Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Paul Hough on Useful and Useless Fitness Tech

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Do you wear an Oura Ring, Whoop Band, FitBit, Apple Watch, or other fitness tracker, or ever thought about getting one? Advances in technology and people’s desire to take their health and fitness into their own hands have made wearable fitness devices more popular than ever. These tools claim to offer us unprecedented levels of insight into our health and well-being, but how accurate are these devices when it comes to tracking your heart rate, step count, total daily energy expenditure, sleep, stress, or recovery? Are these gadgets really that useful? Paul Hough returns to the podcast to discuss the topic of wearable fitness technology and the “quantified self” movement. In case you’re not familiar with Paul, he’s a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Science at Oxford Brookes University in the UK and has published several studies in academic journals. He’s also a fellow author, and his new textbook, Advanced Personal Training, which aims to turn science into applicable practice for personal trainers. And on the hands-on side, he’s worked with elite-level athletes in tennis and Formula One. In this interview, Paul and I discuss . . . - The “quantified self” and what wearable tech can tell you about your health - The accuracy of these gadgets and how useful they really are - What these devices are good at (and what they’re not good at) - How tracking can be counterproductive and the importance of considering why you're monitoring - Heart Rate Variability (HRV): who should track it and why - And more . . . So, if you’re interested in wearable fitness devices and want to learn whether you should buy one, listen to this podcast and let me know what you think! Timestamps (0:00) - Please leave a review of the show wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to subscribe! (3:53) - Is it important to track our health with health & fitness trackers? (12:27) - What are your thoughts on health & fitness trackers? (43:30) - Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://www.muscleforlife.show/vip (46:18) - How well do health & fitness trackers measure recovery and stress? (52:54) - Who should we track HRV and why? (1:03:30) - Is there anything you would like to add? (1:06:04) - Where can we find you and your work? Mentioned on the Show: Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://www.muscleforlife.show/vip Paul Hough’s website: www.exerciseandsportscience.com Paul’s textbook Advanced Personal Training: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09HXGDLNT/?tag=mflweb-20 Paul’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_h0ugh/ Paul’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_hough

Hello and welcome to Muscle for Life. I am Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today to learn about fitness tech, fitness wearables, what's useful, what is not useful. And I wanted to record this episode because there are more of these devices out there than ever before. And a few of them like Aura and Whoop and Fitbit, Apple Watch and others have big marketing budgets. And so more and more people are hearing about these things and asking me about some of the claims that some of these companies make. In some cases, they would have you believe that their little device is going to give you unprecedented insights into your health, into your well-being, into your ability to recover from your training and deal

with stress, into the quality of your sleep, and so on and so on. And in this episode, you're going to learn the truth about those types of claims. You're going to learn how useful these gadgets really are. And you're going to be hearing from Paul Huff, who has been on the show before. He is a senior lecturer in sport and exercise science at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. Paul has published several studies in academic journals. He's also a fellow author. He recently released a textbook called Advanced Personal Training, which contains a lot of practical evidence-based information for improving body composition, improving performance, improving health. The title makes it sound like something

that is only for personal trainers. But if you like the type of material that I produce, if you like this podcast, if you like my articles, if you like my books, you probably will also like Paul's book, Advanced Personal Training, because it contains a lot of practical evidence-based information for people who want to improve their performance, health, body composition. And it is equally, the information in the book is equally applicable to individuals who just want to do that with themselves as it is to people who want to do that in others, personal trainers. Hey, Paul, thanks for taking time to come back on the podcast and talk with me this time about quantified self,

fitness, health and fitness gadgets, wearables. Hi, Mike. Yeah, thanks for having me on again. I'm looking forward to the discussion. Yeah, yeah. So this is a topic I've touched on here and there. I've talked about activity trackers and how they're not great for estimating calorie expenditure because people will ask about that. Can they just go off of their Apple Watch or their Fitbit or something for estimating their total daily energy expenditure? No, I wouldn't recommend that. I think I've commented on

tracking HRV, but I haven't had an in-depth discussion about these devices and the different metrics that the people who sell them promote and how important and useful is this stuff really. And so that's why I wanted to bring you back on the show to get into all the details. Oh, yeah. It's something I'm asked uh fairly regularly about as well because more and more people are kind of using fitness trackers and apps and things and uh they've certainly become more popular and the marketing is good on some of these devices they do a good job selling them and making you think that maybe maybe these devices are not entirely necessary but maybe you could put them in the category of like supplements, not necessary, but certain supplements are going to materially improve your regimen,

which then can improve your results. And of course, the question that many people have is how true is that with these devices? Like, does it really matter if we track our HRV or what about our recovery scores or stress levels or tracking our sleep quality and then trying to calibrate our training or our physical stress levels to how we sleep and on and on and on? Yeah, it's become a lot more popular since devices have become more accessible and affordable and the technology has improved as well. So there's this kind of movement known as the quantified self, whereby people are taking more ownership of their own health and fitness by measuring various metrics on themselves.

So, of course, years ago, we weren't really able to do this. I mean, the best we had was like pedometers which you know suffer bad accuracy problems and then of course since fitness trackers and smart watches have evolved they measure more and more things so people have become more interested in tracking and it's just become a lot easier beforehand if you if you wanted to measure your physical activity even if you had an objective measure like a step counter, you know, it's still just log it manually and you'd have to kind of note that down in your own diary and keep a record, which, you know,

adherence to that was pretty poor. So it's kind of mainly used more so in research. But now these devices, they pretty much all sync up to an app which automatically downloads your data, gives you your scores and information which is you don't have to think about it much which is so there's a very low barrier to entry now on these things but as you touched upon one of the things that's important is accuracy and certain devices i think there's certain metrics like step counts now, which most devices, particularly of the established brands like Apple, Fitbit, and Garmin, etc., have been validated for step counts.

So they provide a really good measure of your daily steps. Like you mentioned, when it comes to energy expenditure, this is a lot more difficult, probably impossible to measure accurately using a wrist-worn device. difficult probably impossible to measure accurately using a wrist-worn device so it used to be that the devices would just use step counts and the accelerometer in your device to work out movement and then apply algorithms to that data to give you energy expenditure but one of the big problems with it is that when we move we move in different ways. So, for example, running is different to rowing, and it was different for walking. So the algorithms have got more sophisticated, so they'll work out kind of what you're doing,

or you can tell your device what you're doing. But ultimately, they're measuring energy expenditure or estimating it through movement, when, of course, the most accurate way to measure energy expenditure is through using indirect calorimetry, which actually involves measuring your metabolism, so how much oxygen you're using, basically. Which, of course, these devices can't do. A mask and going on a treadmill or whatever.

