The Future of HRV - Joel Jamieson

You know, if you're uh an individual trainer, you're not doing this, you're you're ultimately gonna miss out. I mean, I'm working with lifetime fitness right now to look at rolling out Morpheus to their 1.2 million members and their 4,000 plus trainers. I mean, this is already this is already happening. This is not something that's gonna happen in five or ten years. So if you're you know sitting there and and you have nothing, you have no technology, you don't know how to use it, you you know, the trainer down the street is using Morpheus and some other platform and they can tell people all this information, you know, you're gonna lose client.

Hey Finis fans, welcome back to the future of Finished Podcast and Interview Series. This is episode number 88. I'm your host, Eric Alco, and today's guest is Joel Finis. So Joel, uh you can find out more about Joel at 8 weeks out trainwithmorpheus.com, a lot for different areas. He does a more detailed uh biography on himself during the episode, but uh he is very well known in the fitness studies community, uh especially well known in the world of combat sports. So uh he is a wealth of knowledge. We geek out on energy systems. Uh we talk about uh the feature of HRV, uh heart rate variability. Um he is one of the early adopters of that technology and he tells us where it's going, what you need to know about it, and uh what to do about it. And uh I did order his uh his train with Morpheus um HRV unit. I like it. I do. It's the best one I've had so far, and I've tried a lot of them. Um I have a uh bin of them that are kind of uh I've used and talked to die, but this one I still use. So it's it's a great tech, and uh I urge you to check it out and just get used to it because it's gonna be commonplace within our industry for sure in the next five, 10 years, um, if it isn't already. So yeah, go check it out. Um before we get into the episode, got to talk to you about the fitness accelerator. So uh I think Equal Part, Incubator, Mastermind, and networking group. Uh it is the fastest growing network of fitness professionals and entrepreneurs that you've never heard of because it's not on social media. That's right. Uh we're not on social. We have built out a black community that is based on intent, people who go there to network, people who go there to ask questions, to share knowledge, uh, and all these things. And it's not social because let's be honest, people, social media is too cluttered, it is too distracting. And overall, for me personally, it's just a little annoying now. So uh we wanted to get off social, get out of Facebook groups, get out of LinkedIn groups, things like that, and get into a group where um business actually gets done and connections are made. So go check it out. It's fitnessprofessionalonline.com forward slash fit accelerator. Uh again, that's fitnessprofessionalonline.com forward slash fit accelerator. Get two weeks on me. We're offering two week trials for the community. Get in, see what it's all about, uh, no risk for two weeks and uh and go from there. So without further ado, let's get on to episode number 88 with Joel Jameson. This is an audio only podcast. We did not have video for this recording. So uh those of you who are on YouTube, sorry about that. Um yeah, here we go. Hey, Joel Jamison, welcome to the show, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited. We uh, you know, like always, I always start talking to people and they just get this great nugget, and then I realize I'm not recording. So we're recording now. Um so I know who you are. I've I've been following a little bit um, you know, your uh expertise within the um combat arts and the training that you do there with energy systems. Um you're one of the early adopters in HRV, a lot of things, but if you can maybe just give people who don't know who you are, Joel, just uh you know a background on what you do and what you've done and what you're doing now.

Yeah, I mean it's it's been a long time in the industry, about uh 15, 16 years now, maybe a little more than that. Actually, I started a gym back in 2003 called Enzo Athletics and uh started training combat athletes pretty quickly and worked with a lot of top-level UFC and international fighters. Uh, did that for a number of years, and then realized there was a need for conditioning and um you know teaching people how to get in better shape. So I created an online site, eightweeksout.com, started spreading the word about conditioning, and that grew into uh you know a big online enterprise for me uh at the same time. I'd also been on the technology side. I developed uh a product called BioForce HIV back in 200 um like 11-12, which is really one of the kind of the early fitness technology uh software pieces out there, and and spent quite a few years building that and had a lot of teams and organizations, Navy SEALs, different government organizations around the world using that. Uh created a newer platform called Morpheus a few uh months ago or a little bit less than a year ago. I've done stuff with a lot of consulting. Uh worked with a company called Lifetime Fitness, it's one of the biggest gym chains in the US, and helped them essentially build out a lot of their personal trainer education. So uh I've done a lot of different things from training fighters to, like I said, working with giant corporations to developing technology, building the online business, you know, building a brick and mortar business. So I've done a lot of different things in the industry over the years.

Yeah. Wow. Wow, that's so cool. And so when did you start your online business? Around what year?

Uh 2008 or 2009, I started eight weeks out. And I really just had made a post on a big internet forum for MMA conditioning, and there was uh a lot of interest. I got a huge thread going of something a few hundred thousand people were uh reading these posts about MMA conditioning. At the time MMA was was was uh really growing rapidly, and I just realized there was a big void in the marketplace. Nobody was really writing or talking about MMA conditioning, and there was a lot of misinformation out there, and people wanted to understand how to get in shape for combat sports or how to get in shape for different sports in general. So I wrote a book called Open MMA Conditioning, and that really was my launch-off point. And you know, Livvy I wrote that in 2009, and we're still selling you know a thousand plus copies a year of that right now with very little actual uh promotion of that book. So it's uh it was just a really big eye-opener. I think it just spokes the fact that there was a lot of people writing about strength, and not really a lot of people writing about conditioning in a practical way, and I would say that's still the case. You know, you can you can type in strength or power or bodybuilding or uh build muscle or lose fat in Google and you can get a bazillion results. Um but if you look at conditioning, there's really not that many people um trying to write about conditioning in a practical, easy to understand way, you know, that's not just go do a bunch of intervals, and and I've always approached things from a bit more scientific standpoint than that. And so um, you know, I found found a good audience.

