Past, Present & Future of Wearable Tech - Ben Reuter

The idea is these sound waves, which you actually don't hear, but that's a vibration on your wrists that you're wearing a wearable. The idea is this can affect you physiologically and you can calm down. And I know they're doing some stuff with the military with that. And the physician who I talked to so I could get to be a beta tester for it said he actually uses it before the operating room to increase his uh mental attention space.

Hey fitness fans, welcome back to the future of fitness podcast and interview series. This is your host, Eric Melzone, and this is episode number 75. I get to talk to Ben Reuter. So Ben and I connected months back when I posted something on social media about what type of wearable technology I should apply. Little did I know that that would start a uh a great conversation, uh many conversations actually, a friendship. Um and uh yeah, and now we even work together on podcasting. So three things that we are passionate about for Ben and I uh fitness, technology, and podcasting. So you can imagine that uh has a lot of conversations you can come from those three things. So um real quick call to action. Uh if you like this podcast and you like what we're doing, go check out what we're doing on fitness blitz. And if you are fitness professional, uh, I would love to have you on the show and highlight you in that is uh 10 to 15 minutes. It's a audio only uh set question format, and it's designed to give fitness professionals a voice. And I would love to have you so you can reach out to me at Eric Malzone at fitnessprofessionalonline.com and I'll get you set up. So more about Ben. Ben has two podcasts. He's got the Moving to Live uh podcast. He also has a local show just for the Pittsburgh area uh and fitness and health and wellness professionals in that area. Um great dude, very knowledgeable, comes from the world of academia, but he also lives uh and breeds fitness as well. So uh very well connected. And he he essentially brings us through uh the history of wearable technology, uh the current um status of wearable technology and where he thinks the future is going. So really cool episode, lots of knowledge being dropped here. So without further ado, let's get into it. Number 75, Ben Reuter.

Ben Reuter. Welcome to the show, my friend. Excited to be here. I'm uh been looking forward to it after you you and I connected on Facebook with your questions about wearables. And I think we're both gonna jump down the rabbit hole.

Yeah, yeah, we're gonna geek out hard on this. I've uh it's something that um, you know, within on my other podcast too, I don't know if I told you this, but it's uh it's eight to twelve minutes. I talk to fitness professionals all the time. It's called the fitness blitz. And one of the questions, it's preset questions. And the one one of the questions I ask is what piece of technology do you see changing the industry in the next 10 years? Right. So I've asked over 70, uh, probably 100 by the time this goes out, fitness professionals, what they think is gonna change. One out of four, say wearables. And uh I think they're spot on, but I think it's a it's gonna be like a a collection of of everything, right? All the tech coming into one piece. So um, yeah, this is gonna be fun.

Well, if you can't just give give our listeners a little bit of background on yourself, um kind of your uh my my background is my excuse me, full-time job is that I'm an associate professor at Cal U in the Department of Exercise Science and Sports Studies. Uh my background is I started out as an athletic trainer and got a little more education as a with a doctorate in exercise physiology. But I also on the side do some personal training just because if I'm gonna teach in that aspect, I think I ought to have some practical experience because I know that there's the science and there's the academics behind it, and then there's the practicality. You know, we'd all like our clients to come to the gym five or six days a week, and realistically, they're not gonna do that. And then you're going to appear on next week, but I also have a couple of podcasts, Moving to Live and Fit Lab uh PGH, which the ethos of both of them is movement. It's part of what makes your life complete. And I think the final thing to hit on it is I've been a wearable user since 1990. One of my graduate uh from college uh presents for myself was I bought one of the old polar heart rate monitors. Yeah.

Yeah. I was gonna say, was it like a like one of those huge brick cell phones that you like attach to your chest or something like that? But trendy.

No, it's fun, it's funny you say that because I was thinking when I was running today that it's almost gotten to the point where smartphones are wearables because if you carry your smartphone, you can count your steps. Yeah. With a chest strap, you can get your heart rate, and you know, they've got the GPS. So if you're willing to really geek out, you can have that giant thing on your arm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny. I mean, it really is. You're not you're right, it is wearable, right? Because I use Strava, right? I use Whoop, and that combination seems to do me pretty well. Um, but I also have, you know, I have an old Garmin Phoenix, so I'm just geared out, and uh, I got so much input coming in. Let's let's do this, man. Let's give because you know, in order to talk about a topic, I think it's good to understand some of the history behind it. Um, you know, so let's talk about that that 1990 point of when you had that and how you've seen this evolve to where we are now.

