Unlocking Optimal Performance and Longevity: A Deep Dive into Heart Rate Variability with Don Moxley

Greg Spillane: 0:11

Today's guest is Don Moxley, the director of Applied Science at Longevity Labs and the co-creator of HRV+. Don has made it his mission to help people live vibrant and fulfilling lives in all ages. With the background as an athlete himself he wrestled at the Ohio State University. He's also a sports scientist, an instructor and thought leader in this space. Don is absolutely regarded as a leader in the field of human performance and longevity. He's built a reputation for his ability to simplify complex scientific concepts, make it easy for everyone to understand. His expertise was honed during his time as a sports scientist actually worked with the wrestling team at the Ohio State University. His contribution there played a critical role in their success. They won a national title when he was there Also helped develop a number of all Americans during his tenure.

Greg Spillane: 1:10

Don's dedication extends beyond the realm of sports. He is the co-creator of HRV+, which I mentioned, but he's also developed a number of different innovative tools to track and enhance well-being. His insights on autophagy and the science of longevity have captivated audiences and empowered individuals to take control of their own health. For anyone who's ever worn a whoop or an aura ring or any other type of fitness tracker, they want to learn more about HRV, how HRV worked, how it applied in their own lives. This is a great conversation I'll listen to. I learned a lot myself. Drop on in. get ready to get a lot of valuable insights into HRV, longevity and both the physiological and psychological approach to high performance. Without further ado, here is Don Moxley. Don, i appreciate you coming on the show.

Don Moxley: 2:09

Well, I appreciate. your willingness to have me Given access to audiences is valuable and we are grateful for it.

Greg Spillane: 2:16

Absolutely. I think everyone's going to be really excited to listen to this episode. There's so many components I want to go into. One of the things that stood out as I was going through your bio is you were a wrestler yourself. You wrestled at Ohio State. You were also there during a pretty important time, I think, in Ohio State's athletic history 2015-18 spent several years there as a sports scientist. I know you worked primarily with the wrestling team there. They won a national championship while you were there. Tell me a little bit about what a sports scientist does.

Don Moxley: 2:51

Well, great question. I don't think this has totally been developed yet. It's an evolving field In my mind. We know the scientific process. We have a hypothesis, we put together an experiment, we run the experiment, we collect data, we analyze, we re-hypothesize. That's the scientific process. In sport, particularly in athletics, we run the first three steps of this experiment all the time. We hypothesize what's it take to be a better athlete. We create a workout, we run the workout. We usually collect data from the workout. But this is where it breaks down. Rarely is that data taken, analyzed and then re-hypothesized. Most strength coaches who are in this. I'm an exercise physiologist by training My upcoming.

Don Moxley: 3:45

Back in the 80s I was in grad school doing strength coaching. My classmates have all gone on to be strength coaches in the NFL and the NCAA and all this group. I went a different direction but my point is is that so much in strength and conditioning becomes dogmatic? I follow a dog. I had the benefit of training at Westside Barbell in Columbus. There was a guy there by the name of Lou Simmons. He's a god in the strength sports. I listened. It was a blessing I got brought into that environment. I learned a ton Now. Lou was very scientific. He did a lot of re-hypothesizing. It's why he was so good. But so much with strength coaches.

Don Moxley: 4:30

I got my program, my program, and frankly, that's bullshit, because different people respond to programs differently and we need data in order to make decisions. So I think a good sports scientist, what they do is they create data streams so coaches and athletes can make better decisions. We look at data, we break down dogma, we try to figure out. I mean, listen, genetically, my 125 pounder genetically is different than my 197 pounder in my heavyweight. Why do I think they should be on the same program?

Don Moxley: 5:14

It's like saying the sprinter on the track team should train like the marathoner. I know they're both runners and they both run on the track, but the energy systems and the way this work are very different. Same thing and this is individual across the board. So a good sports scientist creates data streams so we can decide is this athlete responding to the program or not? How do we need to change the program? How do we do selection based on good science? So I think that's what we learned with my time at OSU is how do we use some of these scientific modalities that we have access to now to help athletes and coaches make better decisions Yeah.

Greg Spillane: 5:55

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, traditional strength coaches have their dogma. They're putting together their programs here's how we should eat, here's how we should train and then the results are qualitative. It's yeah, joe looked good, or hey, we won this many matches last year, or hey, this guy's bench went up. What you're trying to do is you're truly trying to quantify it. How are people responding? And let's fine tune accordingly.

Don Moxley: 6:22

Yeah, and here's one of the things we did. So one of the things we did with the program was I was lucky to have this very diverse set of very good athletes. So I had 38 guys on the team. Usually when we were there, nine of them were all American or better. So that included an Olympic gold medalist and Olympic bronze medalists and the world champion and national champions, but all American are better. Then I had a group of athletes in that same room I think there was 12 in that group that were good enough to have started for us at some point in time but never made all American. So that was the second group that we put together. So group one was all American or better. That was the goal, that was the expectation. We had a group that started but it never made all American. Then we had a group of guys that Never started. Now, these are very talented kids. I mean that you have multiple time-stay champions and you have, you know, across that group. When you look at the profile They're very, they're very similar.

