Peter Attia· MD
readiness yeah I mean III so when I started getting into heart rate variability it was long before there were commercial you know like rings and wearables that were making it easy to track and so god I'm blanking on the guys name got me into it his name's will Eden works for Peter teal and I don't know how I met will but you know we had a bunch of friends in common and somehow we met and suppose like six years ago and I went up and spent the day in Peter's office and he was showing me like the raw data on their heart mat so heart math was a company that was running the algorithm on chest strap so chest strap that was gathering the data and then heart math was the algorithm you're doing it and I was really impressed by the data roughly speaking what is heart rate variability I guess it's worth defining this this would be another great whiteboard discussion but we get a little like we should have had like a little posted like a little white little flip chart here okay we just draw on the walls to I'm sure he kids do it sometimes when I hear a funny story about this yeah so I got in really late last night but it was still early enough that somehow my son Reese was up but I like as I landed he's just getting ready to go to bed and I'm like oh I I just I wanted like FaceTime him right so we have this thing where I tell him stories every night and I don't know where this came from but like I just decided the name of the character was Reginald I just love the name Reginald right so I'm like Reginald is a four year old boy who has a younger brother and an older sister and it's like everything is about Rhys except it's not about Rhys its Reginald and Rhys is obsessed with trash cans but Reginald is obsessed with helicopters so we're into a sweet Reginald story and you can see my wife is sitting next to him and she's like kind of rolling her eyes like come on get on when they get over and like I got to get this kid to bed and I'm like so I was like I got to make it a quick story so I'm like one day Reginald wanted draw a picture but he couldn't find any paper so he grabbed his markers and he drew a big helicopter on the wall and riesling sits up and he goes he did wide and I hear my wife go good story dad and I'm like oh I mean but after he drew the helicopter on the wall he was grounded for a month and never allowed to draw again I had to like walk myself back it's a good save I think dad's just do that like I think we just give kids bad ideas and we don't realize it because we flinging foot and mouth disease I think yeah I think so even the like today I heard it I heard about it again she's like he's still talking about Reginald drawing on the wall just so you know when that happens you're the one painting it it's like fine I'm sorry just trying to tell a story what was I talking about the RV Oh HRV right so so when you look at this also people listening to this I'm sorry this won't make much sense but if you're watching this hopefully you'll see this so when you look at an EKG which you probably appreciate is there's like this little P wave which is the atrial contraction and then there's the little down tick of the Q the R and the S wave and that's the ventricular contraction and then there's the T wave which is the repolarization and so that is like one heartbeat P dip Q spike r s t can people see that Nick when I'm doing that I bet I can figure out the technology that it like makes when you're doing that we can make the sine wave that would be very Honda Patrick Rhonda would do that that's that's that's that that's LeBron de would take it to that level like we might be too lazy okay so let's say somebody's heart rate is beating 60 times per minute they're there at rest the length of time between those are waves because the spike of the R wave is the most obvious place to measure the beat to beat time would be one second right 60 beats per minute if you're beating 120 beats per minute it would be half a second or 500 milliseconds so what heart rate variability is doing is asking the question how much variability is there between those beats and you might think well if you're just sitting there at rest how much variability can there be and the answer is it depends on what time scale you're using to measure it if you're just measuring it in seconds not much at all but if you're measuring it in one thousandth of a second or milliseconds there could be quite a bit so somebody whose EKG or you know heart rate measurement looks like it's chugging along at 60 beats per minute it might still be you know 970 milliseconds 1030 milliseconds 1005 milliseconds 970 milliseconds etc there's a mathematical algorithm that you applied that you applied that called the root mean square of the standard deviation that basically our MSSD that basically turns that number it's a transformation so it's in mathematics we call these things transformations where you basically compress these numbers and you can then now measure how much variability there's going on okay I don't want to get much more into the math on that in large part cuz actually don't I'm not I'm you know like I'm not an expert on this topic there's a little bit of this on the lust of pots right yeah high frequency versus the low frequency that's right and we included that in the show notes so