Yeah, I had a I had a buddy in college who got me into cycling, and I remember he's the first one who introduced me to watching the Tour de France. And I remember seeing people like Greg Lamond wearing these things on their wrists and asking, you know, asking people to know, well, what are those? They said, Oh, those are whole, uh, those are heart rate monitors, and there's a company out of Finland named Polar that makes them. Yeah. So I looked at it a little bit, and I still remember my first one was a Polar Acurex. And the software for it was DOS-based and it was rudimentary. But to me, the really neat thing, especially since I went to graduate school in Norfolk, Virginia, where it got really hot, was the first time that I could see the practical uh use of, you'd learn in a physiology class, okay, so your heart works harder when you exercise in the heat. And I still remember going out for a run at about 12 o'clock in August, which probably wasn't the brightest thing. You know, I was I was doing triathlons and pretty active. And, you know, I wasn't super fast, but I remember the for the first mile, I was, you know, maybe warming up and maybe eight minutes, and my heart rate was maybe 150. And the second mile, you know, my my heart rate was like 175, and my pace was nine minutes. And I think I was by the time I got to the third mile, my heart rate was pretty close to the age estimated max, and I was barely moving. And that to me was kind of like the first time where the science and the actual practical use is like, oh, so there really is something about the science that I used in the classes, and I can take this and I can actually use this in my training. And maybe I geeked out on it a little bit too much, but I could also still remember after doing a race, again, I said the software was rudimentary, going back and clicking minute by minute in the watch and entering numbers in a spreadsheet so I could get the neat little graph that when you use your Strava or you use your Garmin, you just press a button and there it is on your smartphone.

Yeah, yeah. So what was so okay, so when you had this polar, what was the interface? Like how how did it get to your computer? How'd this whole thing work?

It was there. Well, you had the chest strap that went to the wristwatch. And then if I remember with the wristwatch, there was similar to the like I have a Garmin Fenix 3 now. Yeah. Similar to that, it clicked in, but it went into the, I think it was the serial port, which if you remember way back with uh Windows computers and DOS to get the computer to actually recognize the port with the software. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. And you probably spent more time trying to get it to do that than to do it with the software. And I think I quickly recognized that, you know, it's a pain in the butt, but if I enter them into an Excel spreadsheet, I can actually get better graphs. And I don't think that's the case today with all the software that's out there. Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's wild to me is when you stop and you think about the iPhone came out in 2020, right? It's only been around for really, you know, a little more than a decade, and how completely insanely dependent we are as a society on it. And 10 years ago, we didn't even have it. You know, you think about that to 1990, and that was literally the big cell phones or maybe the star tap phones, right? Like how old are you been? I'm 50. You're 50.

Okay, I'm I'm 41. So we both remember the I re I remember you when you went from having the car phone installed in the car to having the bag phone, which is the big the giant bag phone.

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh yeah. I remember my dad had one and uh he's like, I can't you can't use it. I'm like, why? Because it's like five dollars a minute, you know.

I think now these satellite phones that people are using when they go out in the wilderness are probably cheaper per minute than back when when they first came out with the cell phones. And I know a lot of the people listening, they can't imagine that because they're 20 years younger than me or maybe even 20 years younger than you.

Yeah, yeah. And it's you know, with that, my dad was like, there's no conversations you're having that are worth five dollars a minute. You know, there's just not. I'm like, you're right. There's very few now, maybe. Um, so okay, so let's let's let's go down the timeline here.

You know, what how since that point in in 1990, what what's been some of the major, you know, stepping stones, you know, I think I think probably the next big stepping stone is you saw uh Polar continue to develop. And I know when I started out way back then, Polar was the name of the game and heart rate monitors, and they're still big, but you know, Garmin uh and and a variety of other brands, it's basically they all have chest straps, even Nike does. Yeah. Um but I remember stepping up to that when I was in doctoral studies and I did so I did a cycling study for my dissertation, and I wanted to measure power. And that was the first time that you could that they were starting to come out with power meters for bicycles, which if you have the right wearable device, you can actually pick up the power from your bike into your wrist while you're riding, and then of course download it afterwards. And I still remember, I think it was the 1998 American College of Sports Medicine meeting. I met Dean Golak, who was the U.S. representative at that time for SRM, and I met him in the middle of the lobby and gave him a cashier's check, and he gave me this SRM crank, which hooked onto the bicycle. And it was almost like you were doing this illegal drug deal. But but I think at that time it was the first or second uh SRM outside of a cycling team in the US, and I still remember it was incredibly expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars, and it's like, okay, I'm making an investment for my for my profession. And that all of a sudden allowed you to match heart rate with the power output on the bicycle, and it would also measure cadence so you could look at things while riding and then afterwards. So it took going just from heart rate to more realistic numbers. So that I think that was the next big step. And I remember friends of mine who were coaches and pretty elite endurance athletes thinking that was the neatest thing, but going, you know, my bike is $3,000. I'm not going to drop another $3,000 on a crank.

