the top, top, top, the sport.

If you've got Jay Cutler breathing down your neck, you have to go and squat 700 solid ass pounds like for reps and scream yeah, buddy. But the vast majority of athletes aren't getting to that stage. They may be competing at a local or a regional level or perhaps a national level, but they're not going to do that.

So it's a really difficult pill to swallow and a bunch of my buddies who've competed at worlds for powerlifting have had to take this on. They've had to realize, look, like, I need to concede, this is not my job. This is not where my earnings comes from. Yes, it's where my passion is, but just because I'm passionate about something doesn't mean that I should give it everything at the expense of my life. And it's such an uncomfortable, you know, it makes people viscerally feel. And rightly so, you care about this sport. You genuinely care about your performance. You want to do well, but you got to let it go.

You got to make some sacrifices for you in 20 years time. Exactly. I think, look, I think it's valuable for people to see the running colon documentary, because it's valuable for people to see like, shit, I'm gonna become like that, but I'm not making that kind of money. Or I'm having that level of success.

I mean, what exactly am I destroying myself for? So yeah, I mean, look, if people understand the consequences and they make the decision to do anyway, more power to them. It's their life they can do that they want. And I think if you ask Ronnie Coleman, he doesn't regret it. I think you can go over it.

He says the only thing you regret is not trying to go for a five instead of two with that eight hundred pound squat. Yeah, exactly. You know what? Hey, that's Ronnie Coleman is one of the best they ever do in the sport. You respect that. I mean, that's what it takes, you know, to get to that level. But again, if you're going to put in all that time and effort, then hopefully it pays off for you.

And you end up like Ronnie Coleman, because if you put in that time and effort and you pay that price, and ultimately, you're just some guys in his couch at home talking about his squat five years ago, then you're the albundi of the world. And you're your reminition by the past that really was never anywhere near what these guys were. And the reality is, look, there's only one Ronnie Coleman. There's only one to meet you as Johnson. I mean, these guys are one in a million or one in a billion that get to the very top of these sports. And I hate to say it, but a lot of them, they come down to really good genetics and lots

of drugs and lots of sacrifice. And if you're not willing to have, you know, you don't have all that combination, you're probably not going to get to the top of a lot of these sports. So like you just gotta make a decision for yourself and people need to have those conversations with With themselves, you know, is is what I'm sacrificing worth what I'm getting, you know, is the juice worth the squeeze man. Yeah, we are Yeah, we have a concept that we've come up with over the last few years called the fitness menopause and It's precisely what you're describing there. You, for us, it was as we approached our 30s and we realized, I'm getting a little bit out of breath going up a set of stairs and I've done bodybuilding, like bro lifting for the last sort of eight years and I've been overeating

protein and under eating micronutrients and I haven't looked after my cardio system and I haven't got any mobility. And you see people that might be brought on by an injury, it might just be brought on by the monotony boredom of training. And they start to, oh, I'll have a look at yoga, I'll have a look at CrossFit, I'll have a look at functional fitness or triathlons or BJJ, whatever it might be. And that's what happens, man. And it comes across hopefully for most people not too late. I want you to ask about the role of breathing and breath work in affecting HG Viable.

HIV. What can we do? What's some of the strategies? Yeah. So I mean, like I said, your respiratory function and your respiratory capacity is closely tied to your parasympathetic system because it's just kind of how the two systems are intertwined. So they're like, there's a million ways to roam in that one. There's lots of different breathing strategies out there, but most of them are built around a prolonged exhale, a slowed controlled breathing pattern, and just learn how to mentally disconnect yourself and the stress around you. So I go online, you can look at micro Robertson and Bill Hartman, they've got courses on breathing. There's other people out there, Brian McKenzie.

A bunch of people have started digging into breathing. There's Wim Hof and there's lots of different ways and people are talking about breathing out there. And again, there's lots of different ways to accomplish more or less the same thing, but what it all comes down to is just improving your breathing pattern efficiency, improving your ability to activate that parachute and the nervous system through your breathing techniques,

developing, again, the breathing is like a and protect nervous system through your breathing techniques, developing again, the breathing is like a squatter. It's like a lunge. You have a breathing pattern that you fall into based on your physiology and based on these trained attributes that you get over time. So a lot of it, again, just kind of comes down to recognizing, in my very, you can basically call it

a sympathetic or paracimacy breather and different strategies around those things. But if you want to dig into it, you can dig into it. There's lots of rabbit holes you can go down to. But for most people, literally just kind of spending three to four minutes a day, focus on full inhales and full slow exhales where you're getting a complete exhalation of the respiratory system pattern

and spend time mentally relaxing. Just doing that is gonna break a lot of the stress cycle that we see in a daily basis. So there's so many different techniques. It's like asking what exercise it depends on what you need and it depends on what you're going to do. So if you want to dig in a breathing, go find those guys that I mentioned.

