305: Fri-Date | Living the Blue Zone Lifestyle: HRV Tracking & Reverse Engineering Longevity

Nov 20, 2020 | Fridate, Podcast

We have an admission that’s difficult to make: Rob has an addiction to gadgets.

Specifically, he has an addiction to gadgets that help him track and optimize his HRV, or Heart Rate Variability. This has become the go-to metric for many people who want to track or hack their health, and for good reason — it’s one of the greatest indicators of future health that we have.

But we’re trying to live a Blue Zone life, we’re trying to live past the age of 100 so that we can watch our families grow up, and there’s more to that than just being physically healthy. If you go visit the Blue Zones around the world — Okinawa (Japan), Sardinia (Italy), Nicoya (Costa Rica), Icaria (Greece) — you don’t see a bunch of people with tight butts and rock-hard abs constantly looking at their smart watch to see how the numbers have changed.

The lifestyle and pace of things is just so different in these cultures, so today, Kim is going to try to bring a little bit of that Blue Zone Vibe into the Work Hard Play Hard podcast (and Murgatroyd household) — without entirely squashing this healthy habit.

In This Conversation We Cover:

[05:10] What is HRV?
[06:50] What HRV can tell us about our nervous systems
[08:20] The “fake health” lifestyle
[12:05] One of the things that Rob is doing to measure and improve his HRV
[12:55] “Soft targets” of the Blue Zone lifestyle improve your health, but HRV lets you quantify the improvement
[14:30] The Blue Zone “Power 9”
[31:35] The best ways to track your HRV

The Blue Zones Power 9

We talk about these in the episode, and we challenge you to rate yourself in each of these areas. Where can you be doing better? Whatever that is, it has the greatest potential to transform your health and longevity.