Don Moxley: 7:22

But we wanted to figure out what separated group one from group three. And you know, ironically this was one of the big learnings that we did was that The number one predictor of an athlete ability to move from group one to group three. Wrestling is an anaerobic sport. So you'd think an anaerobic measure. No, it was cardiovascular fitness. Cardiovascular fitness was the predictor. And this was one of the first things that we learned because at the same time We had a program going where we started the program on the back of an HRV program, measuring heart rate variability and marrying and measuring stress and recovery, and I'll send you. I'll send you a link to a presentation that I did that you can put in the show notes to US special operations command. That kind of encapsulated the program and put parentheses around the program. But But we started on HRV but once I was in we started measuring everything. In 17 I measured three and a half million data points on a wrestling team And we're trying to figure out what is the signal, what is the noise, what makes a difference, what doesn't, what cardiovascular fitness predicted your ability to move from group one to group two, to group three.

Don Moxley: 8:35

Bench press predicts nothing. In fact it has an inverse relationship to success. Your best bench pressers are not your best wrestlers. So and then? but you know what for for someone to move from group two to group, from group one to group two. You needed to be able to deadlift two and a half times your body weight, hmm, which is also reflected in a squat, which is also reflected in a deadlift. But I kind of liked.

Don Moxley: 9:04

The reason I like deadlift as a test is you've got grip strength as part of the assessment. You know you got to hold that bar. Putting that bar on your back takes a big element away and, in sports, being able to connect the strength and power that I have here to either a person or an object or something like that, it goes through the hands. Um, that's, listen, grip strength dynamometer is a really good predictor of health. You know, as grip strength goes down, health and it's it connects the strength. But, but so these are the things that we saw. We wanted to Make sure that we were celebrating the things that made a difference. Right, we still did bench press. Okay, they still trained that in a room, but you know the coach, for the whole time I was there, the coach was wanting to put a sign up on the wall the bench press club, and I said you'll do that over my dead body. Um, we, you do the exercise, but do not celebrate it, um, celebrate the things that make a difference, and I think that's really important in programming.

Greg Spillane: 10:06

Yeah, no, that's fascinating, uh, I mean, some of that is Some. Some of that's easy to measure, right, i mean it's, it's easy to measure someone's deadlift. It's easy to measure someone's bench press. It is fascinating here that there's a a negative correlation between bench press and and success. But you know, hrv and some of these other Uh signals are a little bit more difficult to measure. I mean, there's, i'm assuming, special sensors that need to be taken, effect Algorithms that need to be built. Uh, what are you guys using back then?

Don Moxley: 10:35

Uh, we were actually. I had three different platforms. I got to use um. We started off using um. There was back then Um. There was a company called zephyr Um. That I don't think they're around anymore. They had a really cool sensor and that's what we started with, had hrv and hr and motion and so forth in it, um. So I could get a solid hrv signal from it. Um. Then one of my alumni gave me a first beat system. So the second and third years of our program We were using a first beat bodyguard that I could wire guys up for two and three days straight So I could get hrvs at night, i could get recovery, i could see heart rate during training, um. So, so, uh, first beat and and as far as I'm concerned, first beat are the og's in this space. I mean, it's a good, finished company with russian roots where the technology came from, and I love that. I love that company. But then we finished up um with omega wave. Um. So the omega wave is another finished company. They're out of Helsinki, finland. Um. it's more consumer oriented than first beat is, but we had 16 omega wave systems that we got from our partnership with the air force research lab and um, that's when we really started to accumulate data With the omega wave system.

Don Moxley: 11:59

Before I left, i had budgeted aura rings into the program. Um, it took them about three years to pull the trigger on that after I left, and I still don't I know, i still don't think they have complete traction on that yet, but, um, but I think you know those. Those were this You've got to find a transmitter system. You got to find a system that you can trust, and you can't trust all the systems out there. I'll tell you right now um, yeah, so, um, i'm a huge aura fan. Um, i think aura ring does a really good job. There's some things they don't do. I wish they would do. There's a company called cardio mood, c A R D, i, o, m, o O D. They have a really good sensor. And there's another company that's emerging that I'm excited about. Um, i'm not ready to throw the recommendation out there yet, but if you follow me, when I'm ready, i'll put it out there. I have high expectations for them.

Greg Spillane: 12:55

Awesome, fantastic. So, uh, i've used a couple different uh. Uh, the products out there Um one that we talked about before went online that we, either of us, are a big fan of. We'll spare their name here. Uh, i currently wear a, a Garmin Uh watch.

Don Moxley: 13:10

Garmin watch, you know, does, does some by the way, garmin bought first beat In. your Garmin watch is the first beat technology. So I good, there you go, yeah.