But by and large, it's, again, it's just learning how to take full inhales, full exhalations, and then being able to mentally relax at the same time. If you can spend five minutes doing that, you will, I guarantee you'll see your HIV go up a little bit, just because you'll learn how to take a break for a second, activate that parasympathetic system through that process. Brian was on the show a year ago. I had Mr. McKenzie on and we're now actually sponsored by his state app. So anyone that wants to get some breath working out into their daily routine, bit.ly slash state wisdom,

and you can get two weeks for free, just download it on the app store on iOS. So, it's a huge, a huge, a huge valuable. I mean, literally, if you, if you, if people want to do nothing else, spend five minutes a day just relaxing and going through some of those drills, I guarantee you, we'll see you later,

but you go up because again, it's just, we go through our day and we're kind of, in this chronically stressed out state deal with work, deal with life, especially now, COVID is made that even worse. And not only that, people are sitting at home doing doing jack shit because you can't go anywhere else, right? So it's this bad combination of stress plus lack of movement is is equal in, you know, we're going to see repercussions of of COVID long after the virus itself has gone from this, you know, almost a year of this change in behavior that's negative. I mean, gyms are shut down. You're going to have to order out and get food or, you know, deal with the whole different nutritional strategy half the time. And then you're just sitting around stressed. So again, we'll see the price

of that. But spending like I said, five, 10 minutes a day, just luring out a breath and relax. It just kind of resets the switch and it can make a huge difference. That five, five, 10 minutes will expand out into affecting an aggregate across the day. Yeah, absolutely. I honestly thought that the dose would be so low that it would cause a state change, but the elongated trait change would be like pretty tough to achieve.

No, you'll absolutely see it. And it depends on the people. So the people you'll see the biggest impact with are the type of people who just like can't relax. They're just always on. They're always going, they have shitty HIV. You know, they're just go, go, go, go. Like those people, there's something about learning

how to turn that, that relax switch on and learning how to shut that, that go, go, go switch off. Even if it's for five minutes, they just develop, they develop the quality to learn how to do it better throughout the rest of the day or throughout other times in the evening. So I tend to tell people, if nothing else, learning how to do this because you'll sleep better and that better sleep will translate to a million things. So you'll see oftentimes, so you've taken power left during you say, okay, I want you to spend five minutes in the middle of the day, and I want you to do this breathing exercise, and I want you to try to drop your heart. So, the easy thing people can do is just go to these breathing drills and look at their heart rate, and

your goal is to get your heart rate as low as possible. I mean, just look at just sit there and get your heart rate as low as possible, because that's the indication that you're relaxing, and then you're getting that parasympathetic system turned on. So it's a really simple biofeedback tool as you're doing these being exercises and trying to relax and you'll find people suck at it at first because they're trying to hard you the heart rate down and it's kind of counterproductive but they'll eventually learn how to do it and they'll learn how to relax and learn how to see the heart rate come down.

And then again that process of learning how to do that will carry over into just a better response to stress and a better ability to control that. That's also something I would recommend in the gym. So probably one of the easier things you can do that's gonna be more valuable than anything else is as we're doing intervals, okay, a lot of times, I would say 99% of the time, what do people focus on the interval?

They focus on driving their heart rate up and going in as intensely as they can, right? They never focus on actually being their heart rate back down as quickly as they can in between intervals. So whenever I'm coaching intervals or doing conditioning work like that, it's not just about the work, it's about the recovery in between the intervals. So I want people to learn how to not just drive their heart rate up. I want people to learn how to drive their heart rate back down. And so that's again a big part of what I talk about heart rate recovery. So I want athletes or people focused on how quickly

my heart rate come back down in between interval. And if they can develop that skill, because part of it is just fitness, the aerobic system. And then part of it is the mental processes and the mental skills that drive that. So you can learn how to bring your heart rate down faster by practicing it. Because again, part of that is an actual skill.

