The Myth Of The Perfect Health Routine: How To Raise Your HRV By Giving Up Control, With Justin Roethlingshoefer

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast.

**Justin Roethlingshoefer** (0:05)
I had to be impressive. If I wasn't impressive, I would be nothing. And if I was nothing, my soul would die. And God said to me, he goes, Justin, if you can be nothing, I can make it something. And that will be a...
And that's my goal every day, is I want to be nothing. I want to surrender everything to him. I want to submit to him. Being submitted is being so submitted to God's will that you hear him and then obsessively take action.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:31)
Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond.
All right, you know a podcast is gonna be good when I'm interviewing the author of a book that I selected to fit the criteria, which is always heavily vetted. Of our Father-Son Book Club, and the name of the book that my sons and I are going through this month is called Holy Health. It's written by Justin Roethlingshoefer. That's a mouthful. He's the guest on today's show. This is not just another like Bible-based health book. You know how some of them are just like, oh, eat, you know, honey and drink milk and do the stuff they say in Leviticus. I mean, Justin's a biohacker. He works with pro athletes from all over the world. The dude is on the cutting edge of performance. And at the same time, we have some deep spiritual health and spiritual science aspects into this book. So I met Justin when I spoke along with my wife at one of the events that he does for couples called Couples Collective. His company is called Own It Coaching. As you'll hear in the podcast, he's a very good coach. I think he's very good at motivating and saying things in such a way that make you want to get off your butt and change your life, which hopefully you want to do after hearing today's show. All the show notes are going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/holyhealth, the name of Justin's book. That's bengreenfieldlife.com/holyhealth.
A little bit about Justin, he's a former health and performance expert in the NCAA and the NHL. I met him through, again, the event that I did with him, but also geeking out over his love for biometric data, real-time analytics, self-quantification, and a lot of the same stuff that I do. He's now a sought-after speaker, he's a consultant, he's a USA Today best-selling author, and he's podcast host of a show called The Own It Show. So again, show notes are at bengreenfieldlife.com/holyhealth.
Enjoy my chat with Justin. Justin, dude, I have a question that I'm super curious to hear your response to, because it seems like it's a little bit of the thrust of your book, but there's this whole modern friend of extreme wellness optimization, and looks maxing and taking things to the next level when it comes to control over how we look, feel, and perform. I would love to hear your perspective on that, dude.

**Justin Roethlingshoefer** (3:15)
Yeah, Ben, it's so good to be here. And I just love spending time with you, bro. And I think when we look at this, we've been able to see this happen in society very quickly, this looks maxing thing, or even everybody's obviously familiar with the Brian Johnson saga and everything has kind of gone on there from being obsessive about this. And I always want to come back to scripture because at the end of the day, you and me both, we go way back in being data guys. Like data for us, I think at the time in which we were exploring it and trying to figure it out really became this new way to understand our body better. It was this exploratory factor. It was like, let's learn something new. So if we understand how this functions, we can steward it in a better way. We can make a better decision.

**Ben Greenfield** (4:03)
By the way, to interrupt really quick, that's not like a new trendy thing for you or me, admittedly, you've been on the HRV bandwagon since before it was cool, right?

**Justin Roethlingshoefer** (4:15)
Yeah, I was on the HRV bandwagon since 2006, bro.

**Ben Greenfield** (4:19)
Yeah, before anybody even knew what it was.

**Justin Roethlingshoefer** (4:22)
Yeah, it's like I still remember I was at Miami of Ohio with their hockey program at the time. And there was this product out of Germany called Check My Level. And it was basically you had to put on this finger or this apparatus on your ring finger on your left hand. And you had then a strip that would go right across the forearm and it would plug into that little metric box here. And it would send these little electrical impulses that would make your finger kind of just twitch a little bit. And after about 60 to 90 seconds, it would spit you out a HRV number. And everyone thought I was wild and crazy for doing this on all of our athletes. And what we start to do is we started to increase, decrease intensities of the day based upon HRV numbers. We looked at long-term trends and were we moving positively or negatively. And we became the least injured team in the league and the least sick team in the league. It happened like in every level in which we went. And now obviously HRV is the biggest thing. But going back to that statement is I just wanted to understand the body at a deeper level. Like this thing is so complex, but yet God made it so simple. When we come back to that component, there was somewhere along the way that this physical thing, this biohacking, life maxing, looks maxing space took over.