Can a Smart Watch Make You Healthier. The 3 Metrics I Track

Summary

In this episode of the Earn Your Title podcast, Danny Dumas discusses the importance of tracking health metrics to improve overall well-being. He shares his personal journey with health tracking, focusing on sleep, activity levels, and cardiovascular health. Dumas emphasizes the significance of understanding these metrics and how they can lead to better lifestyle choices. He encourages listeners to embrace technology and take proactive steps towards their health, while also addressing the common fears associated with health issues. The conversation highlights the need for awareness and accountability in maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Takeaways

• Tracking health metrics can lead to better lifestyle choices.
• Sleep is crucial for overall health and recovery.
• Understanding activity levels helps gauge physical capability.
• Cardiovascular health metrics are key indicators of fitness.
• Embracing technology can enhance health tracking efforts.
• Fear of health issues often prevents people from seeking help.
• Regular monitoring can help identify potential health problems early.
• A higher VO2 max is linked to lower mortality rates.
• Making small changes can significantly impact health outcomes.
• Being proactive in health management is essential for longevity.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Health Tracking
04:15 Understanding Activity Levels
07:22 Cardiovascular Health Metrics
12:02 The Importance of Sleep
16:01 Overcoming Fear of Health Issues
20:20 Embracing Technology for Health