It's being able to turn that stress system off as quickly as possible and allow the heart rate to come back down. So if you're in the gym and you're doing intervals, just literally spend the time after you're interval seeing how quickly your heart rate comes down in 60 seconds. Or if you're doing a shorter interval 30 seconds, whatever the case may be, see how quickly you can get your heart rate to come down and focus on that. Make that part of the goal to work out is to try to drop your heart rate as fast as you can between those intervals and the better you can get at that, the better you're going to get at just

being able to activate that perishing system system outside of the gym as well. It's a value of a huge valuable skill. I call it dynamic energy control. It's learning how to control the energy expansion, not just by going as hard as we can, but actually recovering as quickly as you can. So it's just another thing to add to your conditioning or aerobic work that makes it a bit more interesting than just going as hard as I can and then repeat. Well, try to actually learn how that goes as hard as you can, recover as quickly as possible, and then repeat that process and just add in that layer in. People have to find makes it a little more exciting and add to a hugely valuable component too

as well. What is some of the physical traits that people can do to achieve that control breathing, calm thoughts? Yeah, all of it. So generally speaking, if we're in an extended position, a hyper extended position, it slows down our recovery and it slows down that recovery from the respiratory function. If we can get a little bit more of a flex, a little bit more diaphragmatically, advantageous position and we can work on expanding and getting full expansion, the ribcage and full breast. And then again, a complete exhale while mentally being able

to relax and turn that switch down a bit, that's the combination that will work really well. And then positionally, it makes a big difference. So if you have someone that just can't get their heart rate down, they just suck at it. The first thing you can have to do is just sit or even lay down. Just positionally, your heart will come down a lot faster if you're laying down or you're seated versus you're standing. So, it's kind of the remedial 101. Like, you cannot get your heart to come down, have them lay down, have them close their

eyes, and have them really focus on just that full relaxation as the lay in the laying position. Okay, now they've got that down really well. They can get that down. Okay, now have them do it seated. Okay, now they can do it seated. Now, haven't do it standing. So, you can't go to this progression of where it's easiest to recover as lane. It's, you know, then, then seated, then standing, then moving. You can kind of go to this progression of letting them get that. But so in general, I'll just go ahead and give you guys some general guidelines. If you're going to 90% more of your max for, you know, any length of time,

generally speaking, we use a 60-second recovery after that. You want to be able to recover between 30 and 40 beats per minute from your max. So if I am doing something, let's see my max is 190. If I get in the 180s, I should be able to do a 60-second recovery and consistently drop it 30 beats per minute. Now, if I do 20 of them, obviously that's going to change and I'm going to have a hard time towards the end of the beginning, but that's kind of our hallmark because we want to hit 30 beats per minute in terms of a recovery from a max intensity exercise. That's a kind of a generic prescription, but if you can shoot from that, chances are you're in pretty good condition and you're able to control it pretty well. Most people hit like 10, 20 as the most and they can't do it consistently. But we want consistently be able to drop 30 beats per minute across at least three to five reps of high intensity work. If you can get there, you can do that.

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

But the impact afterwards, and this kind of goes back to what you were saying before, is your training methodology making you feel like shit? When you leave the gym or is it making you feel good, the things that make you feel good make you feel good for a reason, a good night's sleep, a nice healthy meal that doesn't make you feel inflamed or tired or grumpy afterwards.

A good training session that makes you feel recovered, whatever it might be. And the way that you feel after having done breathwork as well is just so at peace, present, it's... Yeah, I mean, those carry over. I mean, again, those carry over because they're breaking that cycle of stress and they'll translate into better sleep, they'll translate into better recovery, they'll translate into better health in general, because you're feeling good for a reason, because your body is doing something that's beneficial, and it's an important thing. So, I mean, that's a look at the really simple guideline for,

for I get people, if you don't measure anything whatsoever, you know, if you don't, if you walk out of gym, again, I kind of like to use 80-20 rule, because it does apply, if you walk out of the gym 80% time, and you feel at least as good as you went in or better, and then 20% time you feel like shit, you're probably in the right track, right? But if you flip that, an 80% time you walk in a gym feeling like shit, and only 20% of the time you feel the same or better,

you're probably screwed. So you can just kind of use it, like if you don't use any technology, ask yourself how you feel as you walk out of Jim. And more often not, you feel worse. You're probably going to break sooner or later because of it. Who is the best conditioned athlete in the UFC at the moment? Do you think are there any conditioning monsters in there?

