From HRV To Body Composition: Tech That Actually Helps

A new name, a wider lens, and a promise to cut through the noise — welcome to The Anthony Amen Show (formerly Health & Fitness Redefined), the official podcast supporting the mission behind Redefine Fitness, our high-end personal training studios in Stony Brook and Mount Sinai, NY. We open the new chapter by tackling one of the biggest problems in health: people chase the scale instead of the signals that actually change their bodies, their energy, and their long-term health.

Our guest, Jason, cofounder of Elite HRV and the camera-based body composition platform Spren, shows how better metrics and smarter tools turn effort into results you can finally understand. We trace his path from building analytics in the oil industry to democratizing HRV, and now to turning your phone into a near-DEXA body composition scanner. The goal? Clarity. Instead of obsessing over BMI or weight alone, we shift the focus to body fat percentage, lean mass, and fat distribution — because these are the markers that drive performance, aesthetics, metabolism, and longevity.

Jason breaks down visceral fat and the android:gynoid ratio as practical proxies for real health risk. We go deep on why lean mass is one of the leading indicators of aging well, metabolic resilience, and long-term independence. We also tackle modern dilemmas we see every day at Redefine Fitness: “skinny fat” bodies that look fine but hide internal risk, and GLP-1 users losing as much muscle as fat — and how resistance training and protein protect what truly matters.

Then we get tactical. Your Basal Metabolic Rate is a starting point, not destiny. NEAT, genetics, behavior, and identity shifts shape your real maintenance needs. Small wins compound. Resistance training pays interest daily by improving sleep, mood, movement, and the ability to do hard things without burnout. We look ahead to how AI will support future health coaching — letting software handle the spreadsheets while coaches and community bring empathy, context, accountability, and the human touch that actually drives change.

This episode is about simplicity, not surveillance. Track the few metrics that change outcomes. Let your data guide the next right step. And let strength carry the rest.

Want to understand what your body is really doing? Explore Spren at spren.com or in the app store and start tracking the markers that matter. If this conversation shifted how you see progress, follow the show, subscribe, and share it with someone who needs the nudge. Your review helps more people discover why fitness is medicine — and how Redefine Fitness helps people change their lives every day.

Chapters

• 0:00 A New Name And Vision
• 1:19 Meet Jason And The Tech Angle
• 2:07 Jason’s Path From Oil Tech To Fitness
• 5:33 Building Elite HRV And Early Wins
• 9:14 From HRV To Camera-Based Body Comp
• 12:20 BMI Versus Body Fat Explained
• 15:37 Visceral Fat, Lean Mass, And Risk
• 19:00 GLP‑1s, Muscle Loss, And Safeguards
• 22:41 Small Wins, Identity, And Adherence
• 27:18 Resting Metabolic Rate And NEAT
• 31:10 Muscle, Movement, And Aging Well
• 34:06 The Future: AI Coaching And Sensors
• 38:04 Takeaways And Where To Find Spren
• 40:15 Closing And Listener Support

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:03

This is Health and Fitness Redefined brought to you by Redefined Fitness. Hello and welcome to Health the Fitness Redefined. Oh wait, guess what? Today is gonna be episode one where we are gonna do uh awesome rebranding that we announced. We're changing the show over the Anthony Eamon show. Why are we doing this? Well, I'll be truthful, and Jason's gonna get to hear all of this. There's only so many topics of Helm the Fitness you could talk about. 380-something episodes out, over five years of doing this. So I figured I want this podcast to be more raw. Uh, those are the episodes that seem to do a lot better anyway, because that's what you guys want to hear. And then we could dive into a little topic of what it's like to be me, and we can even dive into health. We could dive into fitness, we could dive into entrepreneurship, some awesome, over-encompassing, arching ideas, and then more in-person podcast episodes, get people involved in the local community, bring on trainers like we're doing, bring on our clients, local business people, everything that you want to see and deep dive into topics so we can get to the bottom of absolutely everything. So I'm excited about that. Uh, but without further ado, let's welcome to today's show, Jason. Jason, it's a pleasure to have you on today.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23

Yeah, Anthony. Hey, honor to be episode one with you here. That's uh that's exciting.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29

