Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness.
Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV. Check us out at optimalhrv.com Please enjoy the show.
Welcome, friends, to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I am Matt Bennett. I am back here with great friend of the show, great friend of mine, Stephanie White.
If you I Stephanie, I think you've is this episode five or six, something like that now, I mean, besides Ina, you're really, I think maybe number two on the list of most frequent guests and we'll make you a co host if you're not careful here. So as if you've been with us for any of Stephanie's previous episodes, she does bring slides, which really helps with, you know, what she presents, which is always really, really good stuff. So just if you're listening to us, you might want to look at the YouTube. Stephanie does a good job of verbally describing things. So if you're in the car and you just want to keep listening, keep listening. But you know, we are also on YouTube as well, so if you want to go back this and we'll put links to everything in show notes as well, so you can have that too. So, Stephanie, welcome back, my friend. Maybe before we dive in, just for those who may not have seen the past episodes, a quick introduction of yourself for the audience.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Okie dokie. I'm Stephanie White. I live in Richmond, Virginia.
I'm 60 years young.
Congratulations.
I got really sick in 2016.
Cancer, breast cancer. Double mastectomy, immediately got pneumonia, turned into chronic fatigue and POTS and lymphedema.
And so all of a sudden I found myself and a lazy boy four hours a day hooked up to a pneumatic pump.
Didn't have a whole lot to do. So while I was doing it, I watched everything I could on YouTube that Dick Everts and Paul Lair ever published and Roland McCready and Art Math so I could learn HRV biofeedback because I put on a Garmin watch that had stress and recovery metrics that said I was orange.
[00:02:41] Speaker C: All day long.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: All I had was stress. I had no recovery. And it took me four months of breathing to get in the blue.
And I just thought at the time if, if I had a coach, if I knew what I was doing, I probably could have gotten those results in less than four months.
So I kind of took off on a educational and equipment journey to figure out, you know, how do you teach it, how do you get results faster, what are the right tools, all those kinds of things. So that's kind of where I've been to get me to where I am.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Now and where you're going, which is exciting to talk about today as well.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: So yeah, so for today, I'm going to go ahead and share my slides.
We're going to call this Lab Front HRV Research and a free HRV Masterclass.
I am creating a sandbox to play.
[00:03:49] Speaker C: With wearable HRV data through Lab Fronts functionality.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: So I want to share what they've made available.
So anybody wants to play with me.
[00:03:58] Speaker C: And try different ideas, bounce ideas off.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Of each other, you know, we've got a data set we can play with to see what works and what doesn't.
So yeah.
[00:04:08] Speaker C: Let me introduce Lab Front to you.
So Lab Front came from an endowed Osher Integrated Health center at Harvard University.
Through their work they created a nonprofit physio Q and A for profit Lab Front.
And the Lab Front makes wearable data three different flavors. Cgm, movesense and Garmin available to researchers for lots of different reasons, but HRV is definitely one of them.
And so like I mentioned, there's three sensor options. The Garmin watch, the Dexcom CGM and the Movesense, which has two flavors. A consumer HR2 or medical device. Medical is approved in Europe right now. It's supposed to be through the FDA approval process in the US by the end of 2026.
But they also make a smartphone app available that allows the synchronization of the data from the different sources as well as pushing surveys and questionnaires to the participant so that if you need additional data or you need symptomology and things at different times of the day, you can definitely get that back from the user.
So it's kind of a comprehensive system that builds a database for you.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: And not only gives you access to what the user can see on the consumer app that came with the device that they're using, it gives you access to a whole host of behind the scenes data. That's great. And so for Garmin devices that are enhanced IBI compatible, you get every single heartbeat so that you can, you know, upload to kubios to do to run heart rate variability analysis, but you also get a confidence marker.
So if movement or something else is causing noise, it marks it that this is probably not the highest confidence beat we've got.
And so what people quickly find out is nighttime's golden. Almost 100% confidence all the time.
But as different things happen throughout the day, the confidence goes down. So if they're meditating or they're doing a breathing exercise, it's high confidence information. But if they're running or swimming, it's probably going to be low confidence information.
So it's a really awesome way to get 24.7x365 data.
That includes wet data.
You know, I love First Beat devices and Bodyguard Threes, but they can't get wet.
And so it's nice having the watch data because I can get it all the time. They don't have to wear electrodes and it can get wet. It just checks off a lot of boxes for me.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: That the traditional First Speed device can't do.
And so if I'm able to, to get anybody excited about this, it's really easy to sign up for a free account that comes with five users and just about all the functionality is turned on. There's a few exceptions, but I signed up for lab front February 2, 2025.
This is my one year anniversary.
So I've just passed my one year anniversary with my five users and things have been going really well.
There's a lot of Garmin options. I'm going to focus on the cheapest four and I'm going to exclude the very cheapest and explain why. But at the lower end of the price range, we're talking models like the Forerunner 165 which looks more masculine, the Vivoactive 6 which looks more feminine, the Forerunner 570 and the Venue X1 which is on steroids.
So the price ranges start at $249.99 and go up to $600 for the ones that'll work best with the system.
Why Garmin? Why didn't they pick Polar or Aura or any of the others?
This was funded by the Bernard Osher foundation and he has a real interest in resilience.
Garmin has exclusive, not only exclusive access to First Speed analytics, they bought out the consumer division in 2020.
And so that makes them very unique. First Beats known for having some of the best stress algorithms in the universe.
So it helps that those algorithms are available within the device, but it also offers a migratable research platform. You can start out on the wearable and if you want to take it, full research grade ECG quality data for First Beat backs it up with the Bodyguard 3 device.
And so you can do both types of research and get the same kinds of information, which is pretty exciting.
For those watch choices, there's features that may make one willing to pay more.
For example, the two most expensive have skin temperature.
And so when the skin temperature features available, that's a level five sensor.
[00:09:49] Speaker C: It's the newest, latest, greatest.
If the watch has HRV status feature, it's a level four device. So it's one level back than the level five device.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: The one I'm going to exclude from.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: The running is 2018 technology. I haven't been able to determine if it's level two or three, but I'll show you why it won't work.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: The coherent feature means the watch will.
[00:10:15] Speaker C: Facilitate breathing at six breaths per minute, equal inhales and equal exhales for a 15 minute session. So if your HRV, your optimal HRV smartphone app and your phone's not available and you're running around and you just want to do it off your phone or your watch, your watch will facilitate a coherent breathing session up to 15, 15 minutes.
The QR band. QR stands for quick release. A lot of my clients are sensitive to the materials.
So QR means not only does Garmin have a variety of bands that you can choose from, there's third party bands that you can choose from. Don't require any equipment or tools to be able to change it.