No, DJ left. I don't think anyone's kind of come up to his level, but you get some of the... I mean, we haven't you know I we haven't seen a lot of the five round wars I think the U.S.C. that we used to see is option for every reason I think people have I think that you saw a lot of people realize that you can't go as hard as you possibly can to five rounds out gas and out and most athletes can't so they'll there are people more strategic now about it I think they've become smarter with energy You do see less athletes or fewer athletes gassing out really bad early rounds

because people just realize eventually that you have to be a bit more strategic in it. So I can't think of anyone off top of my head that I think is anywhere near what DJ was to meet you as Johnson when he was still fighting the UFC. So I still think he's in my mind, set the standard as far as the main thing. I love DJ absolutely was, Best Christian out of the UFC.

I think I haven't seen anybody in there that can, that, you know, that would say has been able to take that from him. Even though he's not in the UFC anymore. Yeah, it is interesting, man, especially watching, I was thinking back to Tyrone Woodley's fight, like a couple of his most recent ones and he was so strategic with his energy.

Super, super slow, you know, he looks like he's walking through mud sometimes, but yeah, I mean, I guess it's a big dude with a lot of muscle mass. He's probably focusing very, very heavily on conserving that, that energy. Yeah, I mean, it's again, that's in their skill. You have to learn. And it's not just the actual skills of throwing punches and kicks and all the things are along with it's the skill is conserving energy and knowing when to use what you've got. Because be

used at the wrong time. We use it too long. You're going to pay the price. I mean, that could be was always well conditioned because he's just a mentally tough faster than anything. He's also a really well conditioned. You know, I think it's both. I think he was the guy who was

also he was very well conditioned and then he was like DJ, he was extremely mentally tough. So you were never going to see him fall apart because he had both the fitness and the mental side of things locked down. That's why you could just take people and pound the shit out from five rounds

or usually they'd last that long with him. Just an angry, angry little Russian associated band, isn't he? Yeah, absolutely, but he was, he was, I love watching him, but he was fun to watch because he's beat people mentally and physically. He's, he's kind of like a throwback to the, the older wrestling crowd. I mean, it's so funny, because the USC is, Gondas weird evolution where

early on the USC was specialists, you know, it was the guys that were really, really, really good at one thing that ultimately won. And first it was the BGJ guys from the Hoistgracy era. And then it became the wrestlers who basically took everyone down. And then it was strikers again. And then there was this point where people became, how to become really well-rounded. And then now you've kind of like, if everyone's well-rounded, then it's back to like someone who's well-rounded and has a specialty.

So that's interesting, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the way it's evolved. So everyone now has to be well-rounded. Now they don't have a big hole in their game. Because you will get exploited if you suck it wrestling, if you suck it striking, if you suck it grappling, somebody will beat you because of that. So you have to at least have pretty baseline competency against all those things. But then you still now have to have something that you really have to be a freak in something as well. You see me freak. I mean, yeah, Kabea was a freaking wrestling, right? He could take you

down and beat the hell out of you. Again, I hate to go back to DJ again. I think DJ is the most well-rounded to my perspective, because he was good at striking, good at wrestling, good at grappling. And really, he was pretty equally amazing at all three of those, and he was screaming well, condition mentally tough. So I think that's why he was able to have the dominant run. You see, I mean, I was in his corner for the very first title he won against Benavitas wherever he was 2008 or 9 or whatever that was and you know to

watch him consistently perform the level he did was just testament to the athlete he was but yeah it's funny to see that game kind of come almost full circle in a weird way but everyone's skillsets raised but you know it's kind of come back to this, like, hey, you can't suck at anything, you've got to get everything. But then, if you have one thing that you're just amazing at, you're going to be able to use that because that's your advantage. So it's been a crazy thing to watch the sport evolve for the last 20, 20 years or so. Now, I think I started watching it.

I started training in 2003. So 17 years of watching the UFC's and pride and dreams and one FC and the whole thing in between. So it's been a fun ride. I bet it has. What about the world of weight cutting? Is it still as brutal as we used to hear about a few years ago, or is the recent rules and warning to it?