Definitely exciting. It's like a total overlay mix if you're watching on YouTube. It says Health and Fitness, and then it says the Anthony Amon show. So it's all right, we're gonna we're gonna figure all this tech stuff out later. It is not my strong suit. But you know who's strong suit tech is? Jason's. I need someone like Kim to make sure he comes in and helps us. But seriously, you got something really awesome you're working on in your own company that I, as a gym owner, I think is phenomenal. So I'm not gonna spoil it. So I'll let you talk about how you got into first of all the tech field, and then specifically like fitness technology world.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08

Yep. Yeah, thanks. Uh it's been a quite a wild journey, but um, we're pretty proud of where we've landed, and there's a lot more work to do as a good entrepreneur always thinks, right? And um in any case, uh I have always been involved in tech uh from a really young age. Um, you know, I helped my dad build and configure a computer when I was like six years old, and um, so that I could play video games and tinker with code and stuff on it. Um so it goes way deep in my roots, but I did also go all the way through, study it in school, and then worked in tech in the oil industry, building software and data analytics systems. Um and but uh as a competitive athlete growing up, um, and then my family was kind of like loosely aware of health and kind of talked about it here and there as I was growing up. So it's kind of on my radar. Um, but in my early 20s, I started to really stall out on performance and uh kind of went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out why. And uh that led me to discover that you know, lots of people really struggle with uh health and fitness, and that it's a really big deep subject that goes uh into all the domains now, I think that we all talk about, which is like stress and recovery and sleep and nutrition and exercise and you know uh lifestyle and companionship and like all these pieces. Uh and there's this whole industry, which is kind of actually an old industry now, it seems, uh, compared to a lot of the tech world. Um, but uh there are gyms and there are kind of like software companies and things. But at the time, uh, long story not so short now, I guess, is that um the idea of tracking stuff about your body was sort of emerging a little bit with things like Fitbit and stuff. Um and I was like uh spending my day job looking at ways that we could track the health and performance of equipment in the oil field and improve that preventatively and predictively instead of reactive. Um and uh as I was learning more about health and fitness and networking with experts and coaches, because that's kind of how I like to do, I like to learn from a lot of people who have like real hands-on experience, um, realized like, hey, we need more tools to track our bodies and understand what's happening with our bodies, because it may seem simple to just like exercise, eat well, sleep well, you know, all this stuff. It's like the concepts are somewhat simple at a high level, but it's actually quite complex for any individual to figure out the nuance of what exactly they need to be focusing on and what's work what will work for them as an individual, um, you know, versus somebody else. And so that just catapulted my curiosity into the realm of wearables and into the realm of tracking tools. So uh I've always kind of had an entrepreneurial kind of spirit in me, I guess you could say, of wanting to build things and start things and a little bit of a rebellious nature too, like another good entrepreneurial trait. Um, and so created this company called Elite HRV. So a friend, a friend and I put an app together in 2013, 2014. We put it out um into the world called Elite HRV to help people track heart rate variability. And it was something that uh research was showing uh was very promising as a marker of overall health and fitness, but also to gauge decision making like how well recovered are you, how balanced is your nervous system you know, from exercise and recovery perspective, but also like stress and inflammation and a bunch of these other components that are really important. So we built a tool, we were in the right place at the right time, and people seemed to like our tool. So it got picked up pretty quickly by a lot of people, and pretty soon I was flying around talking to like the national rugby team of England and Scotland, and then talking to hospitals about heart rate variability monitoring for child psychotherapy, and just this whole spectrum of uh things opened up when we took this marker that was formerly reserved for like rich people and athletes, and kind of brought it out into the real world and let anyone monitor it at an affordable price. And so that's kind of the genesis of this whole journey, which we can talk about more of the evolution and where we are today with all our camera tech and a bunch of other new fancy stuff. But that's the early days of saying we were in the right place at the right time, solving a problem, you know, mostly for ourselves, that it turns out lots of other people had also, and they really wanted it. And so uh that ended up growing into a business that was sustainable and ended up serving you know over a million people over time.

SPEAKER_01: 7:24

That's an awesome story.

SPEAKER_00: 7:27

Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, it's it's like that's like the uh, you know, I mean, there were there wasn't a lot of really bad parts of the story, but that uh when you compress it down to like uh you know that description, it's like, oh yeah, it was just like we just built a thing and it was awesome, and then everybody liked it. No, there were so many mistakes along the way. You you mentioned entrepreneurship, you know, at the beginning. So I've obviously zeroed in on that. But um, the real behind-the-scenes story is like making thousands of mistakes and still just like figuring out how to pay the bills and keep going. And uh that's where the real magic ended up snowballing over time, basically.