Yeah, so anything above what we would call a steady state. So that's an exercise intensity that you would maintain for a long period of time so for example if you go out for a 45 minute run and you tell your tracker your smartwatch that that's what you're doing it'll use an equation that's appropriate for that and give you a reasonable estimate provided the data you've put into your device is accurate in terms of your age body mass mass, sex as well. But as soon as you start doing activities which are non-sustainable, like high-intensity interval training, weight training, that type of thing,

it's really a best-guess estimate, and it's not very accurate measuring those things just because what we call like a non-oxidative contribution to energy. In other words, it's anaerobic. And even using indirect calorimetry, we can't measure that accurately. So if we can't measure accurately using lab-grade methods, then these devices, yeah, they just can't do that. They don't have the capacity to do that.

Yeah, and the added work of even, okay, let's pull up the app. I'm about to start a weightlifting workout. Okay, I just finished my workout. In the case of trying to just estimate energy expenditures, it's just not worth it when there are some simple mathematical methods. This is what I tell people that will get you close enough as well. And then ultimately, you are going to have to adjust based on how your body responds or not or what is spit out of the the mathematical method just works fine okay you wanna you wanna lose some fat and you wanna be somewhere between let's say 300 and 500 calories below your total energy

expenditure each day and you use a calculator like Like I have a couple of calculators over at Legion's website that we built just based on validated mathematical methods. You punch in your numbers. It says eat 2,200 calories per day or whatever. And of course that's a range. So you try to, you're, you're between 2,100 and 2,300 per day. And you just do that and it works and you go, all right, cool. I guess I don't need anything else and so that's where i always recommend people start don't don't go to the tech and make it more onerous than it needs to be yeah for sure and one thing i'll always come back to with clients and also with when we look at this type of um equipment and technology with students is that you've got to remember whenever we're using a device there's an amount of

error associated with it this is sometimes known as noise and that means that it's usually your true value lies somewhere between sort of a higher limit and lower limit of error associated with the noise so to give you an example on like a sleep tracker, which might be in a smartwatch or it might be a bespoke device, there'll be a degree of error with that for sleep duration. So it might be that your device has a half and a 30 minute error. So that means what your sleep duration reported, it could be 30 minutes more than that. It could be 30 minutes less. minutes more than that it could be 30 minutes less so in order to detect if you've had a true change in your sleep duration it has to be above or greater than the error of the device

so in other words if you measure your sleep one week and it's your average is seven and a half hours and then next week it's seven hours you don't know for sure that that's a real change because it's within the error of a device. So most devices will publish what the error of the measurement is or better than will, they should be quite transparent with that. And that allows you to make more informed decisions. And it's known in sports science as kind of the smallest worthwhile change. So we want technology, particularly in sports science, where we're testing athletes and looking at very small changes, we want devices which have a good signal, strong signal,

and a relatively low noise so that we can detect the change. And any device which has got a large amount of noise. So in other words, if you were to, say, measure yourself, let's use body composition scales as an example if we were to measure yourself throughout the day in theory where your body composition would be changing if your device is giving you a large difference between measurements and that's what we call a noisy measurement and that means that long term you're not going to be able to detect a blue change so that the equipment's effectively useless so whenever you're you can kind of pilot or test the equipment you use and

things like that and if you're doing repeated measurements and you shouldn't expect to change it's giving you a change then that device has got a large amount of noise and it's probably not going to be very useful yeah that makes. And for people wondering about measuring body composition in particular, we don't have to go into that in this interview because I want to talk about some of these other things like sleep in particular and HRV and stress recovery. But I did do an interview a couple of months ago, probably three months ago, four months ago with Dr. Grant Tinsley all about measuring body composition and talking about different types of devices, scales, handheld devices, and so forth. So anybody listening,

if you are curious about that in particular, Paul and I are not going to get into that here, but if you go and find the episode I did with Grant Tinsley, T-I-N-S-L-E-Y, it is specifically about that just to let people know in case they're like, oh yeah, body comp. When are you going to talk about body comp? But let's talk about, so I get asked, I don't know about you, but I get asked a lot about sleep tracking, recovery, stress, HRV, all those things kind of go together. WhoopBand, there are a few of these, and that's a big part of their value proposition, so to speak, of why they're saying this is why you should buy our device. What are your thoughts on those types of measurements and even those devices in particular, if you have anything to say about those devices? area I've been involved with recently because I've been doing some research with colleagues where we have been looking into different tests and technologies that can be used to measure fatigue. So we've been doing that in sort of a military context where it's important to understand an individual's level of fatigue so you can decide if they're fit to be deployed in certain scenarios particularly sort of like high risk scenarios and there's no real kind of one device or test that can do that you

have to kind of use a battery of tests but nevertheless um these types of devices are being explored and going back to my previous point about sort of like using different technology one of the the tips i give people when they're thinking of buying a device such as an Orin ring or a whip strap or whatever, and if they want to know it's accurate, is to have a look, quick search, either on Google Scholar, PubMed, put that device in, and most of the time...

See if anybody's researched it. Exactly. That would be what we call a validation study. It's independent, so the manufacturers might have commissioned someone to do the study or some researchers might have just selected those devices. And basically they measure it against the best or the gold standard. So, for example, an aura ring and whoop strap would be measured against PSG,

which is basically the most accurate way of measuring sleep. against PSG, which is basically the most accurate way of measuring sleep. Usually done in a lab because you're connected to loads of sensors, like sensors on the EEG, which is brainwaves, EMG, muscular activity, and various metrics that are recorded to determine if you're asleep or not. Sounds like it's not very conducive to good sleep, ironically. Yeah, that's actually one of the problems with it is uh if you put someone in a sleep lab it does kind of affect their sleep so that's why there's a lot of those devices have been made sort of at home devices so that you

can make someone a few nights but nevertheless it's a lot of tech and there's still a lot of analysis that needs to be done so those anywhere the whoop strap and aura rings have them there is some validation studies against psg to show that they're often pretty good or reasonable accuracy in measuring sleep duration onset of sleep and also when you wake up as well what they don't or can't do reliably and accurately at the moment is measure sleep stages. So this is sometimes known as sleep architecture. So when we sleep.