Yeah. You know, one of um, you know, our our mutual friend James Fitzgerald, I went through all of his training too and worked with him for a long time. And the thing that I geeked out the most, and working with him, because I know he geeks down on as well, is just energy systems and how um very little people within the fitness profession actually educate themselves. Strength, like you said, is such a big focus. Fat loss, of course, because that's what the general population needs. But how did you stumble or did you stumble into energy system training and becoming you know one of the leading minds in that area?

It was pretty out of necessity, to be honest with you, because I I'd came up from a strength background like most strength coaches do as well, and worked primarily football, but then I started working with the combat athletes, and you know, one of my first athletes was uh fighting a big fight in K1 over in Japan, and I really didn't know much about energy systems at the time, to be honest with you. I'd like to say I had a strength background, but uh really what happened is I I started training with these guys just to understand the sport better. You know, if I was gonna start training these guys, I wanted to understand what I was getting myself into and what their needs were, so I started training with them and I was you know massively stronger than they were, but within 30 or 40 seconds I was just face down the mat, getting my ass kicked. And it was a real eye-opener that there's there's a whole other dimension to fitness here that I wasn't very good at. And, you know, you realize basically if if you're gonna train these guys, the last thing you want to do is watch them gas out in the fight and know that it was your fault because you didn't know anything about energy systems. So I just dug in and started learning everything I could, you know, kept trying the different methods of myself, uh, talked to anybody I could find that was working the fighters, um, you know, and really just spent years trying to understand how it's all how all the pieces fit together and and how to get people ready to fight and how to get people ready to perform in other areas. So it's it's like I said it was pretty necessity. If I hadn't started training combat athletes, I don't know that would have ever gone that direction. But when someone's counting on you to get them in shape and energy systems are a big part of that, you gotta dive in and and learn as much as you can.

Yeah. Yeah, so I'm trying to ask this question in in a way that's most beneficial to the people listening. But when we when we talk about energy systems, Joel, you know, anaerobic versus aerobic or lactate, uh, you know, how how do you with with taking a complex topic, how do you boil it down to so it would intrigue somebody to learn more?

You know? Yeah, I mean I think the biggest thing to understand is really energy systems are more than just performance. It's it's at the heart of life because every single cell of your body from the day you're you know born to the day you die is dependent and reliant on energy. Um so when we talk about energy systems, really what we're talking about is just metabolism, how does your body take the food that you eat and turn it into the energy that you need to survive or walk around or punch somebody in the face or run a mile or whatever the case may be. And really basically what you find and what's the most interesting about it is just kind of how the body was designed to function in a variety of different capacities, but also the trade-offs that are inherently part of that. So you realize, you know, there's a reason that we can't run uh, you know, a mile at the same speed that we can run 100 meters, right? We can't even run 100 meters at the same speed we could run 30 meters or 50 meters. So uh just understanding kind of how all these pieces fit together is is a super fascinating thing because again, it's it's not just about performance, it's at the heart of how our bodies are designed to function and stay alive. So it's it's really just kind of understanding what the pieces are involved, how they all fit together. And uh, you know, for the reason that people um you know, I wouldn't say struggle, but find conditioning energy systems more challenging, it's just there's a lot of moving parts. I mean, yeah, uh strength is central nervous system functioning and big muscles, and that's a big piece of it, and some connective tissue, but you know, movement and mechanics and energy system and conditioning is all these different variables and all these different factors that are put together. So it's anybody who's fascinated by just how the human body works is is gonna love digging it in into energy systems and movements and all this stuff because there's so many layers you can peel back one step at a time, and and fundamentally, the more you can understand that, the more everything else fits together. Because look at it this way, your your strength and your power, which is what everyone loves so much. Well, that's driven that's driven by energy systems. The muscles don't fire themselves, they all rely on energy to do that. So, you know, whatever area of fitness you're talking about, energy systems is a huge component of it. There's there's no area of fitness that doesn't involve energy systems.

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. Um, you know, I kind of look at I've never I've never coached uh a combat sport athlete. Um, but I've coached a lot of CrossFit people. And um I see I see them similar, you know, um obviously many differences, but similar in the fact that it's like, you know, if if you're training somebody for you know um endurance sports, you know, you can really focus on heart rate training, right? But for you know, at least speaking from CrossFit is like that doesn't work. Like, how do you what metrics do you gather from a CrossFit athlete? Because if let's just put a simple workout, let's say it's an eight-minute AMRAP with um heavy deadlifts, burpees, and assault bike. Like you, as knowing what you know about energy systems, that's just a hot mess of metrics, right? Like, how do you how do you train how what metrics do you look at to train somebody for that particular workout? Because, you know, obviously if they get on the assault bike and they burn into lactate, right? That's gonna be a big issue going into all the energy systems, you know, and then you know, strength is you know, deadlifts are gonna be absolute power, but plus muscle endurance. It just turns very confusing. And I think it's really hard to boil it down into simple terms that athletes can understand.