SPEAKER_01: 8:07

So, what what projected you to go from studying HRV over to body composition?

SPEAKER_00: 8:14

Yeah, so HRV uh is a metric that's always going to be near and dear to my heart, no pun intended. And um, you know, the market has kind of also caught up in the sense that if you've ever used a whoop or an aura ring or now like Apple Watch offers some HRV metrics, um, not quite as deep as those other tools, but um, it's growing in interest. But along the way, um, we discovered that we could build one of our goals is to make these this data and these insights about the body more accessible to more people because we've just seen over and over again the magic of what happens when we break down those barriers. And so we're doing that with HRV, we've done looked at other markers and along the way discovered that body composition was something that we could potentially innovate on, and that's something that doesn't require uh, admittedly, as much education and uh convincing people to pay attention to body composition, right? So HRV, people might be like, oh yeah, heart rate. I've heard of heart rate, I've heard of maybe HRV. It's a pretty deep rabbit hole, and I'd be happy to go down it, but body composition has really taken center stage for us. We now have a camera technology where you can use your phone to scan your body and essentially get a DEXA scan worth of accuracy of body fat percentage, lean mass, like muscle, fat and muscle distribution around the body, basal metabolic rate, markers that you would have typically needed to go pay$150 to go get a DEXA scan for to one time. You can now do this as many times as you want from your phone in the privacy of your own home without having to go to a lab and doing all the stuff. So that we're very proud of that innovation. But once we started going down that path, people HRV is still awesome and very important, but people really want to talk more about body composition because it's relevant to almost everyone. You can see it in the mirror. It it's relevant for aesthetics, it's relevant for performance, it's relevant for health and longevity. Um, and so and it's an outcome that people are looking to measure. And so that's kind of taken center stage for us lately.

SPEAKER_01: 10:33

Yeah, HRV, kind of to your point. If I asked polled my 300 something clients and asked them, do you care about HRV? I think maybe one or two would care, right? Because the typical then I'm gym people here.

SPEAKER_00: 10:45

Yeah, and it's it's uh, you know, if you go through the process of educating somebody, like uh they kind of get it, and then they're like, Oh yeah, that's cool. And then if it's easy to measure, then they'll maybe do it. But it's not really an outcome, you know, people's goal in life is to not improve their HRV, like some people's, it is, but not a lot of people. Whereas everyone has some sort of body composition related goal. Um, and you know, not everyone literally, but like almost no, I get what you mean.

SPEAKER_01: 11:18

I'm but even to your point as far as like educating and pushing it through, the mass people don't know about it, and then the argument going into body fat as an example. I'm still arguing with people to date about why BMI is a stupid measurement and stop caring about it and go get your body fat percentage checked. And they look at me and they blink and they go, Well, isn't that what the same thing? So for for just like an overall basic summary, really quickly, can you explain in your words the difference between BMI and body fat percentage?

SPEAKER_00: 11:50

Yeah, that I mean, uh, if you get it into the scientific community, they can get all sorts of upset with what I'm about to say. Because I think, but simplifying it makes it more practical, right? So BMI is essentially your weight, it's essentially your weight compared to your height. And so obviously, people who are really tall are gonna weigh more, and so they shouldn't be penalized for being tall. But um it it's a very simple metric that uh it's useful for really big population scale type of analysis. If you're like, oh, on general, everyone's getting heavier, you know, it's not because of muscle, unfortunately, in 2025, and or maybe hopefully more of it is now, but um, you know, that helps the government just make big decisions, but it doesn't really help an individual that much uh to pay attention to that metric. And so even the government, there's I could send you an article uh because it was all over the um couple weeks ago, is considering changing the definition of obesity to go move away from BMI and weight and to move to body composition. Because unfortunately for the population, that's gonna actually make more people qualify as being obese, but it's because when you have that metric like weight, it becomes a game, like you end up gaming the wrong metric, and you still end up with bad health outcomes, even if your weight gets a little bit less um if you're doing kind of the wrong things, like losing muscle. And so we can talk about that. Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of you know, uh where body composition comes in. And usually this is again how we end up making decisions about what to innovate on, is we're like, okay, uh, what does the research show? What is like our first principles show? Um, and it was just clearly showing that body weight is not the metric to optimize its body composition, which again is body fat and muscle, essentially, are the main two things that people would care about with body composition. There's a couple of other little things in there like water weight and bone mineral density and things like that. But on a longer term, like not a daily basis, because water can change daily, like depending on how hydrated you are, if you've eaten a bunch of salty food or you know, things like that. We don't really want to pay too much attention to that unless we have problems with hydration, right? Um, and then bone mineral density is important for sure for health outcomes, but it doesn't contribute heavily to your overall body composition uh compared to muscle and fat. So, really, when we talk about body composition, most of the time we're talking about muscle and fat and the distribution of that around the body. And just by changing that topic from BMI to body composition, we unlock so much more value in decision making and really understanding like, you know, nobody wants to waste time and money and effort in the gym or uh with their nutrition or any of these other things. And so, really, what we're looking for is measuring the right thing so that we know all the time, money, and effort that we're putting in is actually getting us where we want to go. You know, and uh so that's kind of one of our core thesis is like break down the barriers of access to the data, let people track it more regularly, more easily, more cheaply, give them insights on what it means, and then they can find the right path that will get them the results they're looking for. With the help of coaches and doctors and other things, that's really important to us too.

