#3 What Do Real Life Superhumans Do?

Siim Land (0:03)

Welcome to the BODY MIND EMPOWERMENT PODCAST Episode Three. This weekend, I went to the Biohacker Summit in Helsinki. Finland is one of the top places of biohacking, with many companies creating cutting-edge self-qualification technologies and nutritional products.

To be honest, biohacking isn't considered to be like biohacking in Scandinavia. It's already a part of the local culture. Finnish saunas and ice baths have been practiced for centuries, and the natural environment is full of incredible nutritious foods, herbs, mushrooms and other compounds. And I must say that the summit itself was a complete blast.

It was very well organized and I had a lot of fun. One day before the actual event, I went to the upgraded dinner, where the host served us a five-course dinner with amazing Finnish superfoods and other highest quality nutritional compounds.

I got to meet the speakers, made a lot of friends, new connections and all in all it was an amazing event. So in this podcast episode, I'm going to simply talk with some of the people there. I'll add some clips from their speeches and ask them a few questions about their biohacking secrets as well. That's what biohacking is all about, like the main organizer of the event Teemu Arina himself said. The purpose is better living through science, technology and nature. It's about getting more in touch with your physiology, so that you could feel more connected to who you are and those around you as well. If you want to support this podcast, then leave us a review on iTunes. I'd very much appreciate it. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, like us on Facebook and if you're watching this on video, then you can see that I'm wearing this STAY EMPOWERED t-shirt that I got made. Let me know if you're interested in wearing one of those and I can, you know, start printing them out, which is another way of supporting the podcast and spreading the message of becoming empowered.

SPEAKER_2 (1:54)

Do you want to know what it is? BODY MIND EMPOWERMENT Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (2:06)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (2:07)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (2:11)

The first person I'm going to be talking with is Bob Troia.

He's an experienced biohacker who is known on the internet as Quantified Bob. What he's done is become his own N equals one self-experiment. He tracks a lot of his biomarkers like blood glucose, ketones, and he uses that data to see how certain foods and other physiological stressors affect his health and performance. And my question for Bob is what would be the top three personal qualifications everyone could do and should do in their everyday lives?

Bob Troia (2:43)

So I'm going to talk about things that aren't about tracking your steps or like even like your sleep per se. I would say there's some simple measurements that can give you a really good sense of your biology and your sort of state of recovery or where you're at overall in terms of wellness.

The first would just be heart rate variability. So I don't know if you understand heart rate variability. It's you know if you measure your heart beat it's like say 60 beats a minute but your heart doesn't beat the same every beat. It might be like one second, 1.1 seconds. So that variability is actually it's a good thing. You want to have your heart be more variable. It's a sign of your parasympathetic or nervous system versus sympathetic which is your your your fight or flight kind of like oh you know a lion's chasing me or I'm gonna rest and recover and so there's simple apps and tools out there where every morning what I do is the first thing before I even get out of bed you can do a one minute reading and it measures your heart rate variability. You can get off your finger or off a chest strap and over time over the overall I would say a week you establish a baseline and then each morning you look at what your your heart rate variability is and it'll either say hey you can go really hard train really hard today or do whatever or you need to kind of relax rest today or maybe you had a hard workout yesterday or you went out with your friends last night and too late and you know you don't go hard today. So that's the first thing.

Second I would say is glucose blood sugar which I know you think of like diabetes and it's like people like that but actually even healthy people can learn a lot just by measuring it. It's a glucose monitor because very inexpensive maybe like 20 euros for like a sensor and the test strips are inexpensive. It's just a drop of blood you take you touch it on this little test strip and within 10 seconds you get a number and what you want to do is every morning right when you wake up and say you got to bed you've done your heart rate variability. You have to do this every day. This is like you just want to understand your trends so maybe you know maybe the first week you do it like every day and then after that you understand kind of your trend but you'll see like where your your levels are in relation to like what's considered safe or healthy you know you're not diabetic but you might still be like a little bit your levels might be high or you might learn that your glucose is affected by you know if you slept very poorly you might have elevated glucose because that might correlate with like cortisol or stress hormones and things like that so I use it also to understand the effects of when I'm like from diet we're all different in terms of how we understand carbohydrates and you can actually do these tests where you eat 50 grams of a different carbohydrate like a sweet potato white rice and then you measure your response over two hours and you'll see how like maybe something spikes your glucose very sharply and you're like that's maybe not a thing I should be eating a lot of or maybe add more fiber if I'm gonna eat something with that whereas other things that you might think are unhealthy maybe you have like a piece of cake chocolate cake and you're I think they're like, that should be bad, but it actually doesn't have much of an effect. And then, so that's, so I would say, RHRV, glucose, and then the third thing I would say, we take up, you know, in biohacking, we're always talking about our bodies, and hacking our bodies, and optimization, but we don't pay attention to the environment around us. And I think the, a simple thing, there's like, there's tools out there that let us monitor our air quality, especially in our homes.