Yeah.

And now we see with the power taps and the various other devices out there, it's not at all unusual for somebody to have a couple of them hooked into their wheels or hooked into their bikes to get even more information on training. And I think what's important to point out with all of this that we're having is this conversation, is we're talking about that's for people who are either uh amateur athletes who are looking at performance or professional athletes who are looking at performance. And I think since then the wearables has really expanded out to, I think you have to classify almost three different areas. I think you need to look at, first of all, are you looking at it for measuring during activity or during rest and recovery to see if you're recovering or adapting to the stresses of life, whether they're training or not. And you and I were talking about that before we started recording. You said you felt like the data geek with your with your whoop and your garment and the variety of other things. And then we were talking a little bit about both of us are looking at the uh aura ring, which is coming out, the second generation. Yeah. And I think that and the motive ring that's out now, and some of the others, they're looking at, okay, how do you evaluate sleep? And there's a company out there, Elite HRV, that has some free software, which is really neat for measuring heart rate variability in the AM and at other times. And it's really looking at, okay, how am I adapting to the stresses of life? How am I recovering? Did I have a good night's sleep? So maybe it isn't as good as being able to go to a sleep lab and finding out what it is, but you can get a pretty good idea. And you can also learn about your body. I think the important thing to remember about all these devices is they're tools and they give us numbers, but we have to realistically look at those numbers and say, okay, does this make sense? And I think a perfect example to stay on that recovery aspect or that measuring kind of sedentary outside of athletic performance is I use the elite HRV app to measure uh morning heart rate variability. And pretty consistently, my heart rate's somewhere between 57 and 63 or 64. And the variability, obviously, that's what we're measuring, the space between the R waves on the uh the heart rate uh measurability strip. And suddenly I put it on one morning for my uh two to three minutes of measuring it, and all of a sudden it was telling me my heart rate was 93 or 94, and it was jumping up, and my variability was like 165.

Whoa.

Uh and it's like, okay, so I reset everything and it still did it. For about a week it did this, and I was, as you, I'm I'm a data geek. So I had another chest strap downstairs and I'd go downstairs and lie on the couch and measure it with that. And I was getting typical values or within the normal of what I'd been seeing for the past three or four months. And like all my good ideas, they happen when I'm exercising.

Yeah.

So I'm out there running with the dogs. It's like, well, I wonder if the battery on the heart rate monitor strap is going. And I changed the heart rate monitor strap battery, and all of a sudden my values of 93, 94, 105 for the heart rate were back down into the range and says, okay, it's reasonable. So to me, the take-home message from that, and I'll toot my horn a little bit, I have too much education, which allowed me to identify that, okay, this doesn't seem reasonable because I know what my heart rate feels at 93, and I'm not even close to that. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And one of the things, you know, I've had the whoop for two weeks as of this recording, which is June 13th. And uh the awareness, you know, I'm I'm I consider myself having, you know, just with my background and finished and and geekdom and all those things, I'm I'm pretty, you know, I'm pretty um, you know, aware of all the different factors that go into because I'm I'm somewhat with my clients, you know, when I was coaching a lot of people, I was very obsessed with sleep. And I think rightfully so, because that that really dictates how I can push them on a day-to-day basis in the gym or in their training. And uh, you know, what's what's got me with this thing is the awareness that it forces me to have. Every morning it asks me, not only does it give me the data of how I slept, but it gives me, asks me the questions like, you know, did you use a um a screened device uh you know, within an hour of bedtime? Did you read a book? Did you do all these things? And you start getting into this routine of like, okay, I'm really I'm really super aware. And most of the time, you know, it's that half hour of right before you go to bed of what you do that really, really dictates the the night of sleep, you know? And uh man, I I can't wait till I have like six months of data to go off of um because you know I'm just getting into it now. But yeah, it's it's so crazy. And I the person who actually suggested the whip for me was a good friend. I was uh vacationing with him down in um Cabo. And he's he, you know, he's he's a recreational athlete, you know, does some traffic and things like that, but he's a high-level consultant for one of the big five, you know, he's not like a pro athlete, you know, and this is the type of people I think, you know, it's starting to get into the mainstream and people starting to see the value of it. Um, because how many people are overworked, uh, overstressed, and underrested in our stuff.

Well, I mean, performance for somebody who's a high-powered executive or even even you know a stay-at-home mom. If you're not at your best, you're not gonna have a good quality of life and it's gonna influence everybody about you.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So what what is what's been maybe give me another major milestone you think in the wearables? Um, that's the evolutionary.

