168: How to Boost Your HRV f. Don Moxley

So it's not gonna be a surprise to any of our listeners that I'm very interested in aging and longevity.

Yeah.

And a few months ago, a group of us published a paper in Nature Aging, in which we proposed that aging, through all of its symptoms that are captured as hallmarks of aging, that all of them are really controlled with respect to the pace that they're advancing through the autonomic nervous system.

Absolutely.

And so when you think about, you were talking about the external environment and how it affects you, things like lack of sleep, toxins, et cetera.

I, I view those as sort of the, the environmental and lifestyle choices that you make throughout life that have to be interpreted by your autonomic nervous system and your immune system, uh, what I call the neuroimmune axis.

And that that neuroimmune axis interprets all of those things as either being a threat or not.

And if it's a threat, then it will trigger what I, what I think of as the systemic version of the cell danger response.

And the cell danger response has some very, very obvious and, and very definable characteristics.

And one of them is increase in reactive oxygen species production and, uh, sort of a loss of efficiency, uh, in your mitochondria.

So what I would love to talk about is we, we talk a lot about HRV and inflammation.

Mm-hmm.

But let's also talk about HRV and your metabolism, your cellular metabolism, and maybe even a little bit about nutrient sensing.

But let's, let's focus on, you know, what about NAD? What about, uh, you know, electron leakage? What about things like that? How do they correlate with heart rate variability? And to what degree is heart rate variability sensitive enough to measure changes in metabolic efficiency?

You know, JP, unfortunately, I don't know that if we have the answer to that question right now.

You know, this is a new enough indicator, this is a new enough objective measure that we're just starting to tease out what these, uh, things impact, you know, what the impacts are.

But I think we can step up a level and let's talk about-- let's not just talk about nutrient sensing and environment, but let's also talk about a central nervous system adaptation to some of these threats.Because here's what I've learned over the years.

And if I have 40 wrestlers walk in at the beginning of a season, we think of all 40 of these wrestlers as being relatively homogeneous.

I mean, they're, they're similar.

Now, there are huge variabilities and, and, and this is something that just, that just drives me crazy about, about, um, performance right now is that the idea that my 125 pounder is going to train the same way as my 285 pounder, frankly, is laughable.

The idea that my guard trains like my center, the idea that my libero trains like my middle blocker in volleyball.

There are huge variabilities within a relatively homogeneous population anyway, and I think the-- I think there's a huge advantage right now in figuring that out, first of all.

Second of all, the background that these-- that an individual walks in, and whether they're walking into Navaz's office or whether they're walking into my lab, they walk in with a por- a personal portfolio that is incredibly dynamic.

So let me build this out just a little bit.

So by 2018...