Outlive by Peter Attia

Danny@dannydumas.com

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Transcript

0:01

Okay. You you You Hey everyone, my name is Danny Dumas and this is the Earn Your Title podcast and today we're gonna be talking about your health and more specifically tracking your health. Now this is not something that I've put a lot of time and effort into. It doesn't speak to me. I'm not a data guy. I don't make spreadsheets. But I had a meeting with a fitness coach and we're talking about some of my goals and. things I was working on, he started asking me how I'm doing in these certain levels of my life, in one of them being sleep. And I said, I think I'm doing pretty good. He said, do you track that? while I don't, I wasn't actively going out and tracking it, I have an Apple Watch. This is Apple Watch Ultra, it's the first one. And I've worn it almost every single day since March 7th of 2000. in 23. So we're coming up on two years where I literally have worn it. I think just about every single day I've had it on and I, I, I like the Apple watch. I'm in the Apple family. I've got iPad, iPhone and made sense to have a watch. I like the notifications. I like when I'm going somewhere and I'm using maps. It notifies me. I like that when I work out, I can see my heart rate. I use that, but I hadn't used the tracking features. of the health thing. So at the start of the year, made a concerted effort that that's what I'm gonna do. And I specifically focused on sleep. And I was really surprised at how useful it was when I was actually looking at the information and actually making decisions based on that information. And what I found first off is when I was at work, I was wearing my watch. So I was tracking my sleep at work, which... for most of you, it should be zero. But for me, I live at work at the station for a day. So my sleep numbers were actually skewed because I was going to work and it was showing five hours average, four hours average for the week while I'm working. I'm going on runs. So I decided to make an effort to, I'm gonna wear it at home. And what I realized that I'm actually, I was actually doing good. I was getting around seven hours of sleep. average, which meaning I was getting a little bit more at home, obviously slightly less at work. And I realized I started making decisions based on the metrics and it has improved my life. So I wanted to share with you some things that I think would be beneficial for you to start tracking. I don't think this is a forever type of, at least not for me. It's not like I'm going to do this forever. And maybe some of you do like, you know, I, my, my mom, she, she, she'll listen to this and she loves technology. She's, I would say she has an addictive personality. So like she wants to get her steps in. We did the world's toughest mudder and her watch wasn't going to make it the entire time. And so she wasn't going to get the 80,000 steps that she was normally going to get inside of a 24 hour race. She's like, I don't know what I'm going to do. said, mom, the steps still count, right? Just because they're not on your watch, but she wants to see that data. So that's not me. If that's not you, it's okay. But what I, I'm going to encourage you to spend enough time analyzing what you're doing so that when you're living that same kind of life, or maybe you're doing a little bit less, a little more, you know where you're at. Now, if you don't have a smartwatch, you could do some of these things manually, but I think in 2024, there is some value in doing that. it's not just health. I'll talk a little bit about other areas in your life where maybe it's important to track and. not maybe it probably is. I saying these maybe's and probably's but it'd be a good idea. And so I apologize if you're watching this. I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything. So I'm going to be looking at my phone. One of those areas is activity. I realized, I looked over my whole year and I'm averaging 30 minutes of activity a day. Now some days that's an hour, an hour and 20 minute workout and some days that's two minutes where I went to the garbage out, but I'm averaging 30 minutes. Now there's no judgment there that's good or bad and what the benefit of that is if I look at myself and I say, do I feel physically capable? And I think all men should. I think to be a man, should be physically capable of doing what your family needs you to do. And that might not be, you know, that might not be like the big, like I'm gonna, there's an active shooter, I'm picking my family on my shoulder, I'm running, but can you get home from work after a long day and play with your little kids? Can you get up early on a Saturday and not feel totally wiped out and exhausted to take your family to do something fun? So figure out where you're at. by knowing the number and knowing whether it's going up or down, you can determine if, 30 minutes a day has given me a good life and I feel good. Cool, keep it up. And it starts going down when you're tracking and I got to pick it back up. So activity of being one, and this is just all around general activity, but obviously you can track your steps, your walking distance, your standing minutes, your resting energy, how much you're, and again, all these are. There are estimates, there's obviously lab tests that do a better job of giving you the exact numbers, but I think as long as the tests are consistent, they don't need to be accurate, because you're not looking for the number as you are the changes in the number. So activity, are you getting up and moving? You know, when I first got my watch, it was, it congratulated me on standing for 12 hours. Like I didn't stand for 12 hours. I had to look up the standing metric and basically every hour they want you to have stood up for like, I don't two minutes inside the hour. like, oh cool, I stood up for 24 minutes. But I realize if you have a nine to five desk job, that could be a good thing. Just get out of your desk, stand up. So activity, what are you doing? How are you moving? Going into activity and specifically cardiovascular activity, this is a whole nother category. So your heart, what is your heart? Now there are a couple very important metrics. So another category, and it goes with activity, but this is cardiovascular health. So your heart rate, your heart rate variability, and your VO2 max being the specific ones and resting heart rate. Now when you're analyzing these, some things you're actively going to go out and try to improve. Like the average number of minutes I had was like 33 minutes a day. That is a number that I can do specific things and know for sure I'm going up. I'll start more workouts. When I go for a walk, I'm turning on my watch. saying that I am working out. doing active minutes. I'm going out and, getting better. Now, one thing that is very helpful is your resting heart rate. My current resting heart rate is 66. That's for the week for the year. It's 