The New Science Of Heart Health, VO2 Max & Sleep Hacking - Dr Andy Galpin - #822

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Andy Galpin. He's a professor of kinesiology, an exercise scientist and an author. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and poor sleep is affecting almost everyone. Andy has some of the best evidence-based strategies for improving both of those while becoming fitter and more resilient. Expect to learn which metrics matter most for health, the best ways to train your VO2 max, what the most optimal daily routine for peak VO2 max looks like, advanced techniques to enhance your sleep, what happens when you over-optimize life, why breath work can replace your afternoon nap, how to improve your sleep with nutrition, and much more. One of my favorite upgrades over the last few years has been my 8 Sleep Pod Cover. It is an absolute game changer. austin gets very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter, and the Pod Cover has basically saved my life and stopped me from fighting with my own temperature. The Pod Cover fits over the top of any bed like a fitted sheet and allows you and your partner to cool or warm your side of the bed throughout your sleep stages. It is phenomenal. I can't sing the praises of it enough, and I use it, I literally use it every single night. It's probably the product I'm using more than anything else based on the fact that I lie on it for eight hours every single day. If you're not happy with your Pod Cover for any reason, within 90 days, 8 Sleep will refund you fully. Head to 8sleep.com/modernwisdom to save 150 bucks on the Pod Cover. That's eighsleep.com/modernwisdom for $150 off, plus the ship to the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and australia. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is there to help you grow. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. From that all-in-one e-commerce platform to their in-person POS system, wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify has got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout. 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. You would be amazed at how many massive brands you love use Shopify. Gymshark, perhaps one of the biggest independent sportswear companies in the world, uses Shopify and if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for you. So if you are looking to get started at selling something online, Shopify is the easiest, quickest and most convenient way to do it. plus, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/modernwisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com/modernwisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. You are probably not having enough protein in your diet. In fact, no one is having enough protein in their diet. This is why you need a high quality protein supplement. A lot of brands may say that they're top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with momentous. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet and I've fallen in love with their whey isolate protein powder. It's grass fed and each batch is exclusively sourced from EU dairy farmers whose cows are free of hormones, steroids and all of the other junk. Tastes fantastic and it is NSF certified and informed sport, meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not sure of the taste or you're just uncertain about this in general, you can buy it completely risk free. If you don't like it for any reason, they will give you your money back right now. You can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code modern wisdom. A checkout that's L I V E M O M E N T O U s.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Andy Galpin.
Talk to me about the metrics that matter most for health, in your opinion. We've got an unlimited amount of data that we can access from wearables and beds and breathwork and CO2 tolerance tests and everything else. What are the ones that you think are most important?

**Andy Galpin** (4:30)
Yeah, sure. I think the easiest way to start this is go over a very large picture and then to stop us from being very general the entire time, which is sometimes a bit boring. I'll let you pick whichever one you want to go hardest into there. When we started looking at things from the perspective of how long you're going to live and how well you're going to live, most people are pretty keen on that idea now, and those things are different and it's not just about living a long time and you want to live well. What's that mean? Well, we actually can pull from multiple data sets here in the sense that it's everything from your sense of connection to the world, your sense of purpose, social belongings. Those things are incredibly important and depending on the papers you pull from, some could argue those are the top predictors of how long. Now, mental health and such is not my expertise, so I will hopefully not spend all of our time on that. But we have to acknowledge those, the way you ask a question, that is a true and honest answer. It is the things that go into making you feel like a sense of purpose and belonging. That's great. Independent of that in terms of your physical health, now we can just really run through the gamut of what does your body have to do to survive and perform well, right? Well, it has to have some functionality of cardiorespiratory fitness. Easy metric we talk about here very often and people are really keen to this fact now, which makes me smile, because for 25 years I've been screaming this and no one cared. Like the podcast of Stan Universe took over with it three years ago and I'm like, oh great, now it's out there. So VO2Max is a very strong predictor of how long I'm going to live from that perspective. Other research is going to look at things like physical strength, both your grip strength and your leg strength. Also very, very important. Backing down from that, now you have things like muscle quality, overall muscle size. Of course you have negative regulators. So what I mean by that is these are things you don't want to have. So as I've been going through this, I realize I've been giving you things that you want to make sure are high. You have a whole subset of things you want to stay away from. Obesity, you don't want to have metabolic disease, you don't want to have sleep disorders, you don't want to have that. So I tend to leave that stuff. I always forget to mention that, but yeah, like don't have any of those. And then be fit, be strong, and maintain a sense of proprioception. And so if you look at the research on things like brain aging, what's critically clear is you don't want to lose your sense of smell. You don't want to lose your sense of vision or your hearing because those are all tied into the global idea of proprioception. And that is a fancy way of saying your body's ability to understand where it is in space. This is translated often into things like balance. Okay, so if you were to look at the research on fall prevention, it's very clear you do not want to fall and have an accident after the age of 60