And that's one of the things people seem to obsess about that I've seen is, oh, well, how much deep sleep did I get versus REM versus light? Yeah, actually, I did a, so I do Q&As at university, one of which you kindly participated in a few months ago. And I was chatting with an expert on recovery, Shona Halson, and also a sleep expert, Dr. Neil Stanley. And this question came up a couple of times because they both have researched sleep extensively, Neil in the military and with general population and Shona with athletes in particular. And questions came up there were about sleep stages and people worrying that they're not getting enough deep sleep based on what their device is fitting out. But at the

moment, those devices cannot accurately measure when you transition from sleep stages there is some papers which show that they tend to be better at identifying rem sleep and that's probably because they that's associated with changes in your heart rate variability but in terms of transitioning from one stage to the other you really have to take that information with a pinch of salt it's not not consistently trying to be accurate against PSG. Whereas the other metrics like sleep duration, awakenings, they have been validated and they show more accuracy from that. And do you remember approximately the margin for error,

just based on what you were saying? Because people might be wondering, because you had mentioned like, okay, it says that you went from seven and a half to seven, but that's within the amount of error that is allowed. So in reality, it's possible that nothing changed. Yeah, different studies have reported different what we call sort of levels of agreement between PSG and those devices. But in general, yeah, it's in sort of using real world terms, but it's around that half an hour, the error on those devices. But in general, yeah, it's in real-world terms, it's around half an hour, the error on those devices. I know that if you're looking at bigger changes than

our large changes, that's maybe more reliable than a 15-minute difference. Yeah, and the other thing that does affect it, and this is what isn't always captured when you look at just group averages, is actually the quality of your sleep. So if you've got someone that's got fragmented sleep, meaning that they wake a lot but then get back to sleep, then their data is going to be less accurate than someone that's got sort of sleep straight through. Because ultimately what the devices are doing is using movement as one of the sort of proxies for sleep

alongside some other variables. So you can get individuals that are kind of asleep, but maybe move more within their sleep and it might be identified as an awakening. So even though it's subjective, there's still kind of some individual variability in the amount of error you get from those devices. I've experienced that. So Whoop sent me,

they've sent me two actually, which is nice of them. And I've used them mostly just for sleep tracking, just because I was curious how the data would correlate with my subjective assessment of my sleep and then just how I felt throughout the day. And if I'm going to have a bad night's sleep, it's going to be wakings. I'll be able to fall back asleep, but I'm going to wake up several times. So usually I'll fall asleep for a couple of hours and I'll wake up. Sometimes I have to pee and then I'll fall asleep for another stretch of maybe it's two hours in the first and then I have to pee and then maybe four hours and I have to pee again. And then the final little bit of sleep, that's probably a normal night.

On some nights, it doesn't happen all that often, but sometimes I'll wake up every hour to two. And so to your point where at the end of a night like that, it says that I got a certain amount of sleep, but it does not feel like I got eight hours or seven and a half or whatever. And it takes more time in bed just to get there, of course. And with the whoop band, they also they give the disturbances. Now that was definitely correlated with actual wakings, even if it is just for five or ten minutes and falling back asleep and so on nights where i had under 10 disturbances i felt pretty rested felt pretty good nights um 10 to 15 were like meh okay and then 15 to 20 was a bad night like i'm not probably not feeling so good

the next day yeah and i'm the same i mean i'm a pretty bad sleeper. It's rare that I would ever sleep straight through. So not to mind you get sort of like four hours, even with, you know, if both children don't wake up at all. But like you just said, a lot of the time you kind of know this intuitively if you've had a bad night's sleep and you don't really, the device isn't telling you anything that you don't know. And that's why I stopped using it. I mean, we'll get into the HRV and recovery and stuff, but it was kind of interesting, I guess, just to see in the different stages of sleep. I didn't even look into the accuracy or inaccuracy of those things. And so I didn't put much stock in that, but I was just more curious, total sleep and then disturbances and how that would correlate with how I feel. But to your point, I was like, well, I pretty much know within five minutes of waking up in

the morning if I'm going to have a good day or not. So that's about it, right? Yeah. There's a lot to be said for intuition. And that's one of the things with this quantified self movement is that you don't really want to outsource all of your sort of perceptions of your fatigue sleepiness and just general health and how you feel to it to a device it's important to to keep in mind that yeah that how you perceive sleep's an important measure as well there's actually been some recent research on that that's showing that i think it was done in military with ads where the group that actually perceived they slept better and had a better immunity response were less likely to get ill

than the the cadets that slept poorly so there is some some research out there even even though objectively they were sleeping about the same it was pretty similar yeah exactly so so so devices could even contribute to and i'm sure this is kind of on your list of things you're gonna want to talk about it could contribute to misperception or even anxieties about let's say sleep or some element of health that aren't warranted that are actually driven by the device, leading somebody to believe that things are worse than they are.

Yeah, exactly. That's a great point. Like disturbances, for example, I look online, people, a lot of people are confused about that disturbances are not wakings, but okay. 10 disturbances. That sounds pretty bad for, let's say being in bed for eight hours, but I can say personally, I don't know about you, but 10 disturbances, I'll feel totally fine. Now, 15 to 20, I'm not going to feel fine. But anywhere from 5 to 10, I'll be like, yeah, it's not bad. I probably woke up in the middle of the night. But, you know, I spend the time that I need to spend in bed and I get enough rest and I feel good.

But I could also interpret 10 disturbances. It's like if I'm only in bed you know between eight nine hours more than one disturbance per hour wow i'm a bad sleeper yeah i mean that's kind of one of the reasons i stopped i'm used to doing a couple of different devices because if we're going to use something in research i'll always try it on myself as well but i did one for about a year actually and i think the most useful thing it gave me was a pattern of what time i was going to bed and time i was waking up because that's if you're not a good sleeper that's one of the the recommendations that we made is to keep those better time and wait time as consistent as possible throughout the week

so not trying to catch up here and there and and not lying in etc so i found that quite useful avoiding naps yeah exactly and that has been i know useful for a couple of clients i've worked with just as sort of a marker of when they're going to bed and when they're waking but yeah to your point when you look at an actigraphy trace which is kind of what uh you'll see on most sleep reports where it kind of got a little graph and it will show a spike when you've woken up and went to sleep that can be quite alarming if you've got loads of awakenings and i remember i compared my trace to my colleagues and his was just like a nice block so sleep wake mine was just like an up and down graph all night mine looked terrible but i didn't read too much

it's hard i can see why people would get concerned you know particularly if you kind of fixated on uh using the device to improve your sleep and to your point that's actually been shown in a couple of studies that some devices or tracking can be counterproductive so there was a study which gave sham advice. So basically the device, the researchers set it to say you've had a really bad night's sleep. And then in the other group, they said you've had a good night's sleep. They manipulated the metrics so it looked like one was really bad, one was really good. Anyway, the group that was told they had really bad sleep reported feeling more fatigued.

