#510 Q&A: Best Time to Eat Protein, Carbs, and Fats; HRV Improvement When Already Healthy; At What Age Does Your Body Start Declining

Siim Land (0:00)

Hey, welcome back to the channel. Today, we're doing a Q&A session. So I asked people to post their questions in the community tab. If you want to ask a question in the future, then make sure you check or keep an eye on the community tab. First question, how to improve your resting heart rate and HRV if you're already relatively healthy, and normal BMI and already exercising. So with resting heart rate, it's a greatly matter of your cardiovascular fitness, your autonomic nervous system balance, and your body composition. So generally, the best resting heart rate, so lower resting heart rate, which I think optimally should be less than 50 So something between 35 and 45 is kind of the sweet spot. So people who are more athletic and fitter, they tend to have a slightly lower resting heart rate and a higher heart rate variability, HRV. The aging phenotype is low HRV and also low resting heart rate. So elderly people, they have a drop in HRV and also a drop in a resting heart rate, which is not the ideal scenario. When you're young and you're fit and healthy, you have a lower resting heart rate and a higher HRV. So that's the best combo that we want. Now, how to lower the resting heart rate, as I said, it's cardiovascular fitness. So doing cardiovascular exercise, doing also resistance training can help, although the research suggests that for HRV specifically, the best exercise is high-intensity interval training or kind of zone two cardio style. Resistance training doesn't really increase heart rate variability, although it can make you fitter, it can help you lose weight, which will improve those markers, but it directly doesn't increase HRV unlike high-intensity interval training. So if you're not doing any regular cardiorespiratory workouts, then you definitely want to add them into your workout routine. So things like some intervals, sprint interval training, regular zone two cardio, just going for cycling and such. Another underrated component of HRV, in my opinion, is just regular walking. So in a study on Fitbit users, they found that people who walked more, they had a higher HRV in a linear fashion. So people who walked up to 20k steps a day, they had a higher HRV compared to people who walked less. And walking is not necessarily like cardiovascular exercise, although it can be for some individuals with lower baseline fitness, but it does help with your blood flow, circulation, it helps with lymphatic drainage, it can help to lower your stress hormones, it can help to regulate your nervous system and things like that. So walking is still underrated and quite useful for increasing HRV. If you want to optimize your HRV to the fullest, then overtraining is not going to cut it. You don't want to necessarily add a ton of extra exercise. You might need to reduce the exercise and just do a lot more walking.

From a dietary perspective, then individual fasting has been shown to increase HRV, but not if it's too long. So 48-hour fasting can lower HRV because of creating some autonomic nervous system stress.

But shorter fasting, like 16 hours, does increase HRV, and it can possibly also lower resting heart rate, at least. That's what I have experienced from my own routines that I've been doing intermittent fasting for 10 years, longer than 12 years by now. So it does lower resting heart rate, especially in like the fastest state, and increases HRV in this kind of a 12 to 16-hour window, if you fast for that duration. Not eating too close to bed, so doing some form of earlier time-restricted eating will also improve these metrics, because if you have more food in your stomach, your heart rate will be more elevated. In your sleep, your HRV will be lower in your sleep as a result of that. So what I like to do is wait at four or five hours before bed with the food, so I stop eating quite early.

Then what else? There's a lot of other things that as well can help with stress regulation like meditation, force-baiting, some mindfulness exercises, saunas and cold exposure do that as well. So there are mild like exercise mimetics, so they increase your heart rate in the sauna. And they basically have this super compensation effect similar to exercise that, yes, exercise raises your heart rate in the exercise period itself, but afterwards, when you recover, your resting heart rate is a lot lower. So that's why athletes have lower resting heart rate. Their heart is more efficient at pumping blood and basically oxygenating the body. So you don't need to have like a super high heart rate. So you don't need to have a heart rate that's like 60 beats per minute, which is for the average person, but I think is not optimal, or at least it can be a sign of lower cardiovascular fitness. What else can be done from a diet perspective? Yeah, the certain foods that can help with heart rate and HRV.