So if you need leather or you need silicone or whatever, nylon, there's every kind of band imaginable, which is important for a lot of my users. And so enhanced BBI is what you need from Lab Front in order to be able to run the analytics we're going to do.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: So do you know the sampling rate on these by chance?
[00:11:21] Speaker B: Let me answer that in a different way.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Let me tell you about the Viva Smart and then we'll talk about that. So the Viva Smart says on Lab Front's website that it works if you run a point care plot. It looks like a battleship grid.
Come to find out it's good down to the 128th of a millisecond.
And so the data, if you look at it and you rank order it, you know it goes in 8 millimeter millisecond steps.
It can't get accuracy down to 1 millisecond.
And so while I can't tell you the sampling rate, I can tell you the lowest priced option is only good down to 8 milliseconds. And so I've excluded it from the running. All of the others can give you accuracy down to 1 millisecond.
So does that answer that question in a different way.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So we got pretty high degree of accuracy.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes. We're good down to 1 millisecond.
And so, yeah, while lab front says Viva Smart 5 works, I don't recommend it because it's not accurate down to one millisecond.
They have a pricing webpage that includes three options. Starting out with the free.
People that do our kind of work are going to want the most advanced plan, because that's the only one that the individual beat intervals is available on.
But when you go with the advanced plan, which is $1,000 for the first 20 users and $20 for each additional user for a whole year, and the year starts from the date that individual signs up, that's really cost effective.
And so signing up for the advanced plan gives you everything in the last two columns, the things in the middle come with a table that starts off with Garmin connect. The things on the right come with the table that starts with Garmin device.
But it gives you a wide range of options of how small a time increment you're willing to deal with or need for whatever question you're asking.
So there's, there's lots of great options all the way down to each interp interval, which is quite helpful. I'm going to hush and see if you have any questions. So far, no.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: So far so good.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Cool.
All of this information is available on their pricing page. You just scroll down to see the detail and so what are we going to do with this? Measurable resilience is going to create a functional heart rate variability and stress assessment.
And so a lot of the traditional statistics are going to be done overnight because that's when the data quality is the highest.
RMSSD is typically what all wearables that do HRV report.
And you and I have talked on past episodes, while RMSSD is not always accurate.
And so if that's all you know, you don't know if that's good data or bad data. That's not enough to tell.
And so we're going to provide sdnn, which is the standard deviation of the normals to normals, cvnn, which is a derivative of taking SDNN and divide it by the median nn, which gives you the percent change in the data.
And we're also going to provide pss, which is a heart rate fragmentation index. And I'll talk more about exactly what that is in just a second. But by reporting all four simultaneously, the user's going to know if they've got good data or if this data suggests a situation in which the recommendations they're using weren't based on, because most HRV decision making processes are based on healthy individuals. And so if you've got variance in data, you may not be able to use those recommendations right out of the box. You may need some modifications. And that's what I want to get at. You know, know who needs what modifications and how do we customize it for each individual based on all four, not just rmssd. Because I think that's a significant place of misunderstanding among everyone right now is RMSSD is not the final answer and it's not enough to know if it's good or not.
So we're going to report all four.
And so on a 24 hour basis.
[00:16:09] Speaker C: We'Re also going to provide a new functional cost assessment. And so it's going to be heart rate based, but it's going to be very different from intensity minutes and heart rate zones.
Why?
In individuals with pots, for example, their heart rate inappropriately increases upon standing. And so the heart rate while they're standing is, isn't about energy cost or load, it's about compensation for low blood volume or other things that are preventing oxygenation to the brain. And the heart rate response is to keep the oxygen going to the brain. And so in those situations, I've got clients who, if you report intensity minutes.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: They'Re getting a week's worth of intensity.
[00:17:01] Speaker C: Minutes in a single day.
And so, number one, it makes that metric unuseful.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:10] Speaker C: And number two, it really does explain why it's so damn fatiguing.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:15] Speaker C: Because while it's not the workload other people are up against, it is definitely.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: A load and a source of stress.
[00:17:21] Speaker C: In the body that we need to try to avoid. So this is definitely something I see with a lot of my people and it's something we're trying to get our arms around so we can help them with it.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: And so once we start to get data and we can make better decisions, it's going to answer the question where to start low level individuals and where to stop high level individuals. Now that makes no sense.
So let me word it another way.
When I was my sickest in 2016 and they recommended pool therapy, at that point in my life, the act of getting dressed, getting in the car, driving to the pool, getting out of the car, walking to the women's locker room, going to the bathroom, I knew at that point I was done.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: And I turned around and I walked right back to the car. I drove back home and I went to bed.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: And I was exhausted.
So it's not unusual for Doctors to recommend 45 minute physical therapy appointments.
And right now the person might look great in the office, but they're not aware a 45 minute physical therapy appointment is not in that person's capability zone right now. So I hope by doing this, we're going to come up with a better way of assessing who needs to start even lower than a basic 45 minute physical therapy session. And if that's where they are, where do they start?
It may be in the bed doing simple exercises while completely recumbent.
But I think we can dial in the answer to that question better than what we're currently doing.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: I'd love to add a little bit of a tangent maybe, but I would love to know when I think about pots, for example, I. The first thing that comes to mind would not be physical therapy. I would love to, just for folks out there like me who don't have your expertise in this, what would physical, like physical therapy look like? And maybe what you mentioned, something like doing things in the bed. What do you think it should maybe look like to better support that population?
[00:19:45] Speaker B: So there's been a lot of research in this area. And so there are published protocols, the CHOP protocol, the Dallas protocol, the Levine protocol.
There's a lot of protocols in existence, but they tend to treat it as something you do once a day.
And something I think having this data is going to prove is it's more beneficial to do a little teeny bit every 30 minutes to an hour.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: As opposed to thinking about it as something you do once a day.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: And so that's the other thing I think that's going to come out of this is that let's break it down to something you can successfully do every 30 minutes to an hour and build up to a certain level before you tackle the kinds of things that might be done once a day with special equipment.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Thank you for that.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So we're gonna, we're gonna take the current research and go farther back to even smaller steps. Great.
That that's part of what I think will really come out of this.
But for the people who are interested, there's three really good protocols out there right now. The chop, the Dallas and the Levine approach to POTS exercise.
And we're going to go back further.
The high level individuals. You and I've talked about this before. There's a lot of optimal health people, you know, optimal hrv, optimal health people are interested in this.
And so when they go to a functional health Provider, they're telling them, you know, we're going to do lab work on you, but we're not going to use the lab ranges that your doctor uses because they're based on Everybody in the U.S. 8 to 80, really wide margin. We're going to look at the lab values for 20 to 30 year old because that's when your physiology was its most optimum and that's what we're trying to take you back to.
So a lot of people connect the dots and assume that means they, if they have optimal health, they can do what they did in their 20s and 30s.