And the group that were told they had good sleep reported the opposite. So the objective data was falsified. It wasn't true, but it changed their perception and also how they felt throughout the day as well. So there's not a lot of studies that looked at it, but there's definitely something in there which could potentially be counterproductive. A few years ago some researchers actually coined the term orthosomnia which is basically a preoccupation with this sort

of desire to achieve really good or perfect sleep so similar to you know um sorry i missed the word i haven't heard this term what is it again orthosomnia like u th somnia oh okay okay yeah so it's uh similar to you know with people that track their nutrition yeah got it like orth yeah it's just the accent that's why i misheard it or is similar to that which is why they the researchers coined that term yeah like orthorexia but orth yeah, yeah. Exactly, yeah. So preoccupation with trying to achieve perfect sleep, which is kind of a futile thing because there's no sleep. Yeah, and I've heard from people where, again, they're maybe a little bit too simplistic about it.

And so they assume, for example, all right, fewer disturbances is better, period. So, and let's say objectively, they're actually sleeping quite well. There aren't that many disturbances and they're, but they're concerned because it's like five or six or seven and they're trying to get it down to one. And so they're taking every supplement that anyone anywhere recommends. And they have like a 45 minute bed routine that you know requires four different glasses and stretches and meditation and on and on and on i've spoken to a couple of different sleep experts and they

say that yeah that compulsion around it actually can make your it can create a problem that wasn't there so for example if you were a fairly decent sleeper and then you've monitored it and then your device is telling you that you're having not much deep sleep and then you start trying to kind of hack your sleep with these techniques and you create anxiety around it, then it's actually counterproductive and it makes things worse. So, yeah, there is an element and certain personalities are more susceptible to this. yeah there is an element and certain personalities are more susceptible to this when you start monitoring something you know maybe more type a's that are kind of striving for the best if you don't consider that those devices have got that error and you're kind of taking what they spit out as 100 fact then trying to improve those scores can become a bit futile because it might just be the error that's being captured in your results and you're trying to improve it when in actual fact there's nothing to improve you're sleeping

perfectly well so yeah there's an element of caution with um over tracking and over surveillance of certain things and and sleep's um it's a passive process so it's not like you know if you want to get fitter you have to do a training program relevant to your fitness goals. You want to sleep better. You can't really hack that. It's something that happens to you. You can only like prepare the ground, right? You can only create the conditions in your life.

And I think as one shaky sleeper to another, like, you know what I'm saying, right? one shaky sleeper to another. You know what I'm saying, right? And there are physical conditions, emotional conditions, mental conditions. You could say spiritual conditions for people who even want to include that. And all you can do is try to set yourself up with a lifestyle that's conducive to good sleep. At least that's been my experience. For sure. And also accepting that it's going to be variable. And sometimes there's no rhyme or reason why you don't sleep very well. But good sleepers don't really dwell on those things. And they just have a better sleep the next time.

And I don't know about you, but when I was 10 years ago, I was a great sleeper. I mean, I had a run of like five or six years. I remember talking about it on the podcast. I remember saying like, this probably won't last last forever but i'm going to enjoy it while i have it where you know i would be working every day after dinner to do my dinner do cardio so let's say 7 p.m i'm doing cardio with caffeine and yohimbean if i were cutting right didn't oh whatever who cares stimulants doesn't matter and then work for another couple of hours maybe it's 11 30 now get off the computer get ready for bed quickly go to bed no wind down time, nothing, fall asleep within five minutes,

blackout unconscious for probably six and a half, max seven hours, wake up for my alarm and just feel totally fine and do that every day for five or six years straight. And that was life then. And then one day, I can remember the day vividly when I realized that wait a minute that this is like two nights of really bad sleep and really like what what is

this what what's going on and ever since then it has never been like that and i don't know if it ever will be again yeah i think um yeah i can vouch for that i think there's sometimes there's no rhyme or reason i think with me i was studying studying for a master's at the same time as working as well. So cramming a lot of reading and stuff into the evening. And of course, then your mind switched on and stuff. So, yeah, in those cases, going back to the tracking, you kind of know that you've not slept well. You don't really need a device to do that so

that's why i don't really track too much unless i'm trying out a new product that we might be using in a study or something yeah yeah and and i'll also just say and you can let me know if you disagree or have anything to add to it but if somebody is sleeping well if they and and we all know what that feels like they're probably also getting an appropriate amount of rem and deep sleep that there's probably not any major dysfunction if they are generally just sleeping well and they wake up feeling rested and they don't particularly get tired throughout the day there's not that like afternoon where they're just slump where they're like falling asleep so there's no reason even if

you could accurately track your different sleep stages there's not going to be a problem there i mean if there is a problem you would know it yeah and you can't you can't shift yourself into different sleep stages anyway so it's um with it when it comes to fitness and health technology if someone's asking me about so what's kind of the purpose of you measuring that? What outcomes do you want to achieve from it? It might just be out of curiosity and interest, which is fine. But if people are using it to kind of try and improve, for example, sleep stages, I would advise against that because, one,

it's not measuring those with enough accuracy to do that. And two, to my knowledge, there's no way of actually kind of shifting yourself into a different stage of sleep. It's kind of a very passive process. And the research in a lot of sleep studies have shown us if you deprive people, they tend to go into deep sleep a lot quicker and skip through the stages. So the real restorative phase of sleep, when you look at sleep deprivation studies, the participants tend to go straight into that.