SPEAKER_01: 15:46

Yeah, it's good to hear that they're starting to finally make that change because it's been a long time coming. Like, biggest complaint is going to a doctor's office, this still checking BMI. And it's even when you look at somebody, because at that point you see them and you're like, Well, you work out a lot, so why my BMI is overweight? It's like, clearly, I'm not overweight. Um, I do like that thought. It's a body fat percentage-wise, but I do want to get a little more granular inside of it and talk about what specifically you should be looking for when reading results. And I think a good area to start is first off the question being A, do you measure visceral fat? And then B, what if you do, what is visceral fat? And why do I believe that is the most important, or do you believe that's the most important metric to look at?

SPEAKER_00: 16:31

100% is the most important one to look at for health outcomes. Essentially, visceral fat and lean mass. Uh, and remember when we talked about BMI being body mass index, like that's your weight compared to your height, lean mass index, or the scientific community calls it fat-free mass index, but it's essentially lean mass index is your like muscle tissue and your lean mass relative to your height. So for health outcomes, the two things you really want to pay attention to are that uh visceral adipose tissue, which will explain, and then this lean mass index, which is how much muscle do you carry relative to your height, basically. And so um uh for us, uh, with our technology and uh DEXA scans too, they have this metric called android uh and gyneoid ratio. And this is kind of gets into the scientific weeds on terminology, but uh you can kind of think about it like android fat is fat that you carry around your trunk and your midsection, and gyneoid is typically more in your like hip styles and limbs, uh like your lower limbs specifically. And um, that is sort of uh for us the proxy marker to visceral adipose tissue. We uh with a phone, we're not an X-ray, we can't see inside of you, but there's a very, very high correlation between android gynoid ratio and the visceral adipose tissue. So um it's very useful to track the android gynoid ratio over time to see if you're carrying more fat around your midsection versus more healthy distribution around the body. And um, you know, we've talked about visceral adipose tissue. I've said it a few times, you brought it you brought it up, VAT. Um, this is fat that accumulates around your organs specifically in your midsection. And this is the stuff that's really uh negative for health outcomes and well-being and all sorts of other um things. And uh your actual body fat percentage doesn't matter as much, we're finding, um, as long as you're within a reasonable range, right? If you have super high body fat percentage, that's probably not good. Um, the confounding factor there is that if you do, usually you also have a lot of that visceral adipose tissue around the organs. And so it's unclear uh you know which one is actually driving the most negativity on that bigger end of the spectrum. But um for aesthetics, the body fat percentage does matter a lot, and aesthetics are important too. People care how they look, and so your overall body fat percentage can be a big you know driver of kind of how you look, uh, especially um if you take care of muscle as well. Um, so these are kind of the things I mentioned a few things, but if I break it down, it'd be like for a lot of people, especially in the Western world, your overall body fat percentage, if you want to look better, you kind of want to get that body fat percentage to go down a little bit, and you want that lean mass index to go up a little bit so you can carry a little bit more muscle. People often worry about getting bulky from an aesthetic point of view, but hopefully, I think the narrative is coming around to say like most people do not need to worry about getting bulky. If you start to get bulky, congratulations. You're one of the rare people who like get that far with their muscle building, and you can just tone it back a little. And then, you know, basically. Um, but uh it's so funny.