Greg Spillane: 13:21

Good move, yeah, so I I've, really I've liked the Garmin watch for for for a lot of reasons. Uh, and you know I'm sure a lot of people out there like like us, who you know are, are gonna buy some type of uh Tracker that's gonna measure all these different variables about yourself Seeing the hrv and you start to get competitive and it's like, why is my hrv not higher? and You know, what can I do to improve it? and uh, what? for those that don't know, maybe we start off What? what is hrv? So?

Don Moxley: 13:52

hrv stands for heart rate variability. Now what this means is that the time between heart beats. So if your heart beats 60 beats a minute, that means you expect to beat every second, beat, beat, beat. Now you still get 60 beats a minute, but with high hrv The pattern may sound like beat, beep, beep. So it's variable. Still 60 beats a minute, but it's variable. And what high HRV tells you is that your central nervous system is in recovery. It's in what we call a parasympathetic mode, rest and digest mode. If you're sitting in your chair and a mountain lion walks through the door, your HR, your brain, your amygdala, says whoa, this is a life threatening event. You need all the resources you can get to get away from this. It starts dumping hormones to your adrenals, so you get a lot of cortisone, you get a lot of adrenaline, you get those things that you need to escape the challenge. That's what we call sympathetic. That's fight or flight.

Don Moxley: 15:03

Ok, i'm either going to fight the mountain lion or I'm going to get away from the mountain lion. Now there's other theories on this, but we're not going to go deep dive into this. But so the question is are you sympathetic, are you parasympathetic? And we expect a wave form on this. Ok, i mean when I train, i want to be sympathetic. I mean when I'm getting ready for a match, when I'm getting ready for a game, i'm excited, i have adrenaline. That's the body saying, hey, there's a challenge coming, i'm going to give you resources. But when it's over, you need to go into rest and digest so that you can get anabolic, your body can return to homeostasis and build what you use And ultimately, you over recover, you build additional resources. That's the adaptive process of the body, and one of the things that people struggle with is that they're sympathetic In society.

Don Moxley: 15:58

our central nervous system evolved to keep us alive. That's what it's job. Ok, and so, as we evolved, all we had to worry about was mountain lions and bears, ok, and we only ran into them occasionally, ok. The problem is now is we have lots of paper lions. We have stressors, whether it's our phone or our relationships or something like that. You know we don't have. We have way too many stressors, we have made way too many things that we're letting drive our sympathetic response And we don't have a lot of natural parasympathetic. You know, just this is where grounding comes into play. You know, one of the, i love being in the mountains and just going and sitting quietly and casting my gaze out. The ocean does the same thing for me too, but but that drives a parasympathetic response for me And I think it's an important part of performance in lifestyle.

Greg Spillane: 17:00

Interesting That you know that that that's a. That's a really interesting way to define it. I had understood the understanding between the variability the heart beats, but seeing the connection of what causes it and, you know, comparing it to the fight or flight was really, was really interesting. So you know, in many ways I mean, yes, there's got to be a physiological aspect of this.

Don Moxley: 17:24

There's also a psychological aspect as well, right, Yeah, descartes was wrong, there is not a mind body duality. They are linked intimately and and the vagal nerve is a big part of it. So your first cranial nerve, the longest nerve in your body, is the vagal nerve And this is what drives your drives, your parasympathetic response. So when you're in recovery, my organs are working, that they're cranking out the hormones they need to crank out. When I'm in stress, we've dumped adrenaline, we've dropped cortisol, so it's giving the muscles in the cardiovascular system all the resources they need to escape. So you know. So this is kind of the relationship that goes on there. But but yeah, you've, you've.

Don Moxley: 18:11

We live in an environment that, if we're not careful, can be overly sympathetic. I mean, if I get upset with drivers, if I get upset with work, if I get anything that makes me upset, it's going to elicit a sympathetic response As I learn to recognize what is a real threat and what isn't. You know, the guy driving their car like an idiot in front of me really isn't a threat to me. I just need to keep them away from me. Ok, blowing my horn and yelling at him and throwing birds and things like that, that's that. That's going from an unnest, that's driving an unnecessary sympathetic response. Going into practice I want to be engaged, i want to be excited. But if I'm in performance mode, meaning that I'm there to learn to perform rather than compete, i'm able to lower the sympathetic, boost the parasympathetic but also have the training response. These things all go hand in hand.

Greg Spillane: 19:08

So the expectation would be, before a match and wrestling, or a game and football, whatever it might be that your HRV would would go down because you're in this situation. That's your fight and you're ready to compete. But the real key is that when it's over and you know it's time to go to bed, Well, let me.

Don Moxley: 19:27

Let me throw in one more variable there. So let's throw in the concept of what's called flow, ok, the psychological concept of flow. And if you Steven Kotler's book, there's one called The Rise of Superman. He's got another book called Stealing Fire. Stephen is the lead researcher right now in the flow space. The most important book I've ever read is called Flow The Psychology of the Optimum Experience. It's written by an author called Mihai Chiksentmihai. Can't spell it for you, i have to look it up. But look up Flow on Amazon, you'll find it. But this flow experience and this is, you know, i spend a lot of time talking to Steven and other people in this space.