And I've experienced that using these devices where I've had four hours, but it's been like knocked out for four hours and then I'm working up okay. I'm not saying that's a healthy way to do it, but it's just anecdotal. I know what you're saying where you're like, I feel strangely okay for four hours of sleep. Precisely, yeah. way to do it but you know it's just anecdotal i know what you're saying where you're like i feel

strangely okay for four hours of sleep precisely yeah i've spoken to you know people with um occupations like shift work and working in the military and they've had that very concentrated bout of sleep and um long-term effects it's not going to do you any favors but in the short term it seems to allow some people to preserve the sleep and yeah which makes sense of course i mean the body is is resilient and so it's it's essentially uh figuring out a way to still stay functional despite non-optimum circumstances yeah exactly it's we've got these kind of short-term ways of dealing with fatigue and lack of sleep but by and large you want to make that a long-term habit but that's

what i think that's where i see the utility in tracking is that you know if you think you've got a problem and then you realize that you're going to bed you know 10 o'clock one night one o'clock the next morning and then it's all over the place, then you've identified an issue. So it's been useful. You can do that with a pen and paper diary, but it's just more convenient to wear a cracker. And most of them will give you that information quite accurately, sort of like when you've gone to bed and when you've woken up. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And one other thing I'll share just for people, anyone who has sort of sleep issues, again, I particularly, I guess the term would be, you know, there's the type of insomnia where you just wake up a lot.

There's a technical term for it. Maybe you know what it is. I don't remember. But so that's the problem I'll run into if I have any problem is, again, the continued wakings. And then occasionally there were even times where I would have trouble falling back asleep. I'd get out of bed for 30 minutes and just read until I was sleepy and then go back to bed and fall asleep. But two things that have helped me in particular.

One is taking some time, and this sounds kind of stupid, but this is something I just didn't do for a long time. Making sure that I'm having some fun in my life somewhere, somehow. And it sounds silly, but as you understand, as so, you know, with two kids and with a couple of businesses that I have to be involved in, and a lot of stuff going on. For a long time, I basically had no hobbies, no social life, and I would just work seven days a week. I would work full days, Saturdays, half days, Sundays. When I got into this writing books and doing podcasts and creating educational material, and that's what I enjoy to do. And so then since then, I've become an entrepreneur. And this is not a complaint, but it's just I've learned that a lot of what goes into building a business is not very fun to me. Some of it is, but a lot of it is not. And of course, you got to do things that are not quote unquote fun and that you don't particularly

enjoy to achieve certain levels of success and things. But for me, I think I pushed myself for years and years and years to just do the next thing, whether I wanted to do it or not. And if I look at it in terms of like diagnosis, kind of pushed myself even maybe into what could be, what could qualify as mild depression. And I always thought of depression as, Oh, I i'm so sad i can't get out of bed and that's not me so i just never even thought about it but a couple of months ago i some came across something and some of those symptoms of mild depression like irritability not really enjoying things not really looking forward to things and some of the some of the others i was

like oh yeah like that's me that's that percent. But because it was something that I was actively creating, it wasn't for no good reason than I was able to. And I guess there's even a technical term, behavioral activation therapy, I think, which is basically like, okay, start doing things that you like to do. Make sure that you have some joy, some joyful experiences scheduled in your life and do those things. That immediately made a difference in my demeanor. And this was maybe low grade. Oh, and any sort of insomnia, by the way, is one of the first things

that if you were to see a professional that they would ask about. And apparently, any type of depression often won't even be diagnosed if there are no sleep troubles. At least that's my understanding. Sure, they're highly correlated with each other. Exactly. That's like apparently one of the most highly correlated. And so simply realizing that and then taking some actions to even, okay, let me look at all the work that I'm doing. Some of these things I don't have to do.

So maybe I take that. I don't like doing it all. Let's take some of those things out and let's just like put some things in. So I started coaching my son's flag football team, right? Something I would not have done a couple of years ago because I was so work focused and just want to get to the next work thing. Just little stupid things like that. Like, okay, let's put some fun things in my calendar that I look forward to and let that counterbalance maybe a little bit of the irritation that comes with doing a lot of other things that maybe I don't really want to do. And my sleep immediately got better immediately.

That feeds into, I mean, I'm not a behavioral psychologist, but there is quite a bit of research on the field of play for adults. And that just means basically doing activities where there's no kind of necessary producing something tangible or learning something you're actually just doing it for the sake of it or for it just for purely enjoyment and that kind of goes back to my point about personality types and developing uh certain conditions like orthosomnia preoccupation with sleep and obsession over diet that type of thing you know when you start getting into these habits, then it can actually be counterproductive for your health.

And, you know, I've seen that with certain athletes, like some endurance athletes that I've worked with. They tend to be very interested in data and logging things and tracking things. And it can cause issues, like if you quantify everything in your life and everything has to have a purpose and there's got to be a reason for it like you just mentioned there that i'm not quite sure where the research sort of the mechanism for it is but i think it's probably supposed to be kind of just having some downtime from thinking about work or producing things. Or just trying to use every minute productively.

And I was able to do that for a long time without necessarily, I guess you could say, having to pay the price. But I had commented on this in a recent Q&A that that allowed me to get a lot of work, but eventually it caught up with me. And I would think that it would have the same effects in anybody. So I was just telling people, I was like, this is what I did. I forget the question, but it was, I think it was kind of like a work-life balance question. Like,

how do you have the time to work out and do the work and all this stuff? And then that was my answer was like, well, I basically for a long time, just like did basically nothing that is really just fun for its own sake, like no hobbies, no social life, even like that, not having regular interactions with people that you like outside of a work context. That's not good for your mental health. Like I would not recommend what I did for a long time. It didn't, I don't think impact me maybe as much as some people would think that it would given the circumstances. And for whatever reason, that is what it is. But eventually, I mean, I think that's really what I'd been dealing with mostly over the last several years without realizing it. And I'm just a kind of a stubborn goal oriented person. So I can just keep

going. But it was, again, I think I was causing the problem myself that then I was trying to find other ways to deal with as opposed to understanding that it appears with me, a big part of it was, again, making sure that I'm not spending all of my time doing things that maybe make sense. Like they can be rationalized and they contribute toward some goal that makes sense, but it's not particularly enjoyable. It just need it. You just need to do it to get to the goal. You know? Yeah.

I mean, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, doing things. I've recently spoke with someone that was really on the kind of quantified two extreme levels. He was talking about how he goes to bed at, or sorry, has dinner at like five o'clock every night and he's in bed by 10 because, you know, that falls inside of his maximal circadian rhythm. And he's kind of like living his, mean you know each to their own but um

i feel like there's got to be some flexibility with your schedule if you're kind of just trying to live to what's optimal uh it might not be the most fun way of living yeah yeah exactly and one other thing that seems to help and there's some research to support it is getting getting sunlight early in the day it's something that I just didn't consistently do. Really, I guess I didn't really ever make it a thing, but I have noticed that I've been doing it consistently. Now, just to make sure to get out in the morning, wake up, just go for a walk. I'm in Florida, so it's sunny a lot.