Yeah, I mean, it what it always comes down to is just this this trade-off, right? The more strength and power you produce, the less the you know, the lower the duration you can produce at four again. That's that's just kind of how the body was designed. So you have to kind of look at where's the balance, right? If I make somebody bigger and stronger, I'm ultimately going to compromise their ability to be, you know, strong for a long period of time. So it's about it's about finding each person's balancing point of the right combination of strength and endurance, and then making sure that you know, as as they progress and develop, they're continuing to achieve that balance. And the other thing people forget about is a lot of it's just technique and control and pacing, and there's a huge mental uh performance side to this. You know, fitness is one thing. I mean, you can you can look at two athletes that have very similar fitness levels, but they might not perform the same, and that's because you know, just because you're capable of the energy production doesn't necessarily mean you're you're going to use it effectively. So, you know, I I think in the last couple years, that's a big area I've dived into is teaching people how to control their energy output and teach people how to manage and pace and do all these things that are a huge part of conditioning. That, you know, again, I look at fitness as one half and I look at the skill of conditioning as the other half. And anytime you're talking about combat sports or CrossFit or anything where there's this huge demand, this huge need for both strength, power, and endurance, it's about teaching people how to execute and how to use energy as effectively and efficiently as possible. Because if you don't, you know, you're gonna burn yourself out and pay the price, even though your fitness might have been good. You didn't have the skill it takes to manage it properly.

Yeah, interesting. I love what you just said, man. I think you may just name the episode too, the skill of conditioning, right? Um, you know, once again, going through my lines of of working with with CrossFit athletes, is you know, they always so many times they thought, well, I just gotta go right out of the gate super hard, right? But then we started coming across, you know, probably five years ago that like, you know, I call it pacing as the new kipping. You know, even if it's a three-minute workout, you still got to find pacing and understanding how you, particularly as the individual, uh, approaches that that workout. And uh it's a skill, man. It's crazy. I mean, you have to get a feel for it, you have to understand the science of it, but ultimately it's just how you feel, right?

Yeah, it's it's being able to what I call it dynamic energy control. It's it's basically understanding how to conserve and how to control and how to expand and when to expand your own energy. And in combat sports, you know, it's I would say it's even more complicated because you're dealing with an opponent and you're dealing with uh, you know, each person essentially has to outsmart the other one, not just in terms of skill set, but in terms of energy, uh, if you're gonna win the conditioning battle. So uh, you know, any any sport like that, I think you can't neglect the the skill aspect of conditioning. It's I would say it's it's more than just pacing, it's literally understanding you know how and when to push and when to when to relax and when to rest and how to just conserve and manage. And it's you know, it's uh it's like I said, it's a skill set that needs to be taught. It's it's not something that just people inherently figure out, and a lot of people uh you know don't figure it out, even though their fitness levels are are relatively good, they just don't understand how to put those pieces together, and that's that's gotta be coached and taught as well.

Yeah. Jules, you in your opinion, is there any sport more complex than combat sports to train people for?

No, not really. I mean, combat sports are complex because uh A, there's so many different skills, right? I mean, yeah, you know, if you look at football or basketball or different sports, the skill sets are relatively predefined. You know, you you have to be able to dribble, you have to be able to shoot, or you have to be able to pass the ball or catch the ball or whatever. But you know, MMA, it's it's like playing five different sports or five different uh well actually it's yeah, it's five different sports. It's you know, boxing, it's kickboxing, it's grappling, it's wrestling, it's submission. There's all these different sports that have fairly unrelated skills. I mean, the groundwork has nothing really in common from a skill standpoint from stand-up and even some of the transition areas are their own sports. So there's a there's a lot of skills involved, b, you know, there's this huge demand for both strength, power, and endurance, which is challenging. And then C, you're talking about you know, complete unpredictability. The fight could go 30 seconds, it could go 25 minutes. There's all these unknown variables of every single fight, and every opponent's got a different style you have to prepare for. So there's you know, there's just a huge number of variables and a huge number of um complicating factors that make it a challenging sport to train for. And and uh you know, the early days were we're just that there very early in people trying to figure it out. I think people have gotten better at it over the years. You definitely don't see nearly as many people gassing out now as as you used to, but a lot of that's because people have just gotten better at uh you know training and and pacing and realizing the limitations of of what they can and can't do. So it's uh it's been fascinating. So I've been training those guys since about 2003, 2004 now. So it's been a you know, it's been an interesting journey to watch the sport progress and grow and turn into what it is now.

Yeah. So my first thought is like with all these complexities, man, do you have like some like you must you must have some kind of systems in place? I mean, it's it's so case by case, but like how do you assess an athlete just to start? Like how what does that look like? How long does it take? How many sessions does it take? Or is it something that you can just kind of eyeball now due to your skill?