Yeah, I think probably I think the rules. Yeah, I think it's probably been down a bit. I mean, I think people are part of it is, student-related, you realize cutting a massive amount of weight. Maybe as in the rules, it's probably been down a bit. I think people are part of it is, you know, sooner or later you realize cutting a massive amount of weight. Maybe as in the advantage you thought it once was. It's not, I mean, when you had kind of a Greg, you're dropping down to 145. I mean, Jesus, I had a huge advantage there,

but aside from those situations, you know, a lot of guys just are realizing that you're so drawn out and you're so depleted that you don't always perform very well because of that. And then you also had aSC and Matt Hewlett for never viewers, 1SCs kind of change their entire structure. Like they have hydration tests, and their weight classes are actually a step above

where they normally are. So the 135's actually fought at 145, and they've kind of engineered the whole process of cutting weight and what weight classes are. And I think that's been successful for them. They've had very few issues over there. So if you don't actually make a hydration, you can lose your purse. It's a totally different thing than making weight.

So you actually get hydration checks and you have to stay within certain guidelines of that or you can be fine for it. So I think it's changed things to the one F.D. world entirely. And I think the UFC eventually, you know, kind of started to realize it's not good to have athletes missing weight, not good to have athletes going to the hospital before they can't fight. So I think the athletes themselves have kind of realized that maybe actually just being really, you know, well conditioned and coming in and shape and not having to drop 20 pounds is a better recipe for success in trying to have this, you know, 5 or 8 pound weight advantage over your opponent

when you actually step in the octagon. So I think it's gotten better. I mean, the old days were crazy and I can tell you, and the stories of walking into, you know, of the old, we'd be in the hotels together, you'd walk into a sauna, the hotel had one, the gym had one and you'd just see these guys just murdering themselves five days out. I'm like, man, you're five days out and you're trying to drop weight in the sun on your screwed. Like you could just see this prolonged draw and you can see the torture they had ahead of them.

So we always focused on you, you want to drop as much as necessary, but you want to drop it over the shortest time possible. Like literally you're better off dropping as much weight for, you know, the last day, then you are dropping a moderate amount of weight for five days because that prolonged depletion that just crushes you. And so again, guys should make this mistake of going into a fight week, you know, let's say 15 pounds of other fight weight. And they would try to drop that 15 pounds over five days or more, 20 pounds, whatever it is over over the last four or five days of the camp before the fight and again

That's just a stupid thing to do because you're you're chronically depleted for Five days and you just traveled probably across the world or across the country at least in a different time zone You're eating different foods your stress out of your mind because of the fight like you're throwing all of this shit yourself And then you're trying to drop all this weight on top of it It's just a terrible terrible recipe. So we wouldn't try to drop really any weight until the last 24 hours You'd want to be in position from a from a camp jam point to where the last 24 hours and the last you know Really it's two four or five hours you would drop as much as you needed to but you wouldn't spend the entire fight We're trying to drop weight for God's sakes. So that's you know It's the mistake people made, but they've helped some of them, some of them didn't.

I've never had to do it, thankfully, but I've watched a bunch of different documentaries. There's this famous clip that keeps on getting reshared on UFC from one of the ultimate fight seasons where this guy's so, so far over. And he's trying to escape and his two coaches have got their foot on the edge of the sauna. He's like trying to open the sauna door. No, no, no, no, no, five more minutes, five more minutes. And then he's got his sweat suit on and though, he's like, just crawls out onto the floor and they peel the sweat suit off him. There's a BBC documentary about a Liverpool MMA fighter watching him in his hotel room, hot bath covered in towels, putting ice in his mouth and then spitting covered in towels, putting ice in his mouth

and then spitting it back out like every trick in the book. And he just looked, it was just so much suffering. And you think, right, okay, and now you need to get yourself from that place into a position where everything is firing. You've got absolutely everything figured out. And you can step in there and with someone who's trying to take your head off. Yeah, it's crazy. Like, say, you want to take your head off. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Like I said, you want to go basically, weigh-ins would be the Friday morning and then you're fighting sometimes Saturday afternoon.

I mean, you sometimes you don't listen 24 hours. Like you said, you go from the doorsteps of death to trying to fight for your life in a day. It's super, honestly. Like I said, the thing is, you're not gonna have that big of a weight advantage. Like, that's how you cut five pounds or eight pounds or whatever more than extra guy. Like those five or eight pounds

are rarely the difference in the fight. It's about so much more than this moderate weight advantage you think you can get over your opponent by cutting more weight than he did. Like, it's rarely going to be the difference maker compared to the difference maker is the conditioning. What your state is and you actually can get in the Arctic. I think people were stupid, honestly, for taking that approach for so long and thinking that

this one-way class difference or this five pound-way advantage or whatever was the deciding factor in the fight of the career when there's so many other things that they go into that process that are ultimately driving success far more than that. So I'm not I'm not betting man, but if I was, I watched all these guys over years, I could pretty much tell you who was going to lose the fight and who wasn't half time because you'd see him in the sauna, packing dinner, Tuesday. You know, you got to kind of figure it out who is probably not going to win their fight.