That also helps. But consistently getting, let's say say anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes of sun in the morning time also seems to help and there's some research to support that oh yeah that's that's one of the strongest drivers of our um or regulators of our circadian rhythm is is natural light but yeah natural daylight is is one of the uh the the best sectors of our circadian rhythm and biological clock so but even then you know people are trying to hack that with sort of um lumen lights and things which um can help but most of them are anywhere near power enough powerful enough or don't give the same looks that a natural daylight would. Yeah, my understanding is that probably better than nothing

if you're in a place where there is no sunlight. But even then, and this is based on my limited understanding, I'm just reading up, driven by sleep, right, just understanding things that even if there's a cloud cover, you're still going to benefit from getting out there and exposing your eyes and your body to that natural light. Yeah, even with cloud coverage, that frequency of light is still significantly more powerful than a lamp would be. But you're right, if you live in a country where it's dark a lot of the time.

You're in Alaska and you're in the darkness phase. Yeah, I mean, just anecdotally,'ve trained in a gym which is in the basement i really don't like it uh just good they have to go in from daylight into a dark area i know some people like that kind of dungeon style gym but i i just like uh windows and daylight and um yeah i think yeah there's even some some some research on that actually. People tend to do better in the daylight than if you put them into a dark, cavernous gym. Interesting. I've worked with tens of thousands of people over the years, and the biggest thing I see with the people I have helped the most is they're often missing just one crucial piece of the puzzle. And if you are having trouble

reaching your fitness goals as quickly as you'd like, I'm going to guess it is the same thing with you. You are probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there's something you're not doing right. And that is what is giving you most of the grief. Maybe it's your calories. And that is what is giving you most of the grief. Maybe it's your calories. Maybe it's your macros. Maybe it's your exercise selection. Maybe it's food choices.

Maybe you are not progressively overloading your muscles. And whatever it is, here's what's important. Once you identify that one thing, once you figure it out, that's when everything finally clicks. That's when you start making serious progress. It's kind of like typing in your password to log into your computer. You can have all the letters, numbers, and symbols right, except just one. And what happens? You can't log in, right?

But as soon as you get that last remaining character right, voila, you're in business. And I bet the same can be said about the body you really want. You are probably just one major shift, one important insight, one powerful new behavior away from easy street. And that's why I offer VIP one-on-one coaching where my team and I can help you do exactly that. one coaching where my team and I can help you do exactly that. This is high level coaching where we look at everything you're doing and we help you figure out that one thing that is missing for you. And it can be a couple of things too. That's fine. There's no extra charge for that. But once we

figure it out, that's when you start making real progress. That's when you start looking better and feeling better. So if you're ready to make more progress in the next three months than maybe you did in the last three years, and yes, that has happened for many of our clients, head on over to muscleforlife.show slash VIP. That's muscleforlife.show slash VIP and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way, is not a high pressure sales call. It's just a friendly chat where we get to learn about you and your goals and your lifestyle, and then determine whether our program is right for you. Because sometimes we do speak with people who just aren't a good fit for our service,

but we almost always have other experts and other resources to refer those people to. So if you are still listening to me and you are even slightly interested, go schedule your free consultation call now at muscleforlife.show slash VIP. So anyways, let's segue back to the devices. And can you talk to us about HRV, recovery, stress, these measurements? Because that little cluster of topics and sleep, those are the two things at least that I get asked the most about. Heart rate usually goes into it as well, obviously. Yeah, I mean, heart rate variability has been used for quite a long time within sports science, but it's been commercialized more recently in terms of it's available now in smartwatches and fitness trackers.

And it's a measurement of variation in time between your heartbeats. So your heart doesn't beat like a metronome, or it shouldn't. There's a small variability between those heartbeats. And by measuring that over a period of time we can actually detect or we use it as a proxy for measuring how the autonomic nervous system is functioning so the autonomic nervous system basically runs in it it's like our background operating system so when you're stressed for example if you've got a deadline or you're late for something there's a branch of the nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system which kind of primes your body for activity

often known as the fight or flight response so you get an upregulation of hormones um catecholamines like the adrenaline cortisol which prime you to do something so cortisol peaks in the morning which is why likely why we wake up so what the heart rate variability can do is give us a measurement of balance between that sympathetic nervous system and the opposite branch of our nervous system which is the parasympathetic nervous system and this branch of the nervous system opposes the sympathetic system so it's associated with rest and relaxation so when we for example before we fall asleep we've got an increase in parasympathetic tone which is causing down regulation of our bodily processes and hopefully sending us to a restful sleepful state so by measuring heart rate variability it gives us a an indication of the balance of that

so whether the body's recovering or experiencing stress or it's in a more parasympathetic state of recovery now what devices do is that they measure your heart rate variability and then a lot of them will give you a score like sometimes it's known as a readiness score or a fatigue score. And this is where it gets tricky because each manufacturer will have a different algorithm to calculate that. Some will call it a stress score and some will call it like charge. So they can't be used interchangeably. You can't use a whoop strap and an Oura Ring score

because they've calculated your stress differently. They've used heart rate variability, but the algorithms that are applied are different. But in any case, they'll give you a score which gives you a global idea of your level of stress. Now, when heart rate variability is being used in sports science with athletes, most of the time we just look at the actual heart rate variability data so it's not plugged into a regular equation. Because one of the problems with those is they've not been validated. So going back to fitness tech and looking at validation studies,

they measure heart rate variability in most devices with good accuracy. So Aurum has been validated. I believe Woobop strap has as well but the recovery score has not been validated so we don't know for sure if that's sensitive enough to be able to say you're recovered or not so it's a problem if you use those in my experience with the whoop strap is i, I quickly started to ignore the recovery score because I remember clearly nights where I slept totally fine. I felt great. I had a good workout that day. My workouts were not like preceding that were just my normal training. Like I wasn't training.