I think the next m major milestone, and it probably was 10 years or so ago, somewhere in that range when they first cut started coming out with the wrist-held step counters. Um I remember when they when they had the ones that they clipped on your belt, and you could pretty much stand there and flex your hip and move it down and watch the step count go. Or I remember there was a professor when I was in grad school who was doing some early research on it with kids, and I still remember he had this one classroom where the values for the steps for the kids were absolutely astronomical compared to all the all the other classrooms that he was looking at. Kind of looked at it and he found there were actually three people in the classroom that were skewing the numbers, and so we went and talked to the kids, and he found out that they were putting the device on the tails of their dogs and watching their dogs wag the tail. But I think that was the first time with the step count, and we've got you know the recommendation, uh, which would be a whole other podcast of 10,000 steps a day, which I think is a good starting point, but I think you'd agree is not nearly enough.

Yeah.

But that with the step counters, it made people aware outside of the performance aspect because they can say, okay, 10,000 steps, let me look at this. I got 10,000 today, but yesterday I had meetings and I didn't get it, what can I do? Um and actually I was just looking at a a little bit of research before uh before I called you. And right now, with a lot of the step counters, they're in that 10 to 15% error range. So if you're a performance athlete, you know, if you're riding your bike 50 miles, 10%, that's a 5% difference. Or if you're running 50 miles, if you've ever done any ultra running, you know, you don't want that 10% difference. But if you're somebody who's looking for a baseline or just kind of like, look, I I know I need to get some activity in, 10 to 15% is right in there and not unrealistic for something that I think at this point in time, if you hunt around, it's 40 bucks.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. Wow. I love it. The wagging tail. What a what a genius kid move.

That's probably kids going, I wonder what happens when we do this. And I still I mean, I still remember whenever I think about it to this day, I just have to have to smile.

Yeah, yeah, genius kid. So um awesome. Well, what what's what next in the evolution? This is fun. I like it.

I think next in the evolution, and I uh you're probably like me, is when they started coming out with the affordable price for the GPS's.

Yeah.

And I remember first the like the Garmin handheld, and I've I've mentioned Garmin a couple of times. I don't want to I don't want to give the impression that I'm shilling for Garmin, it's just they're one of the big ones. Yeah. And very often when I had an REI dividend to use, it's like, oh, I can get a Garmin device. Yeah. And so they started out with the handhelds, and I still remember strapping one of those with bungee cords to my bike, and I could actually lay out the route and look at the elevation. And then they went to the wrist ones, and I still remember going through four or five of them in REI. They had that generous return policy. And what I found with a lot of them is they took a lot of time to pick up the GPS, to pick up the satellites. Yeah. And then I like to go off-road and be on be in the trails, and you'd get in the woods and they'd be useless. Yeah. So I would go for what I would know would be, you know, a four-mile run, it would tell me I'd run two miles.

Yeah.

And I think that really adapted probably after three or four years. And I remember getting uh actually the GPS handheld or wrist held that I still have the Fenix 3, which is theoretically obsolete, but I keep waiting for it to break. Yeah. And all of a sudden it picked up the satellites really, really quickly.

Yeah.

And as long as it wasn't too heavily wooded, you could find out exactly what you were doing. You could see your elevation. It had the heart rate with the heart rate strap that you could do. And then what I saw really added to it that I think really made a difference for me, and I think for a lot of other people, is it had uh settings based on activity. So now if you were biking, you could use it as your computer too. And I know I've seen pictures of you biking, and you probably remember the days of fiddling around with the wires and the sensors on the wheels. Well, I I think we'll all agree the GPS is pretty accurate. So now you can see heart rates, you can see elevation, you can see distance, and depending on the device, you might even be seeing power. So it's really performance-based, not really the rest or recovery, which I think is the opposite end of the spectrum. And you were commenting on the whoop. I like uh everything I've seen about the whoop. The only thing I don't didn't like is I didn't didn't look like it was able to be input the information to like Strava and trading peaks. Yeah. But I think uh it's one of those devices that can work both during activity uh and uh during the recovery sleep sleep cycle too, which is unique because from what I've seen, all the information that it puts out is pretty accurate. So if if you're looking at putting it the heart rate monitor was first, then you got to kind of into the power meters where you could see power and heart rate if you were looking performance, into the wearables, into the GPSs. And now we're getting into the wearable devices that I think people are kind of concentrating more on saying, okay, steps are important, heart rate during exercise is important, but as you said a few minutes ago, you know, the recovery and sleep are equally important. So now they've got all these devices and all these apps out there. That are allowing you to measure what's your sleep quality like, what's your recovery like? And some of them are even coming with built-in programs for guided meditation and guided breathing. So if you're one of those people who really is under stress, then what you can do is maybe 10 minutes before that big presentation, you're in your office and you do your 10 minutes of breathing and you go in and you're a little calmer and a little bit better able to concentrate than you were otherwise. Before that might be something that would only happen with somebody like Michael Phelps before he went out to swim one of his events.