SPEAKER_01: 20:22

People still think it's like, oh, I don't want to look like you. I'm like, you think this is overnight? You think just I worked out once? Like, that was it, man.

SPEAKER_00: 20:30

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like um there's a lot of young men out there that wish getting bulky was an overnight process. Um, but in any case, people often look slimmer if they carry a little more muscle uh relative to their fat, and clothes look better on you, you have more energy, you feel better, your metabolism is better, you can often handle stress, you sleep better. You know, there's so many benefits to adding muscle.

SPEAKER_01: 21:00

So that lean mass index is a really good one, and then the android gyneid ratio is the other that I'm doing you have a lot of current data on all of this as far as how that's correlated to longevity and health health outcomes.

SPEAKER_00: 21:13

Uh definitely, yeah. And and luckily, too, there's actually a lot of data in general um in the scientific community on this. So we get to benefit from all of that because essentially what we've done is just broken down the barriers of access to already proven data points, right? And so um there's this uh data set called INHANES, which is an acronym. It's like N H A N E S. And it's this massive data collection that was done, I believe, in the UK, and on the spot in the podcast. Hopefully I'm not misquoting that. But um, there's basically thousands of people that tracked dozens of markers and health outcomes over the course of 10 plus years, I believe. And uh there was some recent publications that are analyzing all of that data and realizing that one of the primary drivers of health outcomes in that data set was visceral adipose tissue, or one of the highest correlations to negative or positive uh health outcomes was visceral adipose tissue. And so what's really cool about that is that's like 10 plus years of longitudinal data across thousands of people that were doing all sorts of things from smoking to exercise to like, you know, being competitive in sports and uh all genders and demographics and everything, and they can zero it down to these simple markers that are like if you just make sure this stays in range, you're probably gonna be in better shape um than not. And then we can just break down the barriers of access to that.

SPEAKER_01: 22:56

Yeah, it's definitely true. And I think a point on this is this group we call skinny fat people that they look thin, and we all have this. Well, my aunt eats like shit and she still looks like a twig. And I think those people are the most at risk for negative health outcomes because they don't take their health seriously because they're like, Well, I'm thin, I got the aesthetics out of it. But when you run a body fat percentage like a DEXA skin on them, the ratio of visceral fat compared to the lean muscle is atrocious. And then they end up getting crazy diseases and and getting sick from it later in life. So that would be one group, and then the other group uh that's new is like it used to just be gastric bypass people, but now it's GOP1 users where they're stripping away their lean muscle tissue because that's what the drug does. You just can't hold on to it. So they're looking aesthetically thin, but they have now no muscle in their body. So yet again, less lean muscle, higher levels of visceral fat. And I think it's just gonna cause more negative health outcomes than it's gonna fix. And I wanted to see if you had any data on those specific subtypes.

SPEAKER_00: 24:13

Definitely, yep. And um, we're getting more and more, you know, now that we've brought the tech out of the lab and released it to the world, so to speak. So um right now a lot of it is anecdotal because it's early days for the platform to be available for body comp tracking. But um, you know, uh some of the early anecdotes are basically saying like I would I chose to go on GLP1 uh, you know, drugs and started losing a bunch of weight. I was all happy. Then I found Spren, so I started tracking my body composition, and it was telling it was giving me warnings that I was losing muscle, basically. And um, there's a thumbs up for everybody, but uh and they didn't believe it at first, so they went to the doctor and got a DEXA scan and confirmed that they were actually losing muscle, um, or at least that their muscle mass was looking like it was not adequate relative to their body weight. And the doctor was like, Oh yeah, you should be paying attention to this. And so, with some basic changes to nutrition and exercise, that individual actually was able to halt the loss of muscle and continue the use of the drug and get the more of the upside and less of the downside. Now, I don't have like a specific recommendation for any individual whether they should or shouldn't go on any specific drug. You know, obviously talk to your doctor about that stuff. But what's really clear is that you most likely shouldn't do these drugs without the lifestyle changes. Um, and for a lot of people, if you're gonna do the lifestyle changes one way or the other, maybe start with that and uh see where that gets you. There's an interesting anecdote from a functional medicine practitioner in Atlanta from uh uh Stat Wellness, I believe is their practice. And they had a patient who was who went on these drugs but didn't know how to do the injections properly. And so they were not injecting themselves actually with the drug, but they thought they were. And they ended up losing a bunch of fat and building some muscle and being like, these drugs are amazing. And then in the doctor review, they realized they weren't actually injecting the drugs, but they were following the lifestyle change recommendations that they had recommended, and it was 100% from the lifestyle changes that they were getting these results. Um, but they're very strict over there. They say if you don't do the lifestyle changes, we're actually going to revoke your prescription to the drug, and so that like um incentive made them do it, and then they ended up getting the results just from that. So kind of funny.