It was an overreaching period or anything. And, but according to the whoop strap and the whoop app that morning, it was like a red recovery, like a 20 out of 100. And then I had experienced it the other way around, have a really bad night's sleep. And of course not feeling good and you don't have a great workout. You just kind of grind through it yet. According to the whoop strap, you know, it was like a nineties recovery and you should be ready to push hard. So I quickly started to ignore the recovery score, but I would pay attention to the HRV trend just out of curiosity. Exactly. And that's what I would advise people looking at that is look at the HRV itself, the the recovery or readiness score similar to sleep stages on the watches um

and the bands maybe don't read into those as much but and that's the key thing with heart rate variability is you have to have use it for a long period to get a true indication of your baseline or what's normal because everyone's hrv will be different and the way your HRV responds to a stressor will be different. So it's important that you have a period where what the device is doing is establishing your baseline, so then it can try and detect where there's been, going back to my previous point, what's the smallest worthwhile change? So trying to distinguish between what's just general variability, day-to-day

variability, and actual significant change confuses measurements, which is why they can't be used interchangeably between devices when they measure. So I believe, I think it's the Weepstrap, which measures across the night and then averages other devices like there's a validated app where you put it on your phone and you use the camera basically the flash from the camera can measure and detect your heart rate variability that has to be done in the morning at a consistent time the morning approach is probably best because if you use a device which averages across the night, it is susceptible to what you've done in the evening. So, for example, if you had a later evening meal than usual or drank alcohol,

that tends to be one of the things that affects HRV the most. It will affect your HRV score. So it will give you an indication of what's happened the night before, whereas a morning reading, if you do it consistently, tends to give you a more reliable reading of your readiness for the day, if you like. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And who should even bother tracking HRV? And why?

It comes from sports on it, athletes tracking it. And the reason why it's done in sport, particularly in elite sport, is to understand how athletes are responding to training. Because professional athletes, although training is obviously higher intensity and their load is greater than sort of your average person, their training is more predictable and it's their full-time job. So it's training that's more likely to have an effect on HRV. So if you go for a heavy training block, your HRV score should decrease.

It should show a higher level of stress. So it's been used historically in sport to identify when athletes maybe are not recovering well or maybe need more recovery going into a competition, for example. If you're using it outside of sport, it can give you an indication of maybe certain activities which affect your stress levels. So I'll mention one, actually. If you wear a heart rate variability monitor or use an app or something

for a period of time you can identify patterns so for example if you start to get ill illness tends to be picked out quite well with heart rate variability since you're dropping a carb just before and particularly when you are ill and And when you say just before, you mean now it's basically an increased susceptibility to illness? Or is this like when an illness is incubating in you and you just don't know it yet? Exactly that. Yeah. And that's provided you've got good baseline data. If you use an HRV monitor for a couple of days, then all're doing is just measuring daily variability and noise you need a baseline period and then in that baseline period how long is that normally i would say at least a couple of weeks where your schedule is relatively consistent so you're not

expecting any significant stresses so you're not for example you don't start training for a marathon or you're not starting a really aggressive diet or going for a stressful period at work or home. So try and establish a couple of weeks which are relatively normal. And then the algorithm of the monitor will be able to then compare that baseline against your subsequent variability and be able to identify when there's a meaningful change. identify sort of when there are when there's a meaningful change so hrv can be in a non-athletic context to help people identify kind of what periods where their body might be under more stress in which case maybe they should back off certain elements of their life for example if their hrv is dropped for a couple of days and their stress scores are increasing then maybe it's not a good idea to do a really hard craning session and dropped by how much though well it depends on on your um that's

what you need to do baseline period because this but but maybe is there a percentage like not really because it's um there are no cutoffs for it you'll get you'll get 10 athletes who are doing the same program who are largely exposed to the same stresses and their hiv responses are different so that's where the individualized you can't really compare hiv scores because yeah it's it's an inherently quite a noisy measure so you have to have yeah a good baseline period of collection before you start using that information to kind of say okay and also picking up what we mentioned previous about intuition sometimes it kind of just supports

what you already know so for example if you've slept badly for three or four nights then you've done a couple of heavy training sessions your hrv might get a lot worse or decrease and it kind of just supports that you've just put your body under a lot more stress. So it's an objective measure of that, basically. It's taking the perception away and providing a number to it. Yeah, and that's also why I eventually stopped tracking HRV as well, because a simple heuristic of, okay, it's like life periodization works for training too. When you're feeling good, push. And when you're not feeling so good, back off and try, try to do at least enough to not move backward. Like if, if things are really not, let's say with training,

right? You're feeling great. Everything's good. And you're doing three, four or five intense workouts per week. Okay. Good for you. All right. Now you're not feeling so or five intense workouts per week okay good for you all right now you're not feeling so good so let's back that off to no more than three and maybe those workouts are not as intense and if you're sick you're going to take a little bit of rest and if things are really not good then maybe just get in one or two strength training good moderate intensity workouts per week just just to maintain what you've got until you feel better yeah that and that's the utility of using hrv is that it can help sort of what i would say to um my clients and athletes that i work with is music to kind of inform what you do but not dictate it so for example if if you um have just don't feel generally good and you've not slept well, for example,

then maybe back off your training because how you're feeling and kind of your history leading into that is suggesting that you're maybe not going to recover as well. And HIV usually tracks pretty well with that. So sometimes it can be used as an educational tool where athletes have gone, we've looked at it, it's really sort of training down here and you still did that plan of the session and then you got ill on the saturday

in some cases you know my injury it's not to say that that caused that but there's you know it's an association there so it can be used as like a a way of kind of educating yourself on on um sort of load management with training and um yeah manipulating training yeah that makes sense kind of like a reality check yeah exactly yeah and and a lot of people who who take their fitness seriously they're more likely it's harder to take a rest day or to take you know take a deload week. It gives them some justification as well. It's almost like a doctor's note. It's like, I really don't feel great. But then the HIV is suggesting that I'm not recovered as well.

It's not just in my head. I'm not just making up an excuse to skip today's workout. Yeah, so it's supportive of that. But then I always say to people, you don't let it dictate your training. So if you feel really good in your HR, particularly if you're using those metrics of readiness, I wouldn't let those dictate your training at all because they could be giving you a spurious sort of measurement and you're going, okay, I'll back off when in actual fact you feel really good and you're going to go and your HRV is kind of within its normal day-to-day variability.