That's probably an inaccurate assumption.
And so for those people that are.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Still pushing real hard and, or possibly addicted to cortisol, they're doing a lot of crazy things.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: And so they need to know when.
[00:22:03] Speaker C: To stop, what's too much right now.
[00:22:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:06] Speaker C: And if they don't like the answer of what too much is and they want to try to grow it, they need to know the steps to do that successfully. So we'll be able to answer that question too.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Great.
[00:22:18] Speaker C: And we're also going to differentiate a.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: New mode called protection mode.
[00:22:25] Speaker C: And so this is very different from burnout, and it's very different from freeze, shutdown or functional freeze.
You know, burnout People think in terms of Han Selye's work, the cortisol curve, adrenal functioning, that's one thing and it's real. But that's not what I'm talking about. And on the far other side, know people that use polyvagal theory, they're used to talking about shutdown and freeze and.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Just dissociation and those things. We're not talking about that either. Protection is something new that I don't know anybody who's put their arms around it yet. So let me define what I mean by that.
Your body enters protection mode when there's been allostatic physiological adjustments and they didn't occur in minutes or hours. It took weeks and months to get there.
And so as a result of those adjustments, there's currently a mismatch between their physiology and their life, their body struggling to live the life that they're throwing at it.
And so your physiology is the source of stress because your body's struggling.
And so when you look to the left and the right of you at other people doing similar things, you, you have a source of stress that they don't have.
And it can be two to three times the stress that they have. It's a big source of stress. And so getting our arm around when it occurs and how to deal with it is really going to make a big difference for people. And it's going to make a difference for people that doctors are finding have very real symptoms that are hard to treat because all the lab tests come back fine.
We'll talk about that just a minute.
So when your body goes into protection mode, you can't think your way out of it. So traditional talk therapy and mindset is not going to be a total solution. It's going to help and it's going to solve some things. But if your body's had allostatic adjustments, talk and mindset are not going to change it. Your body has to allostatically adjust back in the right direction in order to be able to handle life the way you're throwing at it. And so pills and supplements have the same problem.
It's not.
A lot of my clients come to me with three baggies of supplements, and we're talking hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a month in supplements. They're taking crazy stuff.
And so the exotic stuff isn't going to be what makes a difference. It's going to be the basic stuff that your body has to have to do the job. So we're thinking minerals. Calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, B12. We're talking the basics. Your body has to have this in order to be able to make energy and do all the things that you're asking to do. So we're talking basics.
If those are missing, if your body doesn't have required resources to do the job, it's going to struggle, and it's only going to have.
It's going to have to choose between bad options because the resources it needs aren't available, which causes part of the problem.
And so your behavior probably got you into this over months, not days or weeks. And so behavior change is going to be what gets you out of it, which is a tough pill for some to swallow. But that's the truth of the matter. If you want to change your physiology, you're going to have to change your behavior to walk it back up to.
[00:26:10] Speaker C: Where you want it to be.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: And so you and I've talked about before, I'm growing an army of heart rate variability aware behavioral health coaches who can help people walk through this process and be able to tell if they're making progress or if they're slipping back.
They'll be able to use this information to help the individual and custom tailor the approach to that individual's needs.
So what kind of allostatic adjustments could be happening? The big Levers I'm seeing are changes in blood volume, Changes in CO2 Tolerance, Changes in blood sugar levels, blood pressure and breathing habits. These are the biggies.
And so blood volumes near and dear to my heart because of pots. But just to give you an example, astronauts that leave this earth and go into space experience zero gravity.
When they come back, their blood volume is 15% or more below normal. They have pots, they have orthostatic static intolerance when they come back to the earth.
And so it takes months, and the number of months depends on the duration of the spaceflight. The longer the space flight, the longer it takes to allostatically adjust back to gravity.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: And so we've, we've learned a lot.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: About heart rate variability and blood volume.
[00:27:35] Speaker C: From astronauts, which is kind of cool.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: So different things you do or don't do on this earth can lead to.
[00:27:44] Speaker C: Low blood volume chronically.
And you have to retrain and re educate your body to get back to normal so that you don't experience the symptoms that are associated with that. Same thing with CO2 tolerance. And I'll give you another example of that in just a minute.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: What kind of symptoms can occur because of protection mode? It's a huge laundry list. And I'll go ahead and say now there are legitimate medical reasons that are diagnosable by medical doctors that can generate these symptoms.
But when all the tests are fine and normal, these symptoms can still occur and they can be debilitating without a medical diagnosis.
So when you're in protection mode, it can cause you to be more hyper vigilant, an exaggerated startle response, anxiety and panic attacks, irritability, anger, outbursts, low frustration tolerance, sleep disturbance, which means you can't fall asleep and, or you can't stay asleep and, or it's unrefreshing.
You can have that fatigue wired, but tired feeling, brain fog and poor concentration because when blood volume is involved or CO2, your brain's not getting enough oxygen so it can't do its job. No surprise.
There can be all kinds of sensitivities to lights, sounds and crowds.
You can be restless, you can have muscle tension, you can have gastrointestinal upset and, or slow down in gut motility to where things don't transit through your body as fast as they should and you end up constipated because things aren't moving through. That's very uncomfortable.
Palpitations, fast heart rate feel an amp. You can have shortness of breath or air hunger, which is a miserable feeling that's also panic inducing. You can be dizzy and lightheaded, especially upon standing or with position changes, you can definitely have reduced exercise tolerance and that reduced exercise tolerance.
We're not talking running marathons, we're talking activities. Daily living can kick your butt.
So it's debilitating, emotional numbing and detachment, social withdrawal, cravings for quick regulators like sugar, caffeine and nicotine.
It can cause low mood and motivation. So some people find themselves asking themselves, am I depressed?
I might be depressed.
Protection mode can slow everything down, including.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: Your brain, so that mood and motivation are altered.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: All of these things are possible.
[00:30:23] Speaker C: So just to do the right thing, there needs to be a disclaimer.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: If you have any of those symptoms, see your doctor.
[00:30:31] Speaker C: Rule out medical conditions that need treatment first. But if the doctor tells you everything's fine, all your labs are normal, it might be time to educate yourself on how to partner with your physiology instead of fighting it.
Because if you learn that and you re educate your body and get back.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: To normal, those symptoms will disappear.
[00:30:50] Speaker C: If they're a result of protection mode. I'm going to hush and see if you have a question.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the one that sticks out to me and it kind of goes back to the talk therapy and what you're doing with the coaches that you trust. Training. Is that that list of symptoms?