SPEAKER_01: 27:04

But I wish I could say I'm surprised, right?

SPEAKER_00: 27:08

Right. And yeah, I mean, to be honest, like I'm uh I'm somewhat of a tech optimist and somewhat of an innovation optimist. So I think that eventually innovation in drug, you know, therapy will be kind of the promise that it's sort of presented as today. I don't think we're there yet, but I think it's maybe moving in the right direction. The problem becomes, I think, is that the promise is so like big, and the effort of changing your lifestyle is perceived to be so high that you know, maybe I'm getting on a soapbox here, but I think people just really want that easy button, and we're not quite there yet.

SPEAKER_01: 27:51

And so I think and this is kind of the direction I wanted to take it to show anyway, is you notice not I don't want to say most people, but definitely a group of people who don't want to change anything as part of their lives. Like there's a quote that says hard times create hard men, hard mean men create good times, good times create soft men, soft men create hard times. Yeah, I love it. And I think we're in that shift of soft men creating the hard times because people just like little tiny things like they don't want to change in their lives, even though it has drastically positive effects because it seems perceptually hard. Like, even as an example, waking up 45 minutes earlier to go work out, like that to a lot of people just seems perceptually hard, or parking further away at a grocery store. Oh, I don't want to do that. Like it's the end of the world to park at the other end of the lot to walk into the grocery store. And we take so many things for granted that we think times are really tough and we think that you know people owe us things, but the truth of the matter is we're just not used to taking care of ourselves, and we're not used to pushing through to get what we want, that we just start blaming everyone else for our unhappiness, but truthfully, our unhappiness stems from just not having any motivation to do things. Totally.

SPEAKER_00: 29:33

I'm I'm curious of your uh I've been thinking a lot about this also and this very subject. And I've kind of come to the conclusion that it's um it's difficult to make the right choice. Um we always take the path of least resistance, it seems like, right? And um, if you're essentially like sick and inflamed. And stressed and maybe financially strapped as well. It makes it really difficult to make like to do the slightly harder thing. It just seems like a huge lift, right? And I've kind of come around to this idea that everyone can find a small win somewhere, right? And and that is what is needed to really kind of snowball into doing more of those hard, making the right choice on those hard decisions. And maybe I don't know if I've quite uh articulated it in a punchy like podcast one-liner or something like that yet. But the idea that I'm kind of getting at here is by providing these feedback loops for people, we want to be like, look, there's like on any given day 10 things that you could maybe choose to do that would make your health or your fitness or your wellness or your life a little bit better, right? And maybe 10 is even a conservative number, depending on how small you look. Um whatever one works for you is the one you should do, right? So maybe for one person it's like wake up a little earlier and get into more exercise. Maybe for another person it's like go to bed a little bit earlier or watch one less episode of you know Netflix or whatever, um, or drink uh a little bit fewer calories, uh, you know, in liquid form. Um try to have one less soda a day or something like that. And really what we're trying to do is like kind of what you said, it's like find something small that you can take the slightly harder path that you know is a little bit better, and just try to do that a little bit more each day. And um I promise, as somebody who's done that, and I was skinny fat, you had mentioned that earlier. I've always been a relatively small person, um, but I was up 23, 24% body fat, um, still looked pretty fit in clothes, and that's not super huge. So I appreciate a lot of people are still, you know, way higher than that on a body fat percentage scale. But as somebody who thought of myself as an athlete and really fit, you know, I had kind of let things slip over the years and just didn't really realize because my scale weight wasn't very different. Um, and with some small changes, just some really small changes that I kind of stuck with consistently and had times when I fell off the wagon and then got back on the wagon. Um, you know, I'm back down to like 13% now, is usually around where I hover, and I'm a little bit heavier um on the scale than I was then. But uh it was very small changes that just compounded over time uh that got me here. And so yeah, I've kind of tried to live through it, but I've got two little kids, I'm running this business. You know, I never have enough time in the day to do all the things that I want to do. And so I've just tried to figure out like what are the little things that I have to do and not skip uh to get the results I'm looking for, basically.