64. So looking year over this month or this week, I, my resting heart rate is slightly higher. So I'm a little less deconditioned now. Resting heart rate can mean a lot of things and it can be a diagnostic tool. the beginning of December, I wasn't feeling, I think I actually got sick, but I wasn't like nauseous. I didn't have a fever. had just this nagging cough that wouldn't go away. When I was working out, I'd be warming up and my heart rate was just skyrocketing, like 120 walking on the treadmill. And for me, normally that would be like an 80, maybe 90 if it was on a hill, but it just, I just couldn't get going in the gym. And so as I progressed and I started looking back, I looked at my resting heart rate. My resting heart rate had gotten up into the 70s. My body was telling me something's not right. I'm working really hard to fix this. Dial it back. And that was very useful. I'm not, there's nothing you can do to get your resting heart rate down specifically. Like it's your body's adapting to your cardiovascular health. Active minutes, I can do that. I can put in more active minutes and my average will go up. But my resting heart rate is a diagnostic tool to say, all the effort you're doing, the active minutes you're getting, the water you're drinking, the sleep, my resting heart rate is going down, your heart is becoming more healthy, and you're doing a good job. And if you're doing a really good job and you've got a resting heart rate of 50, that's great, all of a it goes up to 70, and you didn't change anything drastically, something is happening, maybe you're sick. Maybe... You've been working too hard and you're not recovering. Your body's telling you. Very, very useful. So I've got resting heart rate. The other one, heart rate variability. So it's measuring the distance between beats and the higher heart rate, let's say the lower the number, the worse. So you want a higher number of variable heart rates. So mine was a 44 today, but over the course of the year, it was 35. that's a number I'm going to try, I wanna try to get up. My family has a history of heart disease and I wanna have a good healthy heart. So I need to do some things on the heart side and maybe this is on the nutrition side, sleep side, hydration side and cardiovascular side to get my heart rate variability to a slightly higher number. Again, I can't change it specifically. I can't do more of this and change this heart rate variability, but it's a general look. The other one, And there is an awesome book called Outlive by Peter Attia. And it is called one of the major indicators of living a long healthy life is VO2 max. I forget the exact number, but a higher than average VO2 max decreases all cause mortality by a significant amount. a percentage and I apologize I had it and then I didn't write it down in my brain you know I've got a goldfish memory but basically if you have a higher than average vo2 max you can guarantee or almost guarantee whatever you can guarantee in actually life those you know you might hit my truck and then die anyways but all cause mortality heart disease cancer all the things roll it up if you have a higher than average vo2 max you have a lower average of death just that simple and again this is the apple version of vo2 max they have lab tests where you you'll be breathing to a machine running on a treadmill and they'll get it exactly. I don't think you need that. You just need a number that's consistent and you can see whether it's going up or whether it's going down and whether you're above average, average or below average. Having a, if you're, you know, if you're aging, having a high VO2 max doesn't mean you're going to be going, you know, and running, you know, 10 second, a hundred meter dashes. It means you're going to be walking up and down the steps all day and not really worried about, not have to think about. It is a lifestyle. It is a good lifestyle. Now, when we think about health, a lot of times we talk about, you know, not dying, but it's not about not dying. It's about living the life you want, doing the things you want in your life, and then having one bad day. You know, lot of people, they're living, they get to their 20s, 30s, and they peak physically, and they start going down, down, and that's inevitable. You can't maintain peak physical fitness, human body ages, it happens. You you get into your 20s and 30s, maybe you peak physically, and then that does start to decrease. As it starts to decrease though, what you want is just a slow, slow line, not a very steep line. What unfortunately happens is maybe 10 years before people die, it drops off pretty hard and it gets down to this really bad place to live. You know, as a paramedic, I go to some elderly people's homes and the life they're living is terrible. Now maybe they plan financially. Maybe they planned mentally, but they didn't plan physically to live that long in their life. The quality of life is terrible. The goal is not to live forever. The goal is to live a good, healthy life and have one bad day. You want that drop off of health to be, you know, a day, a week. You don't want it to be the last 10 years of your life. And that's important. So things like having a above average VO two max, which is basically the the maximum amount of work you can do before your heart tells you to stop. So that's something you can work on. And so, yeah, I would highly encourage you to just, just take, take advantage of this technology. The, the next big one. And the last one I'm to talk about would be sleep. And this is what got me to start tracking and doing a better job. And I mentioned this, you know, I will continue to mention how important sleep is because it is. I think it's the easiest thing to fix. It's enjoyable. If I said, I could give you a pill, it would increase your testosterone, make you a happy person, improve your mood, make your skin look better, help you recover. And also, this pill tastes really good. Would you take it? That's sleep. I don't know anybody that hates sleeping. Sleeping is pretty awesome experience. We don't get enough of it. So you need, there's several levels of sleep. again, I apologize if you're an Android person, but I'm just going to go with what Apple gives us. It gives us core sleep, which is the most, we do that the most, deep sleep and REM. And then the potential to be awake. The REM sleep and deep sleep are really what we're looking for. And they go in cycles, usually, you like a 90 minute cycle. The REM sleep is when your brain is formulating ideas. It is remembering things, it's putting things in. context and then the deep sleep is when your body is repairing where you're you know, you're making new tissue You're making you know, you're recovering from muscle soreness and you need you need all that Just a quick reminder of how to get good sleep Have a caffeine curfew 10 hours is a good is a good curfew on caffeine, which means If you know you're gonna go bed at 10 rewind 10 hours and