You know, as I. I've done a gazillion trainings on trauma and trauma informed care. Over time, those all could be a result of childhood or even adulthood, traumatic experience, especially with complex or repeated intense trauma. So I'm curious how that sort of informs your thinking, because we know that certain aspects of talk therapy, usually ones with somatic additions to them, can really address a lot of these issues. And it's more not an argument that, you know, I think anything you've said is wrong at this point. I'm just curious how that if somebody comes, how does trauma inform your work? Knowing that a lot of these symptoms have also been connected to that body of literature as well.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: So let me first say that in the POTS patient population, there is like a 34 to 40% overlap between PTSD and high ACEs scores. Yeah.
So when trauma is present, it doubles and triples the severity of all of this. Yeah.
And so at that point, talk therapy needs to be a critical component alongside the approach that I'm laying out. You need both.
And in a perfect world, that talk therapist is going to teach heart rate variability by a feedback.
[00:33:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: And sitting on their desk is going to be a captography device and it's going to be CO2 informed heart rate variability.
Because if CO2 tolerance has been lost, you can't talk the person out of the panic to attack that produces.
The only way you can avoid the panic attack that produces is by raising the person's CO2 tolerance through breath work training.
And so you teach the individual what parts of what you experience are attributable behavior and what parts of your experience are attributable to mindset and thought patterns.
And so the person ends up with multiple tools in their toolbox.
So using standing as an example, it's very relevant that people with POTS become afraid to stand and then they avoid standing and it makes them worse.
And so at VCU they're experiencing with port for pots, they're using pain reprocessing theory to teach people how not to be afraid of to stand. That's really important work and it's absolutely necessary.
But the other thing that could be.
[00:34:23] Speaker C: Going on simultaneously is people start to hyperventilate when they stand.
And so if you're hyperventilating when you.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Stand, you need to learn breath regulation.
[00:34:33] Speaker C: Techniques so you can regulate your physiology so your physiology doesn't exacerbate your symptoms.
So people are going to need to be armed with both sets of information in order to adequately deal with the entire problem when both are involved.
And so for example, the VCU port for pot study, the participants number top two recommendations are one, it wasn't long enough. It was an eight week program and they wanted to be longer. And the two number two recommendation is.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: If you have any kind of trauma.
[00:35:06] Speaker C: Or any kind of behavioral health issue, deal with that first before you take this because it's impossible to make progress.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: With this until you deal with that.
So yes, at you know, knowing what a person aces score, what their trauma experiences have been is crazy critical and you either need to deal with that first or simultaneously.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:35:31] Speaker B: To doing these kinds of things. Absolutely.
Great. Did that answer that? Okay.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Cool, cool.
Yep, I hear you. And let me mention one other thing on the amazing behavioral health medical professionals who use capnography.
It's a wired desk device.
If you're helping somebody with pots, it's going to need to be a bluetooth device that can accommodate them standing and walking.
And we'll talk about that in just a second.
So the device needs change a little bit when they need to be mobile while you're getting readings.
So yeah, see your doctor.
And then you know, either while you're doing that and or seeing a behavioral therapist, educate yourself on how to Partner with your physiology instead of fighting it.
And so some examples of interventions that work are movement hygiene, where you move every 30 to 60 minutes a day at an appropriate level to avoid physiological drift. And I'll talk more about that just a second.
Resolve dysfunctional breathing patterns because they can definitely exacerbate things.
I'm going to give you a wonderful example. This isn't just people with chronic health issues.
Let's talk about US Special Forces.
In 2014, the US Special Forces physical test pass rate was 12%.
By 2017, it had gone down to 3%, which was a huge, huge problem.
[00:37:12] Speaker C: Basically, nobody was passing the test.
And so they hired three individuals, one of which was Scott Son and which I've studied under.
They used CO2 tolerance training and breath regulation to take the physical test pass rate from 3% up to 30% in one training class.
So they determined the lungs were limiting these individuals, not their limbs.
And by learning breath regulation and CO2 tolerance techniques, they removed the lungs as a limiting factor and were able to go the full extent that their limbs could take them. Any questions about that?
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I just kind of wonder too, if the breath work also help with stress regulation and resiliency and recovery at the same time.
[00:37:59] Speaker C: Of course.
[00:38:00] Speaker A: I love this study, though. This is a great one.
[00:38:03] Speaker C: I mean, these are people at the peak of performance.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:38:07] Speaker C: And breathing is limiting them.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:10] Speaker C: So if it's limiting them, just what's.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: It doing for the rest of us?
[00:38:14] Speaker B: How important it is for the average Joe.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: And they don't even know it.
They're just totally unaware of it.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:22] Speaker B: It's a big deal. And it's an under, under recognized, absolute deal. There's all kinds of room for health improvement, including blood glucose regulation in getting this right. Because most people don't realize when you and hard to lose weight. People don't realize that when you lose weight, you're losing water and CO2.
And so if you can't blow it off effectively, you're not going to be able to lose weight effectively. So breathing regulation and function is very basic to health.
It's impossible to have it without it. So, yeah, it's. It's totally unrecognized and it's easy to fix with the right knowledge and equipment.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:09] Speaker B: So we have two level of behavioral health coaches. We have the regular behavioral health coaches that use tools like optimal HRV to help people, but we also have master behavioral health coaches. They know how to use capnography and we do use Bluetooth captography so that we can Measure people not only while they're at the desk, but while they're standing and. Or walking or using exercise equipment at the gym.
And if somebody's an elite athlete, we've got a more expensive device that they can wear in a vest with their cell phone and climb mountains and just fold it down and look at it and fold it back and get immediately immediate feedback as to what their CO2 is doing. So we've got scalable equipment for everybody. Very cool. At multiple price points if people want to take it further.
So allostatic adjustments are new for people. They might not have heard it before. It's important when we start to talk about it that, you know, there's two things that can cause them. One is if there's a cost issue maintaining that physiological set point is too expensive, or there's. There's missing resources and it can't do what it wants to do, so it has to fall back to bad choices. The other is the utility rule. Allostatic processes are anticipatory.
The bodybuilder is an excellent example.
You can't just lift weight once and have your body change.
But if you lift weights every consecutive day for X number of weeks, you're going to start to put on lean mass.
But if you stop, it's going to very quickly fall back off. You know, you have to continue to use it as soon as your body determines you're not using it anymore. It's too expensive to maintain, so it'll get rid of it.
So you can use allostatic adjusting in your favor or without understanding it. It can happen to you and make things not the way you want them to be.
So we're going to use it in our favor.
Come on.
So some overlapping issues with modern life. People in general are overloaded. They're under resourced, they're under recovered, they lack vital reserve.
And when we talk about lack of reserve, it's kind of a health bank account.
If you think about your own bank account, a person was six months of monthly expenses sitting in a bank account somewhere. They have a lot less stress than a person who barely breaks even every month.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: I love that.