Don Moxley: 20:09

I personally believe Flow, that ability to get focused, the ability to have the transformation of time, that righteous place that great athletes and performers get to, there is a sympathetic, parasympathetic co-engagement. Ok, a warrior doesn't need a sympathetic drive. Listen, they're worried about getting shot? OK, that's very sympathetic. But as they boost their parasympathetic system simultaneously, we get Flow. Ok, and this is important. Think is easy to get.

Don Moxley: 20:46

Ok, coaches this is what pisses me off so much about coaches sometimes, because they think being a hard ass anyone can be a hard ass. That's the lowest level of coaching. Ok, the coach that can encourage the athlete to love what they do. Love what they do enough to sacrifice other aspects of lifestyle that may be interfering with their ability to perform. Love what they do to invest. When you start talking about Flow, i can be in Flow when I'm climbing a mountain at 20,000 feet with the wind blowing 20 degrees below zero. If I make the wrong step, i'm dead. That's Flow. It's enjoyable, it's not pleasurable and it's not happiness. Ok, there's a difference between all three of them. Ok, but I can be in Flow. And as I talk to Steven and look at this, i believe this is a co-engagement of sympathetic and parasympathetic. So parasympathetic can be trained, ok, this is where meditation comes into play. This is where a lot of these other modalities come into play The ability to focus on the present, on the task at hand. This is what's so critical in high performance.

Greg Spillane: 22:01

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, it makes me immediately think of like a sport, like professional golf or something like that. I like someone like Tiger Woods. Right where you're, you know You're on the eight, in the seventy second hole of a major and you're coming down with a one-stroke lead And there's no way your heart's not beating, your blood pressure is going exactly. You're in that sympathetic, but you have to be able to force yourself to get into that flow situation where you cannot be thinking about the scoreboard.

Don Moxley: 22:27

You have to be thinking about the shot. You know you've got to pull that back in and and the athlete that does not do that, three putts, that's right, the athlete. And it happens, all the happens all the time. Yeah, so, yes, that's, that's very much the ability to pull that in. So this is just nervous system management. We now I don't recommend you measure HRV during an event because we want it low. Okay, we want that sympathetic drive, but I also want to co-engage the resources that I need to recruit during that event High HRV in the morning.

Don Moxley: 23:03

Well, for instance, with the wrestling team at Ohio State, we got I knew, in 2018 we qualified 10 guys for Nationals. Eight of them made all-american. I knew the two that would not make all-american the first day of the tournament. They we did not get them to the tournament with the necessary resources To win the five matches that it takes to make all-american. They're talented enough they could win a wrestle-off in the room. That was only one match, but you put them in that and they got through big tens. You know, and you can call it. Listen you, you know Big tens has 14 teams. Top eight normally go to Nationals. So that means you got to. You got to be better than four or five other guys.

Don Moxley: 23:46

And our program at Ohio State, you know we were competing for the national title. We weren't competing for eighth and the big ten, like when I wrestle, but But being able to build those resources Necessary that when I go in the competition and the stress is on, i have the necessary emotional and physical resources to drop on. I have resilience, that's, this is where the term resilience comes from and this is, and that resilience leads to a clear mind, that resilience leads to emotional control, that resilience leads to those. We call them the unmeasurables, but I think they are measurable. We just haven't figured out the meter yet because we certainly see this was HRV. But when I'm predicting who makes all-american and who doesn't, based on HRV, it's a pretty good indicator.

Greg Spillane: 24:39

So if you're working with an athlete or, let's say, you're working with an executive You know, i'm assuming that you know an executive, maybe he's got a big presentation, a big speech, he's got to get up in front of a big audience You're gonna start to move into that sympathetic setting. You want to be able to be parasympathetic, you want to be able to calm. How do you, outside of the supplements right, i know that there's some supplements and there's some different things people can take to get to help with that but mentally, how do you Work with people to get mentally prepared for those situations? you had mentioned meditation. What are some other practices?

Don Moxley: 25:10

So this is so what we have done, what we did with our team, was we taught recovery breathing. So breathing at a rate of six breaths a minute, five minutes, five seconds in five seconds out, five seconds in five seconds out That maximally stimulates the parasympathetic response. Okay, i'll tell you a funny story. The the talk that I gave that we're going to put in the link Was down at a thing in Florida called the Institute of Human to Machine Cognition.

Don Moxley: 25:38

It is Skynet. They build robots, they do AI, they do human performance. It's it's a crazy smart place, and I got invited to go down there and do a presentation. I Got the agenda the week I was going down and I was like I was one of six speakers here and I was the only one without a PhD, so so that kind of puts it in perspective. Then I walk into the room. I got 40 of the biggest heads I've ever seen in my life NASA, darpa, all the special operations groups and luckily I got the first day to watch the situation. Now I was the first speaker the second day and, greg, i'm telling you what I was using every trick in my book to keep my shit together.