No, I mean it's both. I mean, we have basic assessments you put the fighters through and and have metrics of you know what what fighters should look like in different weight classes, what's good, what's average, what's what's poor. Um, and then you have to actually watch them train, you have to watch their their fight tapes, you have to do all the sort of skill analysis as well. That's one thing too, is you you really can't separate somebody's skill in their sport from their you know, fitness or conditioning numbers. I think that's a mistake people make is you know, again, just because I put somebody through a conditioning test in a gym doesn't really mean anything if their skill is terrible and they don't know how to actually move correctly and they get in the sport and they're tight and tense and they you know they just don't move well. So we look at the whole picture. I mean, that's where you have you have to work with a skill coach and you have to have an understanding of what the skills are and and how someone should look. And again, you if you watch somebody move in their sport and they're tight and they're rigid, and you can tell they're just burning through a ton of extra energy than necessary, then you know that's something you have to address, even if their fitness numbers may look good. So we've been doing it so so long now, and I work with Matt Hume was who's really the best in the business, the best in the world. Um so he he can use you know his own judgment and coach's eye for you know for assessing how someone's conditioning is gonna look just from watching them, you know, hit pads and and spar and all those sorts of things. So we look at look at all the different uh you know variables. You look at strength, you look at power, you look at their movement potential, you look at their natural pace and ability, you look at their heart rates, their fitness. You really just kind of look at the big picture of what they are as an athlete and then go from there.

Wow. Wow. So do you coach, do you coach coaches now? Is that more of your role or are you still coaching athletes?

No, I I mostly coach coaches these days and work on work on different projects. Like I said, lifetime project, lifetime fitness has been a big project for me. Developing the software and the technology side is a big thing I do. Um and then work on, you know, I have a certification course for trainers and and really kind of that side is where I spend most of my time.

Yeah, awesome. That's a great segue. Let's can we talk about technology for a little bit?

Sure.

Yeah. So you mentioned is is Morpheus the project that you're you're currently working on right now. Is that your biggest thing?

Yeah, Morpheus is our new platform. We launched it back in uh December and continuing to build that out. So it the biggest uh thing I wanted to do after working with with HRV and heart rate variability for a number of years is I think there was a disconnect, um, and there still is for a lot of people between what all the data shows and what they need to actually do in the gym. And you know, we had years and years of all this information, and we always use these questions of, well, what does this mean? What do I do with this? And I think you've seen that with people using Fitbits and and different uh trackers of you know sleep and activity and and all these things, HRV even, but really people's understanding of what to do with it's been lacking. So what Morpheus does is is looks at all your lifestyle. So it looks at your sleep and your HRV and your training, all these different things, how you feel, your activity, it gives you a recovery score each day, and then based on that recovery score, it'll give you three different heart rate zones. Uh basically a blue zone to help stimulate recovery if you need it, a uh green zone to to develop conditioning, and a red zone, which is your your overload, your max intensity zone. So it gives you specific zones that are appropriate to you each day, and it just helps you get in the right level of intensity depending on you know what your goals are and what your recovery levels are for that day. So it connects, like I said, basically your lifestyle and your recovery and everything else to what needs to be happening in the gym. And I think that's really where I think the future's fitness is going, is putting all these pieces together in a more integrated way. Um and then like I said, just making it more effective and simple for people to realize, hey, today I should push myself to this level of intensity or into this zone versus that zone, and being able to personalize that on a daily basis is really um what I've wanted to get towards because I think that's what's been lacking in fitness, is people have this idea of I'll just go kill myself every day. And sooner or later you realize that doesn't work. Yeah. But then what's the answer? I mean, how hard should I push myself today? Most people can't couldn't really tell you that.

Yeah, uh, it's so interesting, man. So um I have another podcast called The Fitness Blitz, and I interview, um it's a short form 10 to 15 interview, and I interview people from all over the industry, right? The fitness profession. And one of the questions I ask in there is, you know, what piece of technology do you think is going to impact the industry in the next five or ten years? And I can say, um, you know, I don't know the numbers exactly, but I'll I'll venture out and say at least 20% of the fitness professionals on that say HRV.

Yeah, I mean it's it's the single, the single most important metric that we have from a fitness and health and wellness standpoint because it correlates across such a broad area of of both fitness and health. And it's been around for 50 years. I mean, this isn't like some new gimmicky fad that someone just came up with to sell products. I mean, it's been around since the Russians were the first in space. That's what they use it for, is to gauge essentially the the stress on their astronauts and they set them up into space. So it's been around uh, you know, forever. And the more they've researched it, the more you've learned about just how important it is and how it correlates to, you know, risk of cardiovascular disease, to body composition, to self-control and regulation and diet, and smoking and alcohol specifics and all sorts of uh just different areas that you wouldn't expect because it's this broad look into the immune system and and how our autonomic system functions correlates to you know a huge number of things in our life because it's also tied to inflammation, and you essentially see that uh the the net the system that HRV is measuring is is our body's anti-inflammatory system, and there's so much connection between chronic inflammation and disease that if you if you see somebody has high HRV, it essentially means they're better at shutting off stress, they're better at dealing with inflammation and turning it off, and they're they're ultimately gonna have a whole lot better chances of of avoiding diseases, of being in shape and having better self control and all sorts of stuff. So it's uh it's a hugely important metric because it's it correlates and is you know kind of implications in such a broad Area.