You'd see it at the hotels before the fight. Yeah. I don't know, man. Given the choice between being 5% heavier in the ring or 20% more positive and 10% mentally sharper, now I'll take the having a little bit less mass but feeling great and firing on old cylinders. Yeah, it was just this mistake and thought that bigger was always going to be heavy or was

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

conditioning side and the mental side are driving this, not the five pounds that you might have in your opponent or the six pounds or whatever. It's a common thread that I know that I've heard you talk about it a lot to do with our belief that more is always going to be better, that beating ourselves in the gym is going to lead to more results. And we're seeing that as well as you say this, extremist mentality, humans are absolutists and it's the same as well when you find your new racquetball, BJJ, whatever the next physical obsession is.

You just go all in and finding that messy middle is precisely where it works, right? Yeah, well, so there's an experiment done, I don't know, decades ago in these rats. And they repeated some other animals, but they basically would take these electrodes and they would tap into the dopamine centers in the brain. And they could press a little lever, a little button. And that button would basically send a direct current into dopamine response centers and you could just dopamine spike. And they could self-control this, right? So they could press this button, this little lever, and it would just constantly send the spike

into the dopamine centers and cause this elevation. And what they basically found is that these little bastards would lever press to their own detriment. The point they would stop taking care of it, they'd stop eating, they would stop taking care of their young, they would basically stop doing everything. Like they would just sit there and lever press and lever press and lever press and lever press

until they would fall apart and die, more or less. So basically, if you look at what we're doing, I mean, that's kind of these sports and these extreme things. They kind of give us that little dopamine spike of like, oh, shit, novelty. It's this whole thing driven around how our dopamine system rewards things. And so we're just seeing this constant mentally stimulating dopamine spike reward from from these different things But again, we're doing it to our own detriment and we're doing it to our own long-term, you know sacrifice and we're gonna pay the price

But again, these mice and these other they did monkeys they actually did human beings forgot say so this study would never be approved today But basically they would find that if you if you tapped directly into that dopamine center and you gave somebody a button that you could press to get there, they would do nothing else. Like I said, they would stop nursing their young, they would stop eating, they would stop doing anything. They would just sit there and love or press themselves into oblivion to get that dopamine spike. And I think in a lot of ways, that's what we do.

As human beings, we get, we get so focused on whatever it is that causes that little dopamine hit, you know, whether it's a high intensity workout or it's getting the gym and sparring or doing something, or it's you know, rack of all and some stupid sense. I mean, we just kind of get these little, these little hits and we just keep pressing that damn lever until sooner or later we break and something pays the price for it. But it's just kind of interesting how we're wired to seek reward like that's gambling. It's the thing about gambling. So why do we gamble?

Because the uncertainty of gambling and the potential of win makes us get put in those dollars and pull that lever. Even though people are smart enough to realize you're going to lose. I mean, have you been to Vegas? People have spent billions of dollars playing games and know they're going to lose. It's the same reasons. It's how our dopamine system was wired to seek reward and to seek these things and to continue to do things at the immediate idea of reward rather than the long term idea of

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

half the time and pass our genes on the next generation and the whole process repeats. Totally right, man. I had a guy called Andrew Steele who's written a book about longevity and the cure for aging, getting older in an ageless society and this longevity, whether it be through transhumanism, whether it's enhanced through drugs, whether it's through transhumanism, whether it's enhanced through drugs, whether it's uploading our brains into computers, it's like a fascinating ethical discussion to think about what a life would be like,

whether it's infinite. It's got no end to it. Until that happens, people need to stop fucking the shit up by doing stupid workouts. Look, Joe, man, I've loved it. It's been really, really cool. It's everything that I wanted to get out about HIV. If people want to find out more or follow you online, where should they go? Yeah. So eight weeks out.com and main site, just the number eight, then weeks out.com,

you can jump on the old Instagram, just coach Joel Jamison, J-A-M-I-E-S-O-N and post on post everything on IG and Facebook. You can find me on there, but eight weeks out, the main site and other than that, IG is probably the two best places to find me. Perfect. Thank you, man. Awesome. Good talking to you. you