[00:41:50] Speaker B: Yeah. If your tires blow or the heating system malfunctions, if you have any kind of unplanned expense, it's going to cause a problem with your personal financial budget.
People need to understand what their health reserve is and how to grow that account so that every little thing isn't wreaking havoc with their body. Yeah, a lot of people are overdrafted.
[00:42:17] Speaker C: When it comes to reserve.
[00:42:18] Speaker B: And when you're overdrafted, you can feel it.
[00:42:20] Speaker C: It is not pleasant experience.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: And so that's something people will learn in all of this.
So as I said before, if your body's missing resources to do what it has to do, it can can only choose between bad options. We need to solve that.
And so typically in a healthy body, it's okay to go slightly over because your liver, your kidneys can eliminate things.
You don't want to go way over because that creates a new job for the body because all that crap builds up and has to go somewhere.
So you don't want to overdo it. But just going over a little bit is better than not having it available when it's needed.
So for the 24 hour functional cost assessment, I said we're going to learn how to start people off, where to stop people and what protection mode is, but we're also going to look, learn which interventions work for heart rate fragmentation, which we've covered what heart rate fragmentation is in other episodes I've done with you.
It is, and it can be a form of cardiopulmonary decoupling where the heart rate variability no longer follows a pattern that matches the breath.
And so worst case scenario, it's an alternon pattern where every other beat you go from high, low, high, low, high, low, that's very inefficient. It works the heart way more than it has to.
So understanding when this occurs and how to deal with it is going to become important because I'm seeing this happen in a lot of individuals with compromised health.
Some possible reasons for it to happen is degrading in the timing and alignment of those systems. There can be noise or higher priority signals. There can be electrolyte and mineral inadequacies. It's a natural part of the aging process and a lot more. It's something I hope we've learned a lot more about.
I've shared this study with you before in other episodes, but can I ask.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: You a question, my friend, out of interest?
Electrolytes.
I, they're, they're kind of, I, I laugh because we all thought when I was growing up, which was a long time ago, and when I was an athlete, which was a really long time ago, we were all drinking Gatorade and we needed electrolytes. I couldn't have defined that until probably, you know, well into my adulthoods where it didn't really matter.
I, I'm seeing electrolytes making a huge comeback. And I think that GLP1s I believe are some of the reasons for that. But I, I'm, I'm curious your thoughts. I, I found it interesting on this bullet point line and if you're only listening, it's electrolytes and mineral inaccess on one line. Just, I'd love to, you know, here it is again. And just kind of your perspective on why those are important. Are we not getting enough of those to certain diets not provide the right kinds of them? Should we be drinking Gatorade again? Like just love to hear sort of your thinking around very hot topic topic right now.
[00:45:41] Speaker B: Okay, so Gatorade specifically typically has way.
[00:45:47] Speaker C: More calories in ratio to the electrolytes to make it effective for the body because it creates a, a high calorie, high sugar situation.
So I'm not talking Gatorade.
Let's just say we're not talking Gatorade grade.
I'm going to recommend a free heart rate variability course from Dr. Ahn at LabFront and he's going to share a graphic that shows the sinoatrial node of the heart requires calcium, potassium and sodium.
[00:46:22] Speaker B: To do its job.
[00:46:24] Speaker C: And so we know in a high stressed body, you chew through those resources much faster than a person who's got normal like levels of stress.
And so in my personal journey, I had to do hair tissue mental assessments to determine if my minerals were dialed in or not. I felt great when I went to the POTS treatment center and they put me on base minerals. I had never taken minerals before.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: Minerals are bulky.
[00:46:52] Speaker C: So that's the other thing you've got to understand. If you're taking a single multivitamin a day, minerals aren't in that vitamin. Because if you start to supplement with minerals, we're talking multiple capsules because they're bulky and as with all nutrition, whole food sources are best.
But in a high stress body, it's almost impossible to get enough magnesium because you just chew through it so damn fast. Okay, so when I was the sickest and I did the hair tissue metal analysis, I needed magnesium at three times the recommended daily allowance.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:47:28] Speaker C: To deal with the level of stress that was currently in my body.
And so there's ways to dial in. Different bodies are wired differently. When some people are stressed, they chew through a certain set of things. When other people are stressed, they choose through a certain. So us functional health coaches believe in test, don't guess to see what your body needs to offset what your body's experiencing the way you're wired.
But the sinoatrial node that controls the beat of the heart and the pace of the heart, it can misfire and cause heart rate fragmentation.
That will not show up on a Holter monitor study that a cardiologist does to determine if you have APIB or any irregularity of the heart physically functioning. This is not a physical heart malfunction. This is a timing issue.
[00:48:21] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: And when that timing's off and doesn't align to other systems, the body gets confused.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:48:27] Speaker B: The autonomic nervous system gets confused.
[00:48:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: And so restoring that timing and alignment can really make everything in the body a lot more efficient because it's just able to communicate a lot better.
[00:48:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So probably somebody who's eating healthy and not dealing with a chronic disease probably doesn't need.
And I'll say probably on everything here, because what is eating healthy is a whole master class in above itself. But this is, you know, like you said, you had to do a hair sample to kind of get this level. But. But should be adequate.
Getting the electrolytes, minerals. However, if we overstress and are eating those up quicker, whether it's out stressors in our lives or stressed by a chronic illness, then this is where we could become deficient in this and see the cardio problem.
[00:49:33] Speaker B: And I'll be honest with you, in the functional health space and the health optimization space, it is recognized that if you could only run one test, and it just happens to be one of the cheapest tests we have, the hair tissue mineral analysis gives you a lot of information because it not only tells you how to dial in your minerals, it tells you if you are being exposed to any toxic elements.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:57] Speaker B: And so there may be things you don't know about that you're exposed to that it's going to reveal these things could be helpful impacting your health.
So when it comes to functional assessments.
[00:50:11] Speaker C: The hair tissue mineral analysis ranks really high.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:15] Speaker B: Among the people my colleagues that are doing functional health coaching.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: Great.
[00:50:21] Speaker B: Because this is just so basic. If this isn't dialed in.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:26] Speaker B: All kinds of things are going to happen.
[00:50:28] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: It's just important.
So I highly recommend that test for folks.
[00:50:34] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:50:35] Speaker B: You're welcome.
So we shared this study before. It shows that from age 20 to 40, you basically lose half of your heart rate variability as measured by RMSD. But the crazy thing is from 60 to 100, you get it back.
Why?
We've talked about VHF before for people who, who say, wait a minute, HF ends at 0.4.
What we figured out is if you extend the power range past 0.4 into a range we're going to call very high frequency. Generally 0.4 to 0.9 is enough. Some people go to 1.
The VHF range absolutely picks up heart rate fragmentation where you've got those irregular patterns where the heart rate is going from high to low every two beats or every three beats. And so from 60 to 100, heart rate fragmentation increases as you age because you lose the timing if you don't exercise it to try to maintain it.