Yeah. Interesting, man. So do me a favor, Joel. Explain HRB to me like I'm four years old. Because I think there's a lot of people, um, you know, even with my, I've been testing it for so long, playing with it. They now use a whoop strap just because it I wouldn't do that.

It's totally inaccurate. I hate to tell you.

Okay, good. I'm glad I brought it up. I actually stopped using it. I bought it for like and I used it for a month, and I was like, well, anyway, for one reason.

Yeah, unfortunately, they they do a great job of marketing and they did do a great job of raising money, but I've tested it pretty extensively, and their HRV is about as inaccurate as it gets. So uh what do you recommend? Well, Morpheus, of course, that's my system that measures HRV, but there's there's there's other ones out there people aren't gonna use uh Morpheus. I would say uh ITLET, I would say even um HRV for training, and some of those that are more clinically based are are gonna be accurate, which is the first thing you've got to look for if you're gonna measure it, is it needs to be accurate. And the the wrist-based device like Whoopar, just they're just not accurate. Uh they they just aren't. I mean, I've I've tested them enough to tell you that they're they're off significantly most of the time. And I think the way that they teach it is also wrong. But uh anyway, get getting back to your question, essentially what you look at is you know, in order for your brain to keep you alive, it has to manage a lot of things within the body, right? It has to manage your blood pressure, it has to manage your oxygen levels, it has to manage your temperature, it has to manage essentially all these bodily functions inside to make sure that your body can survive and stay alive. And then at the same time, it has to make sure that those conditions can work to meet different uh scenarios. So your body basically uses, or the brain uses these two halves of the nervous system called the the uh sympathetic system, which people know as the fight or flight system, and that system's job is to turn energy production up and to prepare you for fight or flight, right? You know, cause the adrenaline to go up and all these sorts of things. The other half is the parasympathetic system, and that's the job is rest and digest and repair and regenerate and all those sorts of things. So, you know, if you're gonna go out and sprint down the track or you're gonna go lift weights, the sympathetic system is gonna turn on, it's gonna produce a bunch more energy, it's gonna make you stronger and faster, and it's going to essentially make sure you can go out and work out or do whatever it is you want to do. And it's up to the other half of the system, the parasympathetic system, to store energy and to rebuild tissue and to make your fitness better. And you know, the big words that people use all the time that are familiar with is anabolic and catabolic, right? So the sympathetic system is catabolic, it breaks down energy and shoves it into muscles so you can produce more force. The the other side, the parasympathetic, is anabolic and it builds tissues back up and makes you bigger, faster, and stronger and you know, digest and all those sorts of things. So what you want to see essentially is that those two systems are working properly and they're doing the things they need to do. And HRV is looking at that parasympathetic nervous system. So it's looking at that anabolic side of the equation of energy storage and making sure that your body is actually putting back the energy it needs and it's rebuilding tissues appropriately and it's you know doing the things it needs to do to stay healthy. So what you're looking at essentially is is that balance, the anabolic, catabolic balance, and you're looking at also inflammation because when that sympathetic system is on, inflammation goes up. When the parasympathetic system is on, inflammation goes down. And so those two systems work together, like I said, to manage your body, to regulate it, to make sure you can accomplish a variety of things and ultimately stay alive at the end of the day. So when we look at HRV, that's why it correlates so many areas because being catabolic constantly and being stressed out and having that sympathetic system turned on isn't a good thing in the long run. It causes lots of problems. Um and not being able to turn on the parasympathetic system and not being able to rebuild tissues and not being able to be, you know, uh build to digest food well or not be able to regenerate and rebuild tissues you stress is is a bad thing. So we're just looking essentially at the the tipping point to the balance between those two systems and trying to understand how the body is doing its job of regulating itself over time, how well it can meet different situations and the stress and how it's adapting to the environment. So it's like so that's why it's so interesting to look at HIV because it tells you, you know, is this person overtraining? Is their body able to recover from the stress of what they're doing in the workout? Is you know how much is their life affecting them? And uh really that's what you find out is people's lifestyles affect their fitness and their health far more than the workout ever does because you know, the workout's an hour a day, the rest of the life's the other 23 hours. And it turns out those 23 hours matter a whole lot more than that one hour. So when you start looking at data, a lot of times people ultimately start to see just how much sleep and and food and alcohol and mental stress and all these things have such a huge impact on their fitness and their health and their wellness, again, far more than the workout often does, to be honest with you. So it's um you know, it's a real eye-opener for people oftentimes to just to see what a couple nights of poor sleep or what a you know a week of stress of the office from a deadline or or exam finals or you know, going through a breakup or whatever, all these things that we deal with in our life affect our um autonomic nervous system, and we can see all that in HRV. So it's it's that's really fascinating to just basically what you're doing is getting this inner look at your body and how it's how it's handling everything around you.

Yeah, it's so fucking cool. You know, what I love about, I mean, obviously, you know, you you've worked with athletes on this, but I um I'd imagine it's you know, it's it's just starting to enter. I mean, I heard about you know, I'm starting to hear about this stuff from friends who are kind of like, you know, recreational CrossFitters, but you know, C-level officers at companies, you know, because they starting to see the benefit of just how they perform in the office place. How are you starting to see a major breakthrough into more of, I guess, lack of better term, general population for HRV tech?