Yeah, it's interesting. And what I I've had some conversations with other people who are very much into the future of everything that's going on here. But APIs tend to be a big part of it, right? Is how are all these things interacting? And there seems to be a little bit of uh, I don't know this for sure because I'm not behind closed doors and boardrooms, but it seems to be a little bit of pushback from different companies of how their softwares interact. How are you seeing that evolving? Is there is there more coming in? Because you're right, I can't use my whoop, I can't use it, I can't link it with Strava to get that data interacting.

Um I think right now, what we see now is not going to be the same six months from now. And not the Aura ring, but there was another ring that was out there that I used for a while and tried and it didn't work for me, it was a good product. But I emailed the company and said, hey, you know, when are you going to allow your data to be uploaded to Strava or vice versa? Because you mentioned Strava. And for people who are into maybe not just recreational, or even if they are, it's nice to see or be able to compare your times on a given course. Or if you go, maybe you go someplace and hike uh Pinnacle Peak in Arizona, and then you could pull it up on Strava and see, oh, I did this time, I'm feeling pretty good from my age group, but wow, look at this guy who went, you know, 30 minutes faster than me. And some of the devices out there where you can do that from the wrist, like your Garmin device, it's great. Some of the others are more closed systems. Right. And I think what we're going to see is as we get better with the technology, you know, the battery life is dramatically improved. You know, when you first started trying with your wearable on your wrist with the GPS, the battery maybe lasted three hours. Yeah, so bad. Yeah. You know, now you're looking at if you're somebody who wants to go out for an all-day hike, there's a pretty good chance it's going to last eight, nine, ten hours if you if you set the sampling rate so it's not going every five seconds. And the the I think as the battery life improves, and as I think as people get more aware of wanting to have consistent value. So when they do something, it measures consistently. So if they have a course that they walk with their friend every morning and that's their exercise, they want to know that it's going to tell them that it's 3.1 miles every time. So they can maybe, okay, today we're going to walk a little faster, today we're going to go a little slower. And if they've got a device that one time it's saying three miles, and the next time it's saying 2.8, I think we're going to see, and I think we've already started to see this, some of these devices go by the wayside. Maybe it's a big company and they consolidate, and rather than having six or seven devices, now they've got two or three. Or I think you'll probably start to see some of the companies go by the wayside. I actually found an article after we first talked. Uh from 2011 to 2018, there's something like 472 different devices. Wow. From over a hundred manufacturers. Yeah. Yeah. So I think uh what you're going to find is there's going to be certain ones that are going to attract the performance person or the competitive athlete, whether they're professional or amateur. And I think that's going to be divided into those that allow you to share it with other people. By that I mean I know that there's a version of training peaks where if you're a coach, your athlete can upload their data to this and you can view it and give feedback for that remote coaching. And I think they'll probably end up with three or four devices that are good for that. There's probably going to be three or four devices out there that are really good for somebody who just wants that consistent feedback. Like, I just want to know that I'm taking at least 10,000 steps per day, or I just want to know that I'm that I'm being active for X number of hours per day, active being up all up off my seat walking around. And then I think there's going to be a third category, which both of these devices, or both of these first categories, the competitive person and the person who's just looking for quality of life. I think there's going to be a third category that both of these devices are going to do, which are going to be devoted to recovery. The fact that being able to measure your sleep, being able to re measure some of your resting values. And I think the devices that are out there now and the software is out there for heart rate variability, you know, there's there's some pretty strong evidence that looking at that long term, not at a single time, but long term, can give you an idea, okay, am I constantly stressed? Maybe it's from work, maybe it's from family life, maybe it's from not sleeping well. And if you're sick or you've just done a couple of hard workouts, if you're that competitive person, am I ready to go again? Because we all know it's really easy to look at training plans and look at things and say, well, this is what I'm going to do, or this is what I'm going to have my athlete do. But it's very hard to be objective when you're looking at yourself. And if you understand the information and you can look at it longitudinally, you can say, Oh, six months ago it looked just like this, and I ignored it and I decided that I was going to go out and try to try to do this hard workout. And look, I was sick for the next three weeks. Maybe I'll be smart.

Right. Right. Yeah, I I I agree. So those those three categories, just because I think it's really kind of it's nice to have I like categories, right? So number one was with the competitive athlete and and the coach, right? The combination.