Don Moxley: 26:22

Okay, it was so nerve-wracking, it was ridiculous. I was using breathing, i was using visualization, i was using the things I was teaching my guy. That was my challenge. You know that was my national tournament, right.

Don Moxley: 26:38

So to go back and answer your question, the ability to focus on the task at hand I have a good friend It was a teammate of mine, dr Ron Garbo, who's is a pain management doc now in Virginia Beach, and he said to me one time he said stress only occurs When we have regret of the past or fear of the future That when I'm present, when I'm focused on the task at hand and I'm doing what I'm good at, you know that executive that gets up front to give that talk that may be getting nervous Needs to reassure themselves. They've been, they know this topic, they know what's going on, they've practiced this, they've done it. You cannot think about failure. Okay, that will drive sympathetics through the roof And it'll suppress parasympathetics. But being able to focus on the task at hand and this is where flow comes into play you know You get up to do that talk and and when I did this one with, with special operations, i Really can't remember. I remember the beginning and I remember the end. I was in flow in the middle. Okay, i was concentrated, i was flowing. You know and as an athlete I go back to you know I was lucky enough to have won a big 10 title back in 1985. I remember the beginning of the match. I slightly remember walking on to the mat and I remember the end of the match. I do not remember the middle.

Don Moxley: 28:07

And I think this is the ability to bring that focus in, concentrate on. You know, i, when I work with athletes, what I tell them is that the only thing that can really distract you from your goal is what's outside of the lines of the field Or the court or the mat. Okay, by the way, that doesn't make a difference. Okay, someone yelling at the official does not cause the official to change the call. Okay, i mean, let's, let's be clear here. And if you're worrying about that, you're not focused on the task at hand, being able to pull it in, only what happens in the lines, inside the lines. Bring that in and bring that focus in. We're able to get in the flow.

Don Moxley: 28:46

Where Sympathetic's easy, it comes. You know, it's natural. Parasympathetic can be boosted. I'll tell you, we use parasympathetic recovery tools Sent. So with our partnership with the Air Force Research Lab who was also working with all the special operations group. We were introduced to sensory deprivation floating, so the seals were using it. We were told about it. We started putting our guys in float tanks. By the time I left in 18 we floated that team 140 times in one season.

Greg Spillane: 29:20

It works, it would float, floating, i mean what is? is that a sensory depra deprivation?

Don Moxley: 29:25

Well. So you're in a tank, you're in water. It's about 10 inches deep, that's super saturated with magnesium salt, so it's like the Great Salt Lake. When you get in this tank, you don't sink, you float on it and the air temperature, the water temperature, is the same as your body temperature. They pull a lid down so it's pure blackness. So all you have are your thoughts, your heartbeat and You're breathing.

Don Moxley: 29:52

Okay, it's a, it's an. It's an intense meditative environment, meditative environment. And when you do that and you learn to get through that, it boosts parasympathetic Dramatically. So it was great to. And now, now there's other little hacks, there's other tools that you can use, like there's a great product out of North Carolina That's called brain tap. They create a meditative environment I love. There's a company called heart math. They've got a great to weaves heart math extensively with the Ohio State program. I still use it today. So and a lot of these wearable companies are starting to evolve this technology.

Don Moxley: 30:28

Listen, your Apple watch will give you breathing prompts. Your Apple watch also measures a HRV. But I'm not. I'm not crazy about how they manage the data. Not sure, i'm not sure the data is there yet, but there's some, there's some indication that their data is there But they're not managing it in a way that's consumable yet. But your, your Apple watch will give you breathing prompts. These are all good tools for learning to focus. Once you can focus on breath and and and you know I wouldn't put my wrestlers in a float tank Until they did the first six days of of how I just totally lost the meditation app with the orange ball.

Greg Spillane: 31:18

Oh, I know what you're talking about.

Don Moxley: 31:19

It'll come to me in a minute.

Greg Spillane: 31:23

But so, while you're thinking of that, let me ask this question. Let me just make sure I understand, because it feels like there's like two things that are happening here. Right, there's, and they're both tied to HRV, and that this concept of sympathetic versus parasympathetic One and this is where I may be mistaken, but correct me if I'm wrong One seems to be more performance based. Right, it's this concept of getting into flow, it's how you're gonna be able to be at peak performance, whether you're an executive trying to give a speech or whether you're an athlete looking to compete. But the second one and I'm assuming more of the nighttime going to bed, like measuring it as you sleep is recovery based. It's how quickly your body's able to recover so that you're able to be at peak performance the next day. Am I missing that, or is that actually?

Don Moxley: 32:11

No, i think that's part of it. It's a natural part of every human's nervous system. So, whether you're an athlete, an executive or housewife, or just a kid going to school, excuse me, it's part of what you do. Now the question is what are you doing to feed the two sides? Okay, we live in environments now that are very sympathetic, dominant Again. Everyone's got a cell phone, everyone's got a device that creates an alarm that draws our attention. That attention used to be drawn by a mountain lion in the weeds or the rattle of a rattlesnake, and that only happened occasionally. Now it happens constantly.