Yeah, but I mean, absolutely just looking at look at the number of devices out there, and like you mentioned, Whoop Band. Whoop whoop raised uh 20 plus million dollars initially, and I've raised another, I don't know how many, 40 million or some number I heard the other day. So, I mean they've raised a ton of money because uh you know, I think that there's enough people out there who do believe that the general public is is looking for these sorts of things that can help with you can not just uh performing better, but just looking and feeling better and living longer. So there's a there's a need for it. I think the people as a whole have have got embraced the idea that uh personalization and looking at their body is important. I think there just hasn't been a uh great overall solution for it. And we'll you know, like they've they raised a lot of money and they've created a product that looks great. It's just unfortunately completely inaccurate at this point. I think the way they're they're using the data is not great, but I think there's a huge demand for it out there. It's just a matter of of figuring out how to put the pieces together and making it accessible and easy to use. And um, I've I've actually looked at you know how can we use HRV to help people understand when to make better decisions, because you can even look at in terms of like when should I be studying for my exam or when should I be doing my most difficult work for school or when should I be maybe making you know financial decisions and all that sort of stuff is is even tied into there as well because it's it's so tied into how the brain functioned as a whole that you could literally optimize decision making from HRV as well. So that's I mean there's there's lots of different avenues you can go with it that I think are all you know eventually gonna have some sort of app or device or or way to do that.

Yeah, yeah. So how do you see like, you know, with this kind of technology, you're you I'm really seeing a bridge, integration, whatever you want to call between like the medical profession, fitness profession, science, because it's gonna become intertwined, right? I mean, eventually, like we were talking about people living to 150, 160 years old. Um, you know, how is how is the medical profession taking this and and absorbing as much as like you know, the the coaching or fitness profession? Because I don't know, I'm not in that realm, but I just haven't from what I've seen, I haven't seen the medical profession really taking it on as maybe like, hey, these are metrics we can track for our patients.

Um, I mean there's you know what there's there's actually hundreds of research papers or even tends to be thousands of research papers in HRV in in uh cardiovascular journals and different medical journals. So they've researched it pretty extensively. The systems they're using are uh you know far more expensive and they're clinical and they're usually off ECG leads and all those sorts of things. So you know, HRV has been used in research and medical profession for many, many years. But yeah, I think you're essentially starting to see uh you know just uh breaking down of some of those some of those walls in between all these different uh you know areas of like I said, fitness and medicine and health and all sorts of things, and you're starting to see more I think you're starting to see more doctors and more uh healthcare professionals open to trying to figure out how do we use fitness to prevent all these things versus just treat all those. And I think as it happens, then you know you'll see maybe insurance companies more open to using letting people use devices or pay for devices, and you're seeing them pay for gym memberships, and you're seeing uh you know more medical influence in some of the health areas. So um yeah, I mean I think you'll you'll you'll see uh uh over time, I think you'll start seeing more of these things become more pervasive or or spread across more of these different uh areas of tradition traditionally been separated.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So um I have a bunch of questions on this, but let's let's put on your you know, let's put on your your future Joel cap here. Like where do you see all this heading in in let's say five years? Because 10 years is is really big, but even just five, where where do you where do you see all this heading? How mainstream you think it's gonna get? How do you think it's gonna change people's lives? Like where what's your what's your vision for it?

You know, I think the next five years, what you're gonna start to see is this big data starting to actually provide more uh solutions and recommendations and and make it more personalized, personalized fitness, I think is really what I would say the next five years look like. I mean, I think we've seen the let's let's go train in groups of 50 people and do all the exact same stuff day after day and and see how that goes. And the reality is it doesn't go great for a lot of people because you know fitness does have to be personalized. So I think you'll start to see, you know, we have all this data now, we have HRV, we have activity, we have sleep, we have all this sort of stuff, and and that's you know, one thing Morpheus is looking at is how do we take all this data and give people personalized feedback and give people personalized recommendations? You know, how many hours of sleep do you actually need? How many steps a day do you actually need? I mean, how many minutes of exercise and different intensities are appropriate for you, and being able to give people those personalized recommendations, not based on just what I think is best for you or what you feel at the moment, but what data actually shows. And so I think we're gonna see the next, like I said, three to five years, we can start to use big data to essentially solve some of those problems and at least give people at least give people a more personalized roadmap of their fitness and give them more personalized prescriptions of of what's appropriate for them on any given day or um you know, just as a whole, and giving people ideas of what types of exercise they're gonna respond best to and what foods they respond best to. I think we're just gonna go down this personalization path that we'll start to see over the next three to five years playing out so that people actually have, you know, again, a more personalized roadmap to their own fitness.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's there's a couple can there's a couple of thoughts because I, you know, I've interviewed almost 300 fitness professionals this year. And um, you know, and I start talking about this this type of topic, a couple things happen. One, people get super excited and they're like starting to be early adopters. Or I get this pushback, but like, yeah, well, you know, you're forgetting about the community aspect, the human touch. You know, what do you say to that objection of like, hey, are we making it too, I mean, with you know, we can make it totally individualized, even you know, maybe AI can take over the workout programming depending on what they, you know, the the feedback gets us. What what do you say to people who are a little bit afraid of of the technology coming down?