I think the the competitive athlete, either they're self-coached or their coach, the ability to have literally as much information as you can get and pick and choose. Yeah. And then just the general quality of the computer. And then the the person who just Exactly. They just want minimal values. And right now I think that minimal value is either distance or steps. Right. But I think that might change as we as we learn more in the research and the devices develop.

Yeah.

You know, that that sort of person, they really don't care that this time on my walk, my heart rate was this. And the other thing is too much information is either too time consuming, or if they're a beginning exerciser or not really technologically involved, too many, too much information will scare them off. It's like, I'm not going to use that. It's too complicated. Right. Right. And I think with all of them, and I think this, I think this is still developing with that, is that recovery aspect. I think that's useful for whether you're a competitive athlete or you're just wellness. And I I know I was fortunate enough to interview Don Moxley a few months back, who is doing some work with Ohio State University's wrestling team. And the amount of wearable stuff that they did and just the ideas that he gave me led me down the rabbit hole of starting to look at morning heart rate variability. And what I really quickly learned is if I had a really hard workout one day, my next morning, my heart rate variability might look basically the way it looked across, but two days later was where I would see it. So it took my body two days to show that, hey, you better take an easy day. And I learned very quickly that if I didn't take that easy day, that elevated uh or that that uh decreased heart rate variability would last for three or four days. Similarly, I learned if I have a bad night's sleep, it's gonna show up that next morning. When I wake up and I strap that heart rate monitor on for two minutes or three minutes, it's gonna show me, okay, that bad night's sleep, even though you're saying I can power through it physiologically, my body's saying, Well, you're not normal or you're not where you're normally are, you can try to do it. And right now, the experimentation for me, which is kind of cool as a data geek, is okay, so I've had a lousy night's sleep. I got to bed late, or maybe I was traveling, I've got this workout planned. If I do this workout, how long does it take to me to recover from it versus doing a much easier workout and saying, okay, maybe that one night's sleep only affects me for one workout versus three or four? And I think the important thing to remember about that is it differs for everybody. You know, we can all have these training plans that look really, really good on paper, but life interferes. Yeah. So I think with us, uh, the people who are a little more competitive or more data geeky, it's like, okay, as much information as possible, look at it, and the software is allowing you to see what are these interactions so that down the line, maybe you drop down to only two or three pieces of information.

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's interesting. We've been talking primarily in the context of you know athleticism and the general population and just general knowledge, but when do you see this playing a major role in with integrating into the medical profession? Like when is a doctor going to be able to look at someone's you know historic HRV or sleep patterns and stress patterns and then be able to diagnose a little bit better or at least have knowledge and background? Like when do you see that starting to integrate? Or is it happening already?

I think to some extent it's happening already. I know and uh many times when they put the heart rate monitor, and we're talking the 12 electrode lead when somebody's in the hospital, they're measuring heart rate variability. Um, I know that there are some physicians I interviewed for one of my podcasts a few months back, uh, Dr. Gary Chimes, who's a uh physical medicine physician out in the Seattle area. And the post that you made on Facebook a few weeks ago about ideas for wearables, he made the same post uh uh on his Facebook account, which sparked a similar thing. And I know he's using the uh a chest strap in the elite HRV. In the aspect of his area of interest is why is it when men get to be 40 or so, you know, all of a sudden that's when the the mental or the physical problems start to occur. Yeah. So he so he's using it to say, okay, I'm using this on myself kind of as a guinea pig. How can I integrate this and give this to my patients?

Yeah.

Yeah. And then the other aspect that I think is getting involved in medical, there is a uh a study that's or there's a beta test going on at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center now with a device that you wear on your wrist with an app on your phone that gives you uh sound waves for a biofeedback type thing. Wow. So the idea behind that is with the app. Um if you, for example, have a big presentation or you have to be interviewed for a podcast in 20 minutes, you would strap this thing on and maybe it would calm you down. Or there's another app based on the pattern of the sound wave, or sorry, another program in the app. Think of the program or as like songs, uh, and what it'll do is maybe it'll make you more alert to concentrate, or maybe you've finished the day and you're all wound up and you need something to calm down. And the idea is these sound waves, which you actually don't hear, but there's a vibration on your wrist since you're wearing a wearable. The idea is this can affect you physiologically and you can calm down. And I know they're doing some stuff with the military with that, and the physician who I talked to, so I could get to be a beta tester for it, said he actually uses it before the operating room to increase his uh mental attention span. No way. I think you hit on this, and I'm not sure if it's before we recorded or after we started recording. With all this information, one of the things it does is it makes you very aware. Yeah. So maybe with this device, it isn't calming you down because of these sound waves, but if you're thinking about your breathing and and concentrating and saying, okay, I'm getting calmer and feeling better, it has the same effect. Right. Right. You know, it can still be beneficial and a valuable tool.