Don Moxley: 32:58

The caveman that the hunter-gatherer, whose central nervous system we have, didn't have to worry about cell phones alerting or paying bills or bad. Well, they probably had bad relationships, but it was different than ours today. They didn't have to worry about paying taxes, didn't have to worry about these things. So we have a whole new set of threats, perceived threats. That's part of it. Now, everyone has that. Okay. And then, greg, we also have to layer on top of this. Our central nervous systems are dynamic, they adapt, and so here's an example is that if you're born into a rattlesnake pit, if you're a human that's born into a rattlesnake pit, the only way you survive is through hypervigilance. Okay, it's the vigilance that gets you out of the pit versus someone who's born into a house full of bunnies, no threat, comforting environment, so forth. So where you're born can make a difference, because there's a change in the nervous system, the hypervigilance, and this is where trauma comes to. So, someone who's had to deal with trauma physical, emotional, poverty there's lots of ways that our body adapts to survive and they usually adapt to survive by boosting the sympathetic hypervigilance. So I learned that all of my wrestlers were different. Okay, everyone that I work with is different based on the trauma.

Don Moxley: 34:38

A perfect example my wife and I. So we live in an RV and we travel all over the country and in January we were driving from Taos, new Mexico, to Sedona, arizona, and we got snowed in in Gallup, new Mexico. There's bad snow that time of year. We got snowed in and the rig right behind us there was an army veteran. It was a female army veteran And I spent some time talking to her and I was like listen. I said it's obvious you've had to deal with some shit that people shouldn't have had to deal with And I'm sorry for that. So I made sure she recognized. I knew what she had had to deal with. So someone's seen as important And I gave her the supplements that we've developed for this space because I knew her trauma system is highly directed towards hypervigilance. That's how she survived her environment. But when she comes back into an environment living in an RV, traveling the country, you know what? it's still hypervigilant, and so there's a change in the structure of what's called the endocannabinoid system. So you have part of your nervous system that's called the endocannabinoid. It's named after cannabis. This is how we figured this out And, frankly, the research. We don't have the papers yet, but personally I believe HRV is a measurement of endocannabinoid system status, and so we've developed a supplement around this. but when we take a look at this, in the absence of having the underlying, here's an example.

Don Moxley: 36:21

Hundreds of years ago, 1600s, 1500s, we started packing humans onto boats and putting them on the ocean. Okay, in 1492, columbus sailed the ocean blue, took them 33 days to get from Portugal to the barrier islands down in the Caribbean. 33 days, okay, 33 days with the food that was on board was enough that they could get across without any medical problems emerging. Well, by the middle of the 1600s, going into the 17th century, we had the age of piracy, so we have people living on boats for extended periods of times. Well, one of the problems with that was the development of a thing called scurvy. Okay, scurvy was a vitamin C deficiency. Okay, how do we solve scurvy? Well, we solve it with giving them citrus vitamin C, because scurvy is a lack of vitamin C. There were sailors who did not get scurvy. They were largely the ones that were eating the rats on board, because rats make their own vitamin C. Okay, so the sailors that ate the rats had a nutritional advantage over the ones who didn't. Okay, so vitamin C. So, even down to a simple ligand like vitamin C, it differs from person to person based on diet, lifestyle, habits. This is the same thing with the end of cannabinoid system.

Don Moxley: 37:48

Depending on your trauma and we can do a deep dive into this I don't think we really wanna go down that rabbit hole. Maybe we do it a different time. But there's difference. Greg, you're different than I am. My brother is different than I am, based on the way we grew up. He was five years younger. I grew up with an older brother that was only a year and a half older than I was. We dealt with shit differently. We dealt with different shit. But as that trauma response grows, as the rattlesnake part of our life grows, it disconnects our ability to distinguish between rattlesnakes and garter snakes. Okay, this is important. Someone who has good parasympathetic tone, who has a lot of bandwidth to make decisions, can see a snake and can take a step back and say is that a garter snake or a rattlesnake? Same thing in an athletic competition, same thing in a presentation. You hear a lot about control, the controllables. Well, a lot of it's recognizing what you control And that comes from bandwidth, which comes from recovery, which is represented with high HRV.

Greg Spillane: 39:00

Gotcha, gotcha. So just to wrap this up with a supplement like HRV Plus, if I'm just a normal guy in my life maybe do a little bit of weekend warrior, competition stuff, but for the most part running companies doing with people, why is it important for me to raise my HRV?

Don Moxley: 39:25

Well, when your HRV is zero, you're dead, okay. So think of video games and you've got a little battery next to your character and as that battery runs down, you try to recharge it. Think of that battery as HRV. Yeah, okay. So when your battery runs to zero, you're done, okay, and there's not a lot you can do with that. So what you wanna do is you wanna fill that battery as much as you can.

Don Moxley: 39:49

Now the difficult part is you fill that battery through movement and exercise. You fill that battery through nutritional support and nutrient-dense food. You fill that battery with quality sleep. You fill that battery with quality light. But you also need purpose. You need a reason.