I mean, I don't I don't think it's ever gonna you know eliminate the human component. Like we we're not replacing humans. I think you're just giving people better information. I mean, uh, you know, look at your car. You don't you don't uh call your friend up and ask him how to get from point A to point B. You you you get on your GPS and you tell it where you want to go and tell you how to get there. So I think that's more what we're looking at is you know, you're not gonna you're not gonna get rid of personal trainers or coaches. You're just gonna have coaches and trainers with way more information to make better decisions, right? So if you look at uh you know football coaches, you're not gonna get rid of football coaches because an AI system could tell you what the best play to run is ever gonna be. I mean, you're still gonna let football coaches make decisions, they're just gonna have better information about things. So I think it's um you know, again, you're you're not gonna replace the human element, you're just gonna give people better information with which to make fundamental decisions about their fitness and their training. So I don't see that really having you know, I don't I don't see you ever eliminating people. I think you just can give people better tools to work with.

Yeah, that's a great answer. That's a great viewpoint too. So, you know, um what what should fitness professionals be doing right now to start, you know, integrating this into their practice?

Well, the first thing is just is just you know be guinea pigs, and that's kind of how I've built uh you know a lot of my careers, is trying different things. I mean, I got into trained combat athletes and and learned how to do that because I started training combat sports myself to see what they look like. And I used technology myself since the early 2000s and used HRV for you know literally that entire last 18 years. So I think at this point, like fitness professionals A, need to start using technology themselves and learning how the stuff works and staying up to date on it. Um, you know, and then B starting to experiment with some of their clients and just seeing how these different tools can help them and make them better coaches. I mean, that's ultimately what technology needs to do is either you know help the person who doesn't have a coach and give them guidance or help a coach, you know, again, make better decisions about his clients and people he works with. And you know, this is already happening. So if you're you know, if you're uh an individual trainer and you're not doing this, you're you're ultimately gonna miss out. I mean, I'm working with Lifetime Fitness right now to look at rolling out more fifths to their 1.2 million members and their 4,000 plus trainers. I mean, this is our this is already happening. This is not something that's gonna happen in five or ten years. So if you're not taking the initiative to stay in front of this, you're ultimately gonna be left behind because other people, other gyms, other trainers are going to. And so if you're you know sitting there and and you have nothing, you have no technology, you don't know how to use it, you you know don't know what to do with the data or what it means, and you know, the trainer down the street is using Morpheus and then some other platform, and they can tell people all this information, you know, you're gonna lose clients. You're you're gonna fall behind. It's that simple.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and as you're speaking too, I just think about so many potential applications. I mean, corporate wellness alone, right?

Well, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's that's tremendous. And and just getting people insights into um just any insight into their health is is tremendous. You know, most people don't understand how much water they should be drinking, you know. As fitness professionals, we always tend to we forget that the large majority of people don't even set their feet into gyms or scared to death to do it. And this is such an easy access point to get started.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we I think as fitness professionals, part of our problem is we look at other people and wonder why they don't all do the same things that we do. But it's just you know people are people are different, you know. Like uh I know I don't know how to develop, I don't know how to write code, and people sit there and write code and look at us like we're crazy because we don't understand computer software what they do. I mean, it's just you can't you can't expect somebody whose whole life doesn't revolve around fitness to have the same ambitions or the same commitment to the same uh drive that that does someone whose entire job is fitness.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, interesting point. So you and I talked about before we started recording about lifespans, right? Um, how technology like this can can drastically affect um humanity, really overall. But um, give us some insights, man. What do you what do you see coming down the pipe for that, the potential um just complete game changers for for humanity?

Yeah, I mean, basically what it comes down to from the research I've done and people I've talked to is you know, once you can start to understand the core genes that are responsible for aging, uh you can essentially turn them off uh to some extent and you can slow down the lifespan dramatically. Even so there's there's a study right now, I don't know if people are familiar with it's called the TAME study, and they're looking at just a there's a drug called metformin, which is used uh for diabetics to control glucose, more or less. And the studies so far have shown quite a bit of promise in extending lifespan by a fairly decent amount. And this is just a study going on right now. You can look it up, T-A-M-E. Um, and I think this is really just the beginning of extending people's lifespan. And a lot of times, um, you know, once you open those floodgates, you start to realize what are the actual DNA mechanisms and what are the actual you know, little messengers that are telling ourselves to LA's you can turn those off. Uh you know, you can extend lifespan significantly. A lot of research that I've you know again kind of read and discussed things with, they think probably the next, you know, it's hard to say exactly, but I'd say 15, 20 years, maybe 25 years, you're gonna be able to extend people's lifespan, you know, significantly. They call it health spans a better way to look at it. Not just not just staying alive, but actually being healthy. You know, they're gonna be able to extend that into the into the hundreds, you know, without question, because you can essentially turn off the big mechanisms that cause ourselves to age. Because aging is basically nature's birth control, really. I mean, it's what it is. We're we're designed to slowly fall apart, and the older ourselves get, the worse they get replicating, and the the worse they get replicated, the more likely they are to you know ultimately get cancer or or have some sort of defect that causes some sort of disease that kills us. And if you can turn that process off, you know, you can slow down aging dramatically. So I think we're gonna have some really interesting, you know, implications in 15, 20, 25 years when it becomes possible to you know extend someone's lifespan or health span double what it is now. But it's gonna be interesting to see you know how all that plays out just from a societal standpoint of food and jobs and population size and everything else, how that's gonna work. But I think those are questions we're gonna have to grapple with in the next, you know, like I would I would say probably 15 to 25 years when some of these technologies become viable and accessible. But even even just this this first study, you know, if if metformin can extend lifespan by even, I don't know, five or eight years, even even that's got a huge significant implication. And that's something that's a simple drug that anyone can go online and order right now if that extends your lifeban. You know, that's a that's just the the first part of what'll ultimately you know ultimately become a huge industry of uh extending people's lives and and keeping them healthy. It's it's gonna be interesting.