So we know that heart rate fragmentation is why RMSSD goes up after that point. And you and I have talked about it before. You've got some people that have contacted you that have astronomical RMSSD and they're so proud of it.
[00:51:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: I know it's high, but it's.
[00:52:02] Speaker C: Not for the right reasons.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: And people have no way of knowing that right now.
[00:52:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: So I definitely want to provide a way for people to know whether that's going on. And so we're going to provide the four metrics. PSS is one of them. PSS stands for the percent of short segments.
By definition, the way Costa originally proposed it, it was a three beat sequence. So you get the high, low and an in between.
In between beat somewhere up or down.
I'm probably going to report it as PSS2 and PSS3. So you know how often two beat sequences are happening and you know how.
[00:52:42] Speaker C: Often three beat sequences are happening because.
[00:52:45] Speaker B: That'S going to tell you whether the RMSSD is.
[00:52:49] Speaker C: Usable, helpful information or not. If this is going on, it's going to inflate it. And so interpreting Hiram SSD as good is going to be an erroneous assumption. Any questions about this.
[00:53:06] Speaker A: Now?
I mean, I'm curious about, because I'm nerding out about hertz right now and going to the very high frequency frequency.
Just kind of the, the accuracy of that measurement.
Because I'm sure you're taking the sampling rate and the accuracy have to be really tuned in, I'm assuming to get accurate very high frequency.
[00:53:39] Speaker C: If you're getting data that's accurate to the mill, milliseconds, you're fine.
[00:53:42] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:53:45] Speaker C: And so at the point, you know, around the 0.28.3 range, your breath, if it's breathing related, it's hyperventilation. 21.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:57] Speaker C: Or higher breaths per minute. When you get above 0.4, it's not breathing related or you'd be feeling horrible.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:54:08] Speaker C: And so a lot of people with heart rate fragmentation don't even know what's happening.
[00:54:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:54:12] Speaker C: So it is not breath related.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: And so the goals are, once we start measuring and report this, we can test interventions, HTMA testing, electrolyte supplementation, other things, rinse and repeat. We'll be able to learn how to deal with this, whereas right now we don't. People don't even know it's happening.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:40] Speaker B: So we'll provide a way to measure and report it so people can, can start to experiment with how to prevent or resolve it.
The other metric is cvnn, which is the coefficient of variance.
It is the percent change that's happening. And so because it's the percent change, it scales with the heart rate.
RMSSD means very different things at an average heart rate of 60 beats per minute versus an average heart rate of 100 beats per minute.
So when you're dealing with a thousand millisecond interbeat intervals versus 500 millisecond intervals, that percent change is vastly different.
And so I prefer CVNN because it.
[00:55:30] Speaker A: Does.
[00:55:33] Speaker B: Take out the impact of the average heart rate when the person comes in to work with us.
Typically, morning heart rates for a lot of our people are 15 beats lower than the afternoon heart rates. So being able to adjust for average heart rate is important for the work that I do. So I find CVNN very useful, and we've covered that in other episodes so people can look at the CVNN episode.
But what I've also found is A CVNN of 2 is fairly disabling.
And so one day we might be able to use this to support disability applications or be able to measure fatigue severity in chronic fatigue and things like that.
[00:56:17] Speaker C: The research already shows that low RMSSD.
[00:56:20] Speaker B: Definitely is highly correlated with fatigue severity.
[00:56:25] Speaker C: I'm showing a chart that shows different curves where CVNN is on the left. And then I rank order things from lowest to highest across the entire day.
And so some of the, the athletes that come to see me, their middle point of the day is around the heat range.
And somebody in their 50s with average health might be in the 40s range.
Someone with chronic fatigue who can't do activities daily living is 2 or less.
[00:56:54] Speaker B: So I definitely see these numbers really.
[00:56:58] Speaker C: Correlating well with the situation of the person that's coming to see me. And so I'd like to raise awareness.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: That this metric exists because, you know.
[00:57:08] Speaker C: We love Fred Schaefer, we love Jack Ginsburg, they wrote the wonderful article about HIV nor metrics, cvnn. And in that article, it's not in any HRV articles.
So I definitely want to increase, increase people's understanding of how valuable this is. Any questions?
[00:57:25] Speaker A: Nope.
[00:57:27] Speaker B: Yep. So cruising right along.
Why do we need this? A lot of people are in love with their current wearable. I've got a people saying, I got a polar, I've got an aura, I've got an Apple watch.
The reason why we need to do this, in addition to what you're already doing with your favorite device is because they're all reporting RMSSD and it can be inaccurate. And so continue to wear your favorite device, use it the way you've always used it. But if you wear a Garmin watch as a functional assessment to get this enhanced heart rate variability information, it's going to open up new doors. And so the reason why RMSSD isn't good enough is because it measures the difference between the beats.
And so SDNN is better because it measures the difference from the mean.
And so when you're trying to measure cardiopulmonary coupling, where the heart rate increases and decreases according to the inhale and exhale pattern with the breath, it's a much better measure of how responsive your heart rate is to your breathing because it should be when heart rate fragmentation exists, because heart rate RMSSD is the difference between beats and you're dealing with extremes. Every other beat, high, low, high, low, RMSSD can be a hundred, it can be 60, it can be 80, where it's normally in the 20s. So it, it definitely throws it off and makes it much higher than it would otherwise be.
If you're lucky enough to have a device that displays the RMSSD chart throughout the night, you're going to see wild variations.
So if you're wondering why Your average is 20, but you see it up in the hundreds, 160s, crazy numbers this might be going on and you might need further information.
So one of my doctors is telling people, you know, look at your device, if your RMSSD is at or above your average, do this. If it's not, do that. Well, there's two problems with that.
First problem is what if your 30 day average was based on all bad days, that's not your base level of functioning that you should be trying to do every day. So first thing you got to figure out is are you using a baseline that's truly a good place to start or not? That's problem number one. And problem number two is if heart rate fragmentation can elevate it, then how do you know it's the right RMSSD and not elevated RMSSD because of heart rate fragmentation. So you can be making bad decisions off of RMSSD if you don't know the other values to know whether it's good RMSD or bad rmssd. Does that make sense?
[01:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess. I mean it's. As somebody who's looked at a lot of people's HRV over the years, I always, always really see SDNN and RMSSD trend together with high frequency.
So I mean it's kind of surprising that like, are we talking about just certain conditions where those don't? Because I've always seen them trend and I see most of the research like leaning towards RMSSD because it takes account for some potential artifacts that might get in. So, so I'm just curious about like, I've always, when I look at HRV readouts, you know, and I'm not saying I've seen everybody in the world's HRV readouts, but like it always, those three always trend relatively together.