SPEAKER_01: 33:26

Yeah, and when you you asked for my opinion, and here's the truth of the matter. I think there's two subtypes of people, those that need the compounding effect, like you were mentioning, where it's taking a little victory and letting it snowball into bigger and bigger victories, and then there's the polar opposite people like me who need to just sink like bottom barrel life-altering ending things need to happen to where it's either die or change, and that choosing that hard path to live and move forward made everything else seem easy after that. So, like, I no longer live in this choosing like this hard path or easy path. It doesn't like it, doesn't matter. Someone says, This is extremely hard to do. I was like, I I don't care. It just doesn't matter anymore to me. Like, I'll do whatever to get wherever because I've been through so much shit in my life. I I'm just thinking of the numb to it, right? So, and I know that I'll enjoy the ride of going through it once I get like my feet on the ground running. Right. So I I do agree there's two different types of people, and people respond to things differently. And I think that's our two subgroups that we need, but there definitely needs to be overarching change. I I made a little short. I'm starting to get on like TikTok for everybody following, even though it's brand new for me. So bear with me. Uh a big, big believer of mine, especially you being an entrepreneur, maybe an entrepreneur, is you will never be a successful entrepreneur if you don't take care of your health. Because there's so many more benefits that come with it as far as mental clarity, as far as truly understanding how to push your body, how to take the hard path. Working out's hard. So you get easy, it gets easier when you're an entrepreneur and you own a business because there's a lot of hard times associated with it. And there's so many more benefits to being physically fit, to having good mental clarity as you move up the wealth scale. And the truth of the matter is, it doesn't matter how much money you accumulate, if you didn't take care of your health, you ain't gonna be able to spend that money on the things you thought you were gonna be able to spend that money on, because you're either spending it in the hospital or you just didn't live to see those days. So it's it just doesn't make sense why people prioritize their wealth over their health in any way, shape, or form in general. So that's why I like the more knowledge the bet the better. Like personally, I bought an aura ring. So definitely like used to like you mentioned, it's a good way to track because my biggest issue has been sleep my whole life, but knowing how important and valuable sleep is, it's like this is something to help just give me a little more information to figure out like how I can tweak and just feel better on a day-to-day basis so I can make decisions. A lot of people don't know this, but I used to be like a really heavy drinker. I wasn't an alcoholic because I didn't have an addictive personality, but I drank a lot for like five straight years. And what ultimately like kicked the drinking bucket habit for me was owning a business because it was just like I can't be hungover and wake up at four o'clock in the morning to get there at five and work at their 10-hour shift, and then that escalated to like at the point now I don't even miss it. Like, I would be like, Oh, I'll just have a couple beers here and there. Like, I don't remember the last time I even had a beer. Because like it's not, it's no longer just about me. It's my wife, my kid. I have 30 employees under me. I we have hundreds of clients. If I'm not mentally sharp and there comes a decision where my team needs me or my family needs me, we're screwed. So it's just a no-brainer to not even drink anymore and super prioritize my health. And I just wish that people understood that I don't have to go through what I went through to get here.

SPEAKER_00: 37:42

Yeah, well, it's you know, um, kudos to you for doing that. And I think the as you were describing that, even with the two buckets of different types of people, I was thinking through like there's an identity component to it, right? And sometimes people may not think of themselves yet as somebody who can do really big hard changes with regard to their health or fitness or or other things that they're working on. But I um I think that changing your environment uh or kind of you know uh like breaking those things cold turkey can be a way to shortcut that. But over time, these things become easier as your identity kind of solidifies of like, oh yeah, I am somebody who can do uh these maybe small at first, but maybe really big changes. And do I need to be the guy who's always drinking? Um, or am I or is my identity more anchored to being an entrepreneur or something like that, right? Once your identity can shift and you can really internalize that, things get a lot easier. Like now I'm a guy who doesn't skip the gym versus before I was a guy who found reasons to skip the gym, right? And uh now it's kind of if I miss here and there because I get busy, I'm like itchy to get back to it, basically, right? So it's uh it's a big shift that sometimes takes a while to get to, but um my promise is that having served thousands and thousands, now over a million people, um, you know, you can do it.