Don Moxley: 40:04

Because we live in environments now that we don't move enough, our food has. The nutrient density in our food has been diminished dramatically through agricultural farming practices. Our sleep has been disturbed dramatically. Our light is toxic. Listen, you live in San Diego and I don't know how far you are from the beach, but there's a certain beauty to going out there and watching the sunrise and the sunset. That beauty reflects itself into our central nervous system. This is where grounding comes into play, these things. So anything that.

Don Moxley: 40:43

But you need to have purpose to make the decision to go to the beach to watch the sunset, and know that it's more than just Fufu, know that it's feeding, that you need purpose, to know that I need to get up and go exercise because I'm not moving enough And literally it's tough to exercise enough to beat off sitting on your ass eight hours a day. You know there's gotta be more than that. I now set alarms so that every two hours an alarm goes off and I get up and go for a walk. Or I use a stand-up desk. I use things to prevent sedentary behavior. So you use nutrient-dense food.

Don Moxley: 41:24

The number one driver of poor HRV is inflammation, okay. So if you're inflamed, your body recognizes that you're under stress and it provides resources for that. So if you're eating too many Omega-6s, not enough Omega-3s, we put Omega-3 fats into HRV+ because most people don't have enough of them in their diet. We also put a thing in there called specialized pro-resolving mediators, spms. These are the biological available end of the resolvent of the Omega-3s. And then we put it in with known cannabinoids CBD, cbda, beta-carry-offeline. These are all drivers in the endocannabinoid system which, again, if I don't have enough vitamin C, i get scurvy. Whether I get it from citrus or rats. It's a choice I have to make. If I don't have enough of the endocannabinoids or enough of the foundational molecules to drive that, i have to supplement them, and what we know is that you probably need to supplement it both through behavior and nutrition.

Greg Spillane: 42:31

Yeah so in other area that I know you're involved with I know the companies you're involved with has some supplements around. is autophagy right? It's this, and maybe you can explain autophagy. I know it has something to do with dying cells and how we're replacing dying cells And it's a big buzzword in the longevity world right now. I know that much.

Don Moxley: 42:56

Well, listen, there's one factor that's associated with longevity more than anything else, and that is the process of autophagy, and that's an internal cellular cleaning process. If you fast, the reason you fast is because it drives autophagy, and what we know is that if you have high inflammation, you have low autophagy. As you raise autophagy, inflammation comes down. So these are really these two products go hand in hand with something like so the product is called spermadine life. Spermadine is a molecule in every cell of your body men, women, plants and animals. We've known about it for hundreds of years, but it was only they gave a Nobel Prize in 2016 to the Japanese researcher that really described the autophagy process, and then the founder of our company, dr Frank Medeo in Austria, started using spermadine to treat what's called senescent cells, and these are zombie cells. You put spermadine on them, they recover, they boost autophagy and they become functional again. So what we have found is that spermadine is critical in the autophagy process. Now, going back to nutrients and where you get your food, we have to extract ours from wheat germ extract, so we use wheat germ out of Central Europe, which has very different rules for farming than the United States and North America does. We can't find spermadine rich wheat in the United States to extract spermadine from. Okay, we can't find it because of our industrial growing processes. Now, people who live there's a thing called blue zones There's five areas around the world where people routinely live to 90 and 100 years old. They grow their own food. They have spermadine rich diets. We know that Now there's other things that go with this, but spermadine's one of those other supplements.

Don Moxley: 44:45

And again, there's a cutoff point. There's a point where you stop and I think HRV Plus goes across it. And if you're 25 years old, you don't need to worry about autophagy. I always recommend, when you start investing in a 401k, when you invest financially in longevity, invest nutritionally in longevity as well, and that's where thinking about a spermadine supplement can be beneficial. But if you have anybody who's dealing with chronic inflammation, we've got papers showing that this inflammation goes to Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's syndrome. We do know that improved autophagy helps both of those. We do know that poor autophagy, high inflammation, leads to poor immune response. We know that poor cardiac performance is going to be a problem as you age. And again, once you've lived through the 40s, once you've lived through the time that you're gonna kill yourself doing something stupid. The thing that's gonna take you out between 40 and 70 is probably gonna be one of those inflammatory related diseases.

Greg Spillane: 45:53

Which How do you know if you're inflamed, like what's a good way? I mean, i'm 46. Yeah, how did I know?

Don Moxley: 46:02

There's inflammatory markers. You can go to your doctor, get a blood draw done and they'll look at inflammatory markers. You can also look at it visually. I mean there's days listen, there's days when putting my aura ring on and off is difficult, but there's days when my inflammation is so low I can put it on this finger too. I'm not quite there today. I've been driving, there's been a lot going on, so I'm kinda up just a little bit.