Yeah, well, you know, whether the information is accurate or not, we all want to know why. We all want to know why we feel like crap in the morning on some days and why we don't. You know, so I think this gives us insights into it. And I think naturally within our human brain, if we can start processing it, we feel better because we can have an understanding thereof. You know, there's also the flip side. Like, when does it become too much information and we're too dependent on these things and it's telling us everything? You know, I was joking about it earlier with like, you know, I woke up in the morning, I was gonna go to the gym, but my whoop told me I didn't rest well, so I stayed in bed for an extra hour. Then I missed my workout for the day. You know, when when does when does that, you know, when does it when does it start to go over the edge and for you know what type of people? I guess we don't know, we'll see.

But um I mean, I know I know some people who coach uh Iron Man athletes who are pretty good, and their comment is okay, you can use the power meter on the bike, you can use the heart rate monitor on the run, but when you get to 20 miles of the marathon, put the heart rate monitor away and and race. Yeah. Because you know, you've got you've got 10k to go, and if you're running side by side with somebody else, either to win your age group, which is very competitive, or if you happen to be a professional, you know, if you say, Oh, I have to slow down because my heart rate's above this zone that I've decided I'm gonna do, you've just lost, you know, at this point in time, seven and a half hours of racing if you're an elite, if you're an elite athlete, rather than saying, okay, for this 40 or 45 minutes, I have to go on feel, I have to go on effort, and recognize when I look back at those physiological variables, holy cow, that wasn't what they were supposed to be. But it may not matter because you were not performing based on your physiological variables, but you were actually performing based on competition.

Yeah. And it's, you know, when you get down to it, I mean, there's we're we're humans with souls, right? And um, there's gonna be life is gonna get uncomfortable. And if we start using these devices, like, I should have just got up that morning and gone to the gym, right? I mean, I should have just gone. Like, it's okay if I'm not fully rested during those days because we can recover really well, but also being able to push past the pain. As one of my ex-coaches says, he's like, it's the human experience. I asked him, like, well, hey, when I get to this point in my race, what what do I do? What what do I go into? What what mindset do I go into? He's like, nothing. You fully embrace the pain and you push through it. That's the human experience. And I was like, oh, geez, man, you're good. But it was, you know, that I think that's part of it too, is like, you know, we can't stuff, we can't stay away from from it too long. Sometimes we really have to go forth and push it because there's times in life, so you got to get too ethereal here, but there's times in life when you just have to suck it up in a big way.

I'm I'm reminded of two stories. The first one was, I think I'm paraphrasing with Dave Scott, the famous Iron Man triathlete, who does some coaching, and his comment was if you don't feel good, go out and do something light for about 20 minutes. If you don't feel any better, stop the workout. But you may find that that not feeling good is just psychological or just not being ready. Yeah. Um the other thing that I remember, and way back from uh psychology classes in college, and I'm sure there's a study in one of your listeners is gonna say it was this study. But the the people who are the elite athletes, they're constantly monitoring themselves and saying things like, okay, my legs hurt, but they don't hurt as bad as they've hurt before, so I can keep going. Well, maybe if I pump my arms harder, my legs won't hurt as much. Hey, I could breathe a little deeper. Hey, I'll tuck in behind this person and I'll draft off them. Whereas the person who maybe isn't as experienced with basically, as you said, suck it up and go, uh, is gonna say, Oh, my legs hurt. I better slow down because otherwise I'm gonna blow up and not be able to continue. Yeah. And it's similar if you're looking in the strength power realm. How many people go to a powerlifting meet or go to a CrossFit games and PR something far above what they ever did in training or ever expected to do in training? Yeah. Because they didn't listen to all the physiological variables. They get they had the psychological input from the crowd or their friends screaming at them. And if they were saying, Well, according to my training and my monitor, this is what I can do.

Yeah. Oh, I saw it every, you know, coming from a cross-it background and being around cross-it competitions and seeing it all the time. You were you saw people do things, you're like, there's no way that that should have just happened. You know, there's no way they should have just done a snatch ladder and hit a PR at the end after three days of competition. It doesn't make sense. But it's that, you know, the psychological factor is is tremendously powerful. Yeah.

That's why they have competition, other than other than uh that's exactly summed it up.

So, you know, if if you okay, let's let's let's get to the crux of this. If you see like everything integrating, you know, what what is what is Ben's dream, right? What does it all look like in like 10 years? What what what is that? I'm sure you think about this, right? What does that look like? I can see you smiling already.