I haven't done like, okay, is it 5% difference from day one, day two? Like, you know, SDNN is a different metric than RMSSD so they, their numbers are different as long high frequency is a totally different, you know, numbering system. But just like, it's interesting because what I've always seen is that trend.
[01:01:45] Speaker B: You.
[01:01:45] Speaker A: Know, together in folks that I've done kind of assessments and stuff with over the years, they don't.
[01:01:56] Speaker B: And so for example, when someone's resonance frequency breathing and they've got a beautiful sine wave pattern, it's not uncommon.
[01:02:10] Speaker C: For.
[01:02:11] Speaker B: STN to be 1.5 to 2 times higher than RMSSD because RMSSD is measuring the difference between the beats and STNN is based off the difference from the median.
And so in situations like the optimal HRV where you can't see the heart rate trace after the breathing session's completed.
[01:02:32] Speaker A: Oh, and just to be clear, I'm not. I mean as soon as you change your breathing rate, I don't think RMSSD or SDNN are okay worth much.
[01:02:43] Speaker B: One example.
[01:02:44] Speaker A: Yeah. On heart rate, I'm talking resting normal breathing.
[01:02:48] Speaker B: Okay, so resting normal breathing. The opposite can occur when RMSSD is twice stnin. You probably got heart rate fragmentation going on.
[01:02:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I like said I've never seen like, like that's just what I say. I see them always trending.
[01:03:07] Speaker B: In a healthy person, that's typically correct.
[01:03:10] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:03:11] Speaker B: But in the compromised population, you can't assume that.
[01:03:16] Speaker A: Okay, so that, that, but that's, I just, that that's a great distinction to be made to, you know, because one, it allows people to dig deeper into their data if, if they are coming to a heart rate variability for, you know, pots, for example.
[01:03:37] Speaker B: Right.
[01:03:38] Speaker A: You know the great information to get out there. However, somebody who's relatively healthy, you know, we, we may see RMSSD and sdnn, like, like I said, every like session that I've, I've seen those, those trend together over time. Again, with high frequency being the third metric that just always in my experiences flow together. But it does make sense to dig deeper if it's throwing that off.
[01:04:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
And heart rate fragmentation starts to show.
[01:04:13] Speaker C: Up at like 0.28 and higher.
So it's possible for it to show up in the high end of hf, but when it's in the VHF range.
[01:04:21] Speaker B: It'S almost always heart rate fragmentation.
[01:04:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:04:24] Speaker B: Because people just don't breathe that fast.
[01:04:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:28] Speaker C: So.
[01:04:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:04:30] Speaker C: And let me mention another thing.
[01:04:35] Speaker B: When protocols are created, there's always exclusions of people that aren't going to be included in the study.
And so studies work best when people are sort of close to normal.
[01:04:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:50] Speaker B: And so a lot of the people that this is happening with have been excluded from research studies.
And so I'm specifically trying to draw attention to fact that this population is bigger than you think it is.
[01:05:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:05:05] Speaker B: And so I think new lines of research questions will be asked if we understand how prevalent this is happening.
[01:05:13] Speaker A: Great.
[01:05:15] Speaker B: And so I am trying to raise people awareness that this is real and it's bigger than you think it is.
And nobody's looking at it. So they don't know that this is happening, but it's definitely happening.
And so as SDNN is less impacted by heart rate fragmentation, so that helps. So again, that's why we're doing all four. If you know all four, you can make reasonable assumptions. If you only know one, you can't. And that's part of the awareness I'm trying to erase.
So by doing that, we'll initiate new lines of research inquiry. We'll go beyond rmssd, LF and hf, which is what you and I were just talking about.
We need to stop vilifying the sympathetic nervous system.
It's not a bad thing. It is an awesome thing.
So knowing when I need to be, I want to be sympathetic. When I need to be, I want to be parasympathetic. And actually, when you've got this wonderful combination of both, it's what I call your heart singing. It's what layer causes calls.
Shoot.
Something. Augmentation.
Your heart rate variability goes really high. Yeah.
Accentuated antagonism.
It really blooms your heart rate variability. I say your heart singing, or to me, that's the state of flow.
[01:06:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:46] Speaker B: And I've shared with you. One of my people can get it when she curls up to her son and reads the bedtime story. Another one can get it when they're doing gentle movement with Tai Chi.
So different people achieve it different ways, but it's really magical when it happens.
And so we'll start to value resilience and the ability to quickly change.
[01:07:09] Speaker A: And.
[01:07:10] Speaker B: We'Ll achieve breakthroughs in what I call the software issues and what other people call the software issues. What on earth are software issues?
In US medical schools they use the two volume Bradley's Neurology textbook.
If you this is the older version on page 108. There started a chapter on the autonomic nervous system written by Tom and Giesla Chalimski. Awesome dynamic husband and wife team that just happened to be recruited to Richmond, Virginia to start an autonomic clinic.
They in the chapter present autonomic issues as one of two types, structural and functional. So there's imaginary line down the middle if you have the opportunity to hear them talk about it live.
They call the problems on the left hardware issues where something is not working correctly. But the ones on the right are software issues. Everything's working fine, but something else is throwing things off.
And so these includes things like pots.
[01:08:16] Speaker C: Interstitial cystitis, Irritable Bowel Complex Regional pain, fibromyalgia, Gastrointestinal disorders, Renault's Migraine headaches, Chronic Fatigue syndrome.
There's a software issue.
And so I think understanding this protection mode and helping your body physically allostatic adjustments adjust in the direction you want it to is going to eliminate a lot of those symptoms that are a result.
[01:08:52] Speaker B: Just a protection mode.
[01:08:55] Speaker C: But again, see your doctor rule out the medical issues, deal with them appropriately.
[01:09:00] Speaker B: See your behavioral health professional deal with.
[01:09:02] Speaker C: Those issues because you need to either deal with one first or simultaneously. But how to follow up if any of this interests you? See the show Notes Email me if you'd like to discuss what I call pre search opportunities.
My definition of pre search is proof of concept work that's done before research.
[01:09:27] Speaker B: And what makes it different is it's client patient funded.
So they pay a fee for a functional assessment which makes the work possible.
That's going to allow me to create a sandbox data set. So if a potential researcher has questions and they want to run it against my sandbox, you know, we can test some theories out before they write the research protocols and go their own way.
And if anybody has any hard cases that they just can't get their arms around that they want to know what the background data is on a consistent daily basis.
I can definitely help them with that to get, you know, try to provide some answers. I'd love to work with them on that.
And so yeah, email me if you want to talk about pre search opportunities.
Individuals who are interested can see the show notes to sign up for the functional system which is going to offer daily monitoring and weekly email reporting.