Don Moxley: 46:26

I got a plane flight tomorrow, i mean by Thursday. I'll struggle with this because I'll have a couple flights under my belt, i'll have bad sleep, i'll have a lot of these things. So I've gotta have the resilience. My behaviors prior to that trip have to give me the resilience so that I can do that trip and not get ill. So my immune response is high, my cardiovascular response is high And I need to be sharp. This plane flight takes me to Orlando where I've gotta give a talk Friday. I need to be sharp then? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to employ a lot of bio hacks along the way in order to keep inflammation down, in order to boost parasympathetic response, so that when I step up behind that podium to do my talk, i'm sharp. I mean same thing when I'm gonna really step on the mat to wrestle in the Big Ten finals. I need to be sharp, I need to make sure and I need to bring resiliency with me.

Greg Spillane: 47:23

Have you measured how alcohol impacts some of these different factors and impacts performance Crushes?

Don Moxley: 47:29

it. So if you want to improve. Sorry, i hate to be the bearer of bad news, but four beers. So we have data that shows four beers before bed. So the three hour timeframe before bed, So four beers in three hours, is nothing right. You're not intoxicated. It cuts recovery in half, okay. So eight hours of sleep after four beers is only four hours of sleep. So only four hours of recovery. Yeah, alcohol crushes it.

Greg Spillane: 48:07

Yeah, i had a we. We do this thing. I've been doing it for the last eight or nine years. We'll just do go like full dry January, right, we'll take the entire month of January. We're off, won't have a beer, sip of wine, anything, and you know I normally through the week, you know I might have a glass of wine and I have the wife. You know the weekend have a couple. You know the typical thing, right. So? but I had, you know, the Garmin watches year and I really wanted to like, track it. I wanted to see, like, really like, how did it affect it? And I was shocked disappointed right difference.

Greg Spillane: 48:38

It made a little disappointed. Yeah, yeah, a little disappointed, because you're like, yeah, all right, it really does impact it and, and it was it really is it's. I mean, it's a little as a glass of wine tonight, you know, i could I get by the way impact my sleep cannabis extracts, used correctly, are anti-inflammatory.

Don Moxley: 48:54

Yeah, so it was. It was funny. I left Ohio State to go work in the cannabis business. I had some, i had some indicators like I need to be in that space And I I drove in, i dove into the deep end of the pot pool down in South Florida. So I go from a sports scientist at Ohio State to Selen weed in South Florida. But there was a great learning experience and and literally I stopped drinking.

Greg Spillane: 49:22

Yeah, and replaced with that, and that was, that was.

Don Moxley: 49:26

I'm using, i'm you, i use our. So I use the cannabinoids that are not necessarily The THC based ones On occasion. On occasion I'll use it. But there's a lot of other cannabis products, there's a lot of other cannabinoids and this is what we've isolated in HRV plus. We've isolated those ones that hit the inflammatory receptors, that hit the pain receptors, that hit the serotonin receptors, that hit the receptors that get the response we want. We package that in omega-3. That's immediately available To go ahead and create that environment that you can then train in to eventually drive HRV up and build more resilience.

Greg Spillane: 50:09

So where? where can people find out more about this?

Don Moxley: 50:11

mode method. Comm. M o d e Method. Com mode method. Comm is the site. Now we have a different site for longevity labs. With sperma dine life You go to sperma dine life S P E R M I, d, i, n, e, li FE dot, us. So sperma dine life is where you'll get the information on sperma dine and autophagy Mode method is where you'll get the information on HRV plus and improving performance.

Greg Spillane: 50:43

All right, and if I want to go out there and get the best advice that reasonably Available for myself to be able to track things like HRV, what was your recommendation? you like the ORA ring?

Don Moxley: 50:56

I do like ORA, i'll tell you. I also like there's a product called cardio mood. Listen, you've got that garment on your wrist which is a pretty good tool. Yeah, again, it's okay. And there's actually My social media is at Don Moxley Everything's at Don Moxley. I'm looking at a third product right now that I'm really excited. I'm really excited about it, but It's not ready yet, so I'm not ready to to give the seal of approval. I'm actually have a call with this company right after ours Because I'm paying really close attention to it and it's ready to go follow my social. When I'm ready to talk about it. It'll show up there at Don Moxley, on insta and then and Twitter, and I don't do much on Facebook, it's.

Greg Spillane: 51:42

I do a lot of words.

Don Moxley: 51:44

Listen. I accept all requests on LinkedIn. I usually engage on LinkedIn and and listen. If you buy HRV plus, You'll you'll be invited to have a phone call with me and we can talk about it.

Greg Spillane: 51:59

Okay.

Don Moxley: 52:01

So yeah, that's part, because I learned from it too.

Greg Spillane: 52:05

Awesome, awesome, don. I appreciate man, great, great meeting you, great speaking with you, and I really appreciate you taking the time to help us all understand this a little bit better.

Don Moxley: 52:14

I appreciate it. Yeah, mode method, calm mode method on Instagram, spermeting life dot US on Instagram. So all those have their own socials and Yeah, we'll.

Greg Spillane: 52:27

We can put everything in the show notes, okay.