But it's a useful measure, but it's like with the sleep stuff it's not to become fixated on it and uses as kind of a guide rather than something that details what you do yeah yeah and when i was paying attention to hrv i was looking at trend in particular because similar to the recovery it It wasn't as stark, but there would be days when HRV was significantly lower than average, but I felt totally fine. I slept fine. It seemed almost anomalous. And then a couple of days later, it's just back to normal. And I didn't change anything on those days. So not to say it's not a useful measurement, but at least in my experience personally. And I don't think it was user error. I was using a Garmin device, you strap it on and same spot, same thing every day. And there would just be some days that were better than usual for no apparent reason, and some days that were worse

than usual for no apparent reason. But I did notice that if things were worse than usual consistently yeah that did seem to correlate with worse sleep or just a higher amount of stress than usual including so you have training stress and everything else but individual readings i was like you know i i'm not going to change anything because my hrv came in 10 low today yeah exactly, exactly. Exactly that. You base your decision on trends. So either an upward trend or a downward trend if stress is getting greater, rather than you can't just take a one-off reading and kind of let that dictate what you do or you shouldn't do anyway, because yeah, there is inherent variability with the measurement from day to day and also just to finish that's why timing is critical you can't um if you're going to use hrv and your device

studied throughout the night then make sure they obviously use the same device and if you're doing it i believe some devices like the garmin where you put a belt on and you dictate when you don't make sure you do it in the morning at the same time um so that you're not adding extra variables which you're gonna because pretty much everything affects hrv which is why it's such a noisy measurement that makes sense yeah yeah um in my case it was you know like an example for people if i were to do it before i did my morning cardio session or after that's totally different before i had caffeine or after totally different yeah yes it can whenever you're using a

bit of fitness tech if you can standardize conditions and make it as much of a kind of like a lab test as you can even with things like i mean you've talked about this on your podcast before like body mass and taking your weight how about taking it at the same time the same if you've been to the bathroom before and tracking a weekly average and not taking kind of a snapshot um which is a big often mistake people make with uh when they're tracking their body mass is they only measure it once or twice a week but you really should look at kind of a rolling average um so they four five day average from week to week to look at the trend heart rate variability is the same as that and most physiological measurements have got

diurnal daily variability so looking at them across the week at the same time of day and then averaging it is a way of kind of trying to reduce that error. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we're coming. We're just over an hour now. And those are the major things that I wanted to discuss. We had a couple of things in our outline that maybe we could save for another discussion. Massage guns, compression things, IV drips, ice baths baths cryo also things i get asked about but i think this is a good point to wrap up this discussion is there anything else regarding what

we discussed that you wanted to that's still kind of bouncing around your head anything that i should have asked i suppose just from from a consumer and what I often get asked in terms of, is this any good? My checklist would be, okay, how long has it existed for? Has there been any validation studies done on it? And anyone can find that out using Google Scholar or PubMed. Look to see if there's been a published study on it, which preferably is independent because a lot of companies will do their own kind of in-house white paper studies, where surprise, surprise, you know, it really shows great accuracy.

Or they'll work with just research groups that are unethical and or, yeah, it's in their financial interest to produce what the company wants, and that happens. Yeah, I mean, I've worked with them, actually done a validation study. The company was really great because you sign a contract at the start where you say, look, whatever we find from this device, we're going to publish it, and they sign that off as well. So it's independent, and they don't off as well so it's independent so there's no and they don't see the data until it's ready for publication so studies that have done like that they will go through like an ethical approval process so there's a data sharing agreement etc

and it just means that that research is of a good quality and it's not it's less prone to bias from in terms of publication bias of any publishing results which show the device is really good so that will be my um the first thing to do have a look at see what the literature is on that device and then also before you start measuring something on a consistent basis things you tell what are the what are the main purposes why am i measuring this what what do i hope to get out of it you know as i mentioned earlier some people could be out of general interest but if for example you're using i don't know biological impedance and our analyzer to track your body fat

having a good understanding that that has got an amount of error associated with it you're not going to get two weeks down the line and really annoyed because it's not changing because you understand that the analyzer isn't sensitive enough to pick that change up. So understanding some about the technology can be really useful as well.

Yeah, great advice. Well, if there isn't anything else, I think this is where we wrap this one up. Why don't we finish with where people can find you and find your work and your book that you recently published and anything else you want them to know about? Yeah, thanks, Mike. So I've published a couple of books. The latest one is mainly for personal trainers and people working in the fitness industry or what we're interested in in training and some of the topics we've discussed are covered in the book and that's uh

advanced personal training so let's practice uh there's a second edition available which you kindly contributed to mike so thanks for that on one of the chapters yeah and i'll say for for people listening who are not trainers but who enjoy these types of discussions, there's a lot of just great evidence-based, very practical information in that book. So even though it is marketed toward trainers, I would say that if somebody is looking for evidence-based advice on how to improve their regimen, how to improve their strength training, how to improve their endurance training, how to combine those things effectively,

how to improve their body composition. They'll get some good practical advice from that book. It's not a book. I wouldn't say it's just like, here's how to be a good trainer. It's here's how to improve all of these different things that a lot of people want to improve. Yeah. And in hindsight, I kind of wish that the marketing was more on the kind of consumer fitness enthusiasts, not necessarily a practitioner,

because I've got a lot of feedback on social media, people messaging me saying, I don't actually work in the industry but i'm really keen on you know training i'm enthusiastic and like the chat to the topic we just talked about about um tracking and monitoring they found that really useful and applicable to their training so that's yeah it was really good to see in terms of my other work i do a regular sort of q a it is geared towards uh students that are studying sport and exercise side but it's open to the general public and and you can't have one of those on um working as a fitness entrepreneur there's various topics which have got quite broad applicability so i usually advertise those on my social media channels which which is probably best if I just include. It's quite difficult the way my handles work.

So maybe just include those in your show notes. Yeah, there'll be links and stuff, but people can also just search your name, I'm assuming, to find you, right? Yeah, if you Google my name, Sports sports scientific you probably will come up with um my website and write some of those links as well cool and last name is h-o-u-g-h for for people yeah it's half spelled h-o-u-g-h um i'm not to be confused with um there's a film director of the same name occasionally i'll get a message saying did you direct this film as well? You know, but yeah, we're different people. A Renaissance man.

Yeah, I do. I do that. That's my side hustle. Yeah. Yeah. I'm into directing horror films as well. All right.

Well, thanks again, Paul. This was a great discussion and I look forward to the next one. Cool. Thanks for having me on Mike. Really enjoyed the discussion. Thanks. rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com,

and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.