don't have caffeine after that an hour or two before bed, get the lights as dark as possible, candlelight, dim lights, try to keep the screens directly blaring into your face. One hour before you go to sleep, turn off all screens, have a cool, dark room, have a consistent bedtime, barring some other medical problem, you should be able to get good sleep, because it's so important. Now, As I talk about all this, I'd say there's 40 % of the male population, and I'm totally making this number up. Maybe it's higher than, I'm gonna say 60, least the guys I know, that they have a concern, and it's the reason they don't go to the doctor. Because if you don't go to the doctor, they can't tell you you're sick. They can't tell you you have a problem. At work, we have one of the leading cause of deaths in firefighters, is cancer. We get cancer at a higher rate than any other, know, all other men combined. You know, there's certain cancers that we just get because we're exposed to a lot of things. We get poor sleep. And as a union and as an organization, we are making a push to prevent that, to do some things to stop that. And some of that is cancer screening. We have guys that are concerned about going to get cancer screened because what if they find out they have cancer? And from the outside, it seems ridiculous. But if I'm talking to you or maybe it's somebody you know, or maybe this was your dad or your grandpa, you know who that is. You know that person and it doesn't make sense because lots of cancers, like skin cancer, if you catch it early, it's like a outpatient procedure. They cut it off. You're good to go. If it progresses and gets bigger, it literally can kill you. But because they're afraid, they're worried that that They're gonna find out something and then that's gonna be bad. And so if they don't find out about it, it's not bad. It's not gonna go away. This data, this information can only help you. Right now, maybe it's going to cause you to change. there's a lot of, the technology is amazing. You can get real-time glucose monitors. It's like a pucky stick on the back of your arm and it measures your glucose in real time, which means you could eat a cake, a piece of cake. check your blood sugar and see what it does. it didn't do a lot. If you're healthy, it's really cool. Cause most people that are healthy and put these real time glucose monitors on realize your body does a really good job of maintaining very consistent blood sugar. It's very encouraging. But if you were to wear one of those and your blood sugar's all over and like, yeah, I probably, I probably have type two diabetes. I just didn't want to say anything because then I would have to say I have type two diabetes. And if I say it, have to do something about it. But I want to encourage you. Do something about it, guys. With modern technology, we can fix. You can almost make it go away completely, like zero problems, but you'd have to change. We were talking about Sleep App, and we're in a CPAP, which is a machine that basically shoves air into your nose, into your mouth, so you stop snoring. And I worked with some guys that were complaining about it because Insurance won't pay for it if you don't wear it at least so many hours a night four or five hours a night They thought that's ridiculous But what they don't think is ridiculous is that they're okay like they know they have sleep apnea like they haven't gotten tested yet But they wake up gasping for air they wake up with a sore throat They wake up, you know, we can hear them who we all sleep in a big room. You can hear them snoring and stop breathing They're literally going hypoxic their brain is going without oxygen for extended periods of time at night until their body wakes them up to force them to take a breath and they don't want to get a CPAP because insurance says you have to use it. Well, insurance says you have to use it because it's saving your life, guys. Please, if you hear the passion in my voice, it's because it's real. I want you to live a long, healthy life and there's tools, there's modern technology, there's testing that you can do to help you do that and live a good life where you can you know, watch your great grandkids graduate from high school. That could be a thing. But we have to take action. We have to do something. We have to incorporate these things. We have to not be afraid to find out bad things because you have the power to change. And I think that's probably where the fear comes from. It's not that I'm gonna find out that I have, you know, I'm pre-diabetic or type two diabetes is that if I find that out, I have to do something and change is scary. We have a saying in the fire service, there's two things firemen hate, change in the way things are, and I think we could probably just incorporate that to men. Men in general want things to be the same. We want static, we want it to be like it was in high school. We want this new technology to be like the old technology. We want cars to run like they don't. Time is moving on, whether you like it or not, so embrace it. Embrace it. Get your smart watch. Get a fitness tracker. There's all kinds of things. There's the whoop is a band. doesn't even look like technology. It looks like a big wristband and it records all this stuff. There's no screen on it. If you don't want to be distracted by screens, there's an aura ring or a fitness tracking ring. Literally it's a metal ring. You put it on your finger. It tells your temperature, your heart rate, how much you slept. No screens. I get not wanting some of this stuff, but the technology is there to make your life better. Use it. If you need some help with your fitness, if you need some help being accountable to go to the doctor, get a physical, reach out. My email is danny at dannydumas.com and I wanna help you. I am in contact with guys once or twice a week where we're talking about these things. They're telling me they're having some problems. They come up with the solution. I don't know what's best for you. I maybe have a few ideas I could throw out there. But I'm just holding you accountable. That's all it is. Hey, did you do this? You said you're gonna do this. Did you do this? Guys, start keeping track. If you have zero technology, don't need, you have a flip phone, you don't like this, check your pulse when you wake up in the morning. know, count, you know, put a timer on for a minute and count. Whatever the number that is, that's your resting heart rate. Measure your waist. If your waist is growing, you're getting unhealthy. If it's shrinking, you're probably getting healthy. You know, measure how much water you drink. Write down all the food you eat. Take a picture of it. Do something. Be active in your own health. Be active in your own survival. Be active in living to be 100 years old and having one bad day. And I truly think you can. And I'm here for you. So my name is Danny Dumas. This is the Earn Your Title podcast. And I will talk to you later. Bye.