So before we go 10 years, we'll start currently. I'll I'll admit I'm I'm a rot watch geek. I like mechanical watches.

Yeah.

So I'm hoping that the device they come out with long term doesn't require wearing a watch because I like wearing my mechanical watches. I like the idea of something on my wrist that's me too. But what I'm hoping with, and we've talked about this a little bit, uh, the first generation Aura Ring got really good reviews for that passive, that recovery, that sleep that you and I have talked about that's vastly underrated and under-examined in most people. I'm hoping that the version two that I just uh set my size in, I'm hoping that does a really good job of sleep quality and uh measuring heart rate variability. If it doesn't, I'll still continue to use the elite HRV device or HRV app and either the chest strap or they're coming out with a device in the next couple of months that'll use the uh finger, and I've got that on order. Yes, I've got a problem. Yeah.

Yeah, you do.

So what I'm what I'm hoping will happen is I'm hoping for current, I'll give you your 10 years in just a second. The current will allow me to wear something like the aura ring for the passive stuff, the day-to-day stuff. And then I'll continue to use my Garmin watch, or when that breaks, another watch that does GPS heart rate, and that I can use on a bike and a run, or if I do things like indoor activity in the in the gym. Not so much lifting since I think the technology still isn't there for that, but more cardiovascular and high intensity stuff. So currently I'm hoping to be able to get down to two devices. The kind of the one during activity and then the one for the rest of the time.

Right.

Over time, I'd like to see them have a device that if it could be in a ring or you know, maybe a small thin wristband, like some of these step checkers. So you could still wear your watch that doesn't make you look like you're the geek going to the gym when you're wearing a business suit. I'd like to see something like that, but I also recognize the limitation of so many of these things is the battery life. They've improved the battery life dramatically. Um I just saw something in the last day or so. There is one uh uh wearable device, it's actually on my list of things to read that supposedly it charges from your body's from your body's uh chemistry. And I'm not speaking correctly on that. It's like I want to you're looking confused, and I'm looking confused. Yeah. And I I saw it in a f in a it just in past. It's like, oh, I need to look at that. Um I'm wondering if it actually works.

Yeah.

So I think in a nutshell, in 10 years, what I'd like to see is I'd like to see a single wearable device that would measure sleep quality, that would allow you to measure other things, not appearing on the wrist to look at necessarily, but that would have an app that you could look at on your smartphone. Maybe on the wrist, all it would show is heart rate. And if it's sleep, maybe maybe there's a sleep scale for sleep quality when you woke up, you know. Maybe there's based on a variety of parameters, well, one through ten, uh sleep quality, one being horrible, ten being the best. And then with the information you could get from the app, you'd say, okay, I'm a seven today. I can suck it up and go to the gym. Oh, I'm a six point five. My experience has shown me if I have a six point five and I go to the gym, it's either not going to be a good workout or I'm gonna get sick in a couple of days.

Yeah. Wow.

So I think I indirectly answered your question.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's all exciting, man. Well, and we'll just we'll see. We'll just on for on this ride, we'll see what happens. So, Ben, if people want to um contact you or find out more about you know uh the work that you do, where where do you send them?

Uh, easiest place I'd send them is I'd send them uh either to my email address, which is R-E-U-T-E-B-H at gmail.com. Yeah. The other thing that I would send them to uh just for the podcast, because just like you've got some really interesting guests and we've talked, one of the great things about podcasting is you can find out all kinds of information. I'd direct them to my uh moving to live podcast. And if they put moving to live, just M-O-V-I-N-G to L-I-V-E, it'll pop up the first four or five. We do uh podcast kind of long-form interviews, which you're going to be on in a week or so. The first part first part is their story. How'd you get to where they are? And we get some really interesting stories about some people. How did you get to that point? And then the second point is they kind of talk about what they do professionally. So it's all a way of getting out that thing that you're doing too. It's like movement is part of what makes your life complete. And the big thing that I'm trying to do is to get it outside of the knowledge silos where the doctors only talk to the doctors, the personal trainers only talk to the personal trainers, the runners only talk to the runners. So everybody's all trying to get people to move, whether it's performance or it's for quality of life. And you're like me, you're getting a little older, you're starting to recognize like, look, I just want to keep moving. So the more information you have, the more you can give it to your clients and people that you love. And the idea of the perfect death is you're out doing something that you want to do and you drop dead of a massive stroke. Yeah.

We'll end and we'll end it right there. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Reuter, thank you for coming on, Ben. I'll uh I know I'll be talking to you soon, man.

Thanks for having me on.

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