Yeah, that silence is is my mind exploding at this point. Because that's good. I mean, just the ethical, God, so many things we're gonna have to deal with. Um and it's cool. I mean, it's cool. I'll be I'll be right around 60, you know, if we project that those timelines are accurate, right around 60 when that conversation really is in full throttle. But we already have too many people on the planet, um, or at least we're misusing, you know, our our resources quite a bit.

So I mean, this is Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see like does the technology to manage those resources more effectively, you know, uh develop at the same rate as some of this stuff. I mean, hopefully, otherwise you're gonna be in big trouble because you're you know you're overpopulated the hell out of everywhere. But uh, you know, if we can get our hands uh you know, get get clean energy and and renewable energy sources, and we can figure out ways to uh you know clean up pollution and we can do all those sorts of things at the same time. We can develop technology that helps us live longer, then maybe we'll be okay. If not, then I don't know, maybe we're all screwed. But uh it's it's coming. I mean, there's no doubt. I mean, look up, like I said, go to look up the tame, T-A-M-E. It's metformin and longevity study. It's already clinical trial right now, and and so far the the results seem to be promising, and that's literally just a single drug that's you know being targeted to help people live longer and and stave off disease. So if if you know if that shows that shows a positive outcome, that really just kind of like said starts the floodgates from opening, because if that works, then we can figure out why it worked even more and and they'll target even more specific drugs to do the same thing in a higher level and just keep going. I mean there's big money in it, right? I mean, who wouldn't pay to who wouldn't pay to to stop the aging process and live an extra 50 years or 75 years and stay healthy the entire time? I mean, people everybody on the face of the earth would pay for that. Then it becomes a question of how affordable is it, right? Who can buy it? Maybe it's super expensive and only the wealthy can afford it. Then you've got a whole other whole other set of problems, right? Yeah. It's it's opens up Pandora's box as far as uh you know ethical areas are concerned.

Yeah, then it turns into that movie with Matt Damon. What is it, Elysium or something like that?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's not too super far fetched, who knows?

Oh, it's wild. Um geez, this is gonna be like I'm gonna wake up at 3 a.m. and just start thinking about this shit.

Yeah, well, like I said, there's lots of stuff out there. Start researching it.

Yeah, man. So, you know, if people want to get involved, maybe I'm a fitness professional, um, can they uh just go to Morpheus.com or where where do they go to to get more?

Train TrainwithMorpheus.com is where that's at. So you can go to my main site, eightweeksout.com, where I've got all my articles and and basic stuff, and then trainwithmorpheus.com is where they can learn more about Morpheus itself.

Awesome. And just out of curiosity, what is how do you guys price it out? You know, because I'm I'm honestly I'm probably gonna get off this right now and buy one.

Yeah, so we have basically it comes a recovery band that's 147, uh, and that allows you to take your recovery measurement each day, and then the recovery band can be used to work out, but we generally speaking recommend people use a Bluetooth heart rate monitor um just because the heart rate monitors and the chest strap are always gonna be more accurate. Morpheus itself is a band that goes around your forearm or your leg to measure your recovery, just because it's way more convenient. Most people don't like using the chest strap every day to measure HRV and recovery. So you get the recovery band 147, there's no annual subscription or month subscription, that's just what it is. Um then the cool the cool thing is I'm developing some uh some programs right now that'll essentially help you use Morpheus to uh improve your conditioning or reset your recovery and eventually develop strength programs. So, what I'm basically doing now is you know, like I said, since Morpheus can measure your recovery, it can give you heart rate zones, you know, I want to help people put that into actual training programs. So I'm working on a a 90-day or a 12-week conditioning program that'll be built around using Morpheus, and we'll call it metamorphosis. And it's again, it's it's the next step of okay, how do you use all this data to personalize your program and get better results? And that's what we're also ultimately working on right now.

Yeah, man. Cool. Well, you just got at least one new client for sure.

Awesome.

Um yeah, one more time. Yeah, that's right. Joel, this is this has been great, man. I really uh I really enjoyed um you know this this information. I appreciate you coming in and really explaining it to me like uh like I'm four years old. It's been it's been awesome.

Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, man, keep up the great work.

Thanks.

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