And I want to get people excited about the free master HRV class that's available from lab front from doctor on the cardiologist. Matt and I have both taken it. I'll let Matt speak for himself. We both learned things and we're going to geek out about that on another episode. But just to give you a teaser to make you really want to watch the course.
It's about a five hour course. It's broken down into three modules with wonderful topics. But the teaser is very early on in the course.
He explains why cardiologists thinks heart rate variability is antiquated, but other people in the performance realm think it's indispensable.
And I for the life of me would never have guessed in a million years why cardiologists think it's antiquated. But once you hear his story, you're going to be like, that makes all kinds of sense.
[01:11:15] Speaker A: It does. Really? Yes.
[01:11:17] Speaker B: And the reason cardiologists needed it and depended on it no longer exists.
[01:11:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:11:22] Speaker B: And he's going to explain that really well.
And so that's the teaser to make you want to watch. It's a really good course.
[01:11:28] Speaker C: Matt, what's your two cents on it?
[01:11:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I think definitely I. The first, the first.
There's three sections. The first one is must, must watch. I think if the second ones, if the topics are interesting to you.
[01:11:44] Speaker B: Right.
[01:11:45] Speaker A: Watch those.
You know, I found them all interesting so I'm. But you know, you talk about this subject. I think that the first one I was surprised on how much new material, you know, we were talking about is like we really got new stuff to learn. Like I'm always looking for new stuff.
[01:12:07] Speaker B: You can teach me new stuff about hrv. I get excited.
[01:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah. A thousand research articles, you think you know it. And especially if like the essay node and how this all works in the heart itself, I've gone back and I need to watch it like three or four more times. It's, it's that, it's that good. And it really understands some of the mechanisms that are responsible for HRV that I don't think a lot of people really understand.
So the first One, I think anybody that listens to this podcast is a must one. And then if the other two. Two, which kind of focuses a little bit more on cardiology, if those are interest to you, the nerds out there will love them as well. But the first one, you know, get, get. It's going to be worth the hour plus of your life, trust me.
[01:13:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So the next episode, Matt and I do, we're going to nerd out about what we learned and what we thought was amazing. Yes. So if you can watch, if you're going to watch the cast, if you can watch it before we nerd out, we can all nerd out together and you'll know what we're talking about.
[01:13:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:13:19] Speaker B: But that is our next episode. We're going to go over the crazy things we learned.
[01:13:24] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:13:24] Speaker B: From the lab front course. Because I was pleasantly surprised that I learned, I learned quite a bit. And I found better ways to explain tough topics.
[01:13:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:13:35] Speaker B: And that's always useful too.
[01:13:37] Speaker A: And why I have to explain to cardiologists why HRV is important. Which never made sense sense to me at all. Like I'm like, what's wrong with these people? Like haven't you googled it like in the last 30 years? And the answer is no, not necessarily.
[01:13:53] Speaker B: They, yeah, it's, it's old news. Been there, done that, don't need it anymore.
[01:13:58] Speaker A: So that, that alone was. Yeah, that, that alone was worth it. But it's like said just a lot of really good stuff about the fundamentals that you know, again, as somebody who understands this stuff quite a bit, like I watching it a couple times because I wanna, I wanna know it deep and that this course gives some really great, great stuff. So.
[01:14:24] Speaker C: Yeah, you and I talked before. There's a lot of people doing HRV.
[01:14:28] Speaker B: That don't understand hrv.
[01:14:30] Speaker C: His course goes a long way to improving understanding.
[01:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's a lot of people that I think understand.
I think I.
Again, you and I know more than 99 point something percent of the world.
You know, we can distinguish BS from non BS. And yet there's so much more I know I'll speak for myself only here that I, I gotta figure out. Like you know, and his was a step in that, that direction to really. Okay, now, now we're getting down to the really nitty gritty. And if I understand the origins of this metric, I can understand the metric better. And you know, again, if you've listened to 100,000,000,000 episodes of this podcast, it is, it is new stuff that's that's really, really good. And again we're worth your time. And then I think if the topics of the other two courses, you know, if you're interested in that, it's, it's definitely worth a watch. And for those maybe you put it on as you walk the dog or something like that.
You know, if you want to look at the graphic, great. But the first one is.
Yeah, just a mind blowing what he puts in there. So yeah. And if you're HRV nerd, you're also to going and watch the other two as well.
[01:15:54] Speaker B: So yeah, yeah by the third it gets really deep and high level.
[01:15:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:15:59] Speaker B: So even my head was hurting at that point. But yeah, I agree the first one's amazing. So yeah, that is what I wanted to share. Plus the little teaser that there's a free HRV course out there that's about five hours long if anybody wants to check it out.
[01:16:13] Speaker A: Yep. And we'll put links and everything in the show notes. Stephanie always does a good job of making sure sure you got all of this stuff at your fingertips, including the great PowerPoint presentation.
All the links included. Stephanie's email.
Stephanie, I want to thank you. You always bring great stuff to the podcast.
You know, one of the reasons I went on my HRV journey was because certain populations were just being left out of this because of cost.
You know, I think think those high end Garmins are a good example of.
I don't know if I can afford one of those though I'd really like to because they're really cool devices and I love what Garmin's doing and the spotlight you bring and really your friends at BCU as well and the Richmond mafia of HRV that are doing such great work but you in particularly and your coaches really bringing this and trying to problem solved around an underserved population when it comes to autonomic health. And you're right, the norms we have are kind of junk for a lot of reasons, but they're junk for. Because it's only a healthy population that's often studied. I don't think it even makes sense a lot of times for a healthy person to look at population norms more than once or twice.
And this is where you're just, you're a gift to the world of bringing this into populations that you know, again we were talking ahead of time that often just get, I don't know, you're just being lazy or get up and get off the couch or other BS stuff or go do a vigorous swim class or whatever. It is like you said, and really understanding the reality under the skin that's going on.
And hey, maybe it starts with electrolytes and minerals working our way up, addressing some of those issues. And like I said, you're a gift to the field in the world for that focus and I really appreciate you, my friend.
[01:18:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'll add one thing I didn't talk about. VCU would love to have a way to to measure metabolic issues in energy creation and they don't have it. They would love to have it in the functional health space. We do. But it's expensive. Yeah. So as people sign up for this, if budget permits, we're going to start running some of those metabolic screens for nutrient analysis. Awesome. To see if we can find patterns that other people can benefit from. But unfortunately that is expensive. But we will have that available. That will be part of this.
[01:18:57] Speaker A: Awesome.
[01:18:59] Speaker B: I appreciate you.
[01:19:00] Speaker A: And as always, you can find show notes, links, presentation, PowerPoint slides, everything else at optimalhrv. Com. Stephanie, again, thank you so much and we'll see you next week.