SPEAKER_01: 39:22

Yeah, and I think the more information you have on yourself, and the more you're able to just even see those visual changes. Because like we're not gonna be able to look in the mirror and be like, oh, we're different people, right? So it comes down to tracking data and having the data show you that you lost the percentage. Because what does a percentage look like to you visually? You don't notice it. But an app being able to show you that and feed that information to you is awesome. I mean, on the flip side of it, which is a specific question I have for you, uh, the basal metabolic rate you have on there, or your resting metabolism, basically, how many calories a day you burn when your body doesn't move. How accurate is that compared to whether you can run like uh Mikillus equation, or is it more accurate where it's a breathing test kind of baseline? Like how do you strip that number?

SPEAKER_00: 40:16

Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, and these are all different methods of measuring this kind of you know resting metabolic rate, which is a super useful metric. And I in some ways, um, though I think we want it to be more useful than it than it actually is, because where I'm going with this is that um this is a very accurate way to do it based on body composition. There's a high correlation with, you know, um, again, height and weight, but your lean mass and how much muscle you carry has a big impact on your metabolic rate. Um, but really uh in some ways it's like finding your caloric set point. So when you work with people and you say, like, here's the amount of calories that you should eat in a day, you know, you probably find that like based on someone's height and weight, you would think that their calorie maintenance calories would be this amount, right? And there's some variability to that. And it's partly partly based on body composition, partly based on how active you are. There seems to be a genetic component to it, or at least some complex component that's hard to explain. What's really important is that you calibrate that over time, right? And so your resting metabolic rate, like for me, I can eat a ton of calories and not seem to gain weight. But over and I just thought I was magic, um, you know. Um, but in reality, I have like pretty high thermogenesis and pretty high like non-exercise activity um based thermogenesis, this thing called neat. Um, and so I'm very fidgety, and if I eat a lot, I generate a ton of heat and I move my body a lot, and I naturally want to go walk around and move around and stuff and seem to ramp up calories, plus, my brain is always you know going 24-7, but which is a different conversation. But in any case, um most entrepreneurs struggle with ADD.

SPEAKER_01: 42:14

Just saying.

SPEAKER_00: 42:17

That was like another thing that attracted me to learning about HRV was understanding my nervous system and how my brain needed downtime and things like that. But coming back to this metabolic rate conversation is you know, what we're trying to say is just existing is actually what burns the most calories for people, right? Your brain uses up 20% of your calories, even though it's less than you know 10% of your weight or or low, smaller. Can't remember the exact percentage off the top of my head, but your brain uses a ton, and just being, just living, uses a ton of calories. Exercise itself doesn't actually, you know, compared to that, burn tons of calories, but it is still very important for um body composition and metabolism and stuff, which is why compounding effect back to your theory, it's more important.

SPEAKER_01: 43:12

Research is finally catching up to weightlift than run, if you had to choose, because the more muscle you have, the more calories a day you burn a day at rest. So that compounds over time as opposed to running just is a quick cut, and that's it.

SPEAKER_00: 43:30

Exactly. Yes, yeah, and there's a compounding effect of more muscle gives you more energy, more energy makes you more active. It's like success begets success, and um, you're more likely to do more things and to make better decisions and do harder, you know. Weightlifting is also hard, especially if you train relatively hard. Um, it helps, you know, there's at least a lot of anecdotal evidence, but I think there's some scientific validity to just doing those hard things makes you better at doing other hard things, also. And uh so this all kind of comes back around to uh these assessment tools, like your metabolic rate, gives you a starting point. And then really what you want to do is say, like, how active are you? Um, you know, how much are you eating and resting, and how much muscle do you carry relative to your you know, body fat and your height and stuff, and use that as a starting point that then you can calibrate over time and say, um, figuring out how much to eat so that you can maintain or build muscle while maintaining or losing fat and still feeling energetic most of the time is this uh, you know, it takes a little bit of trial and error for people to figure that out, and having a great coach or nutritionist support you in that is really the fastest way to figure that stuff out and the most effective way. Um, but using these tools, you can kind of do that on your own now a little bit too to like figure out how much to eat and how that's all affecting your body composition.

SPEAKER_01: 45:11

Yeah, and I I'm in the same boat with having really high non-active hemogenesis. I about the same thing. I used to see 4,000 calories a day, and you're like, I don't gain a pound. My leg is going a mile a minute every class, every period, just shaking, and it's just like calm down, stop moving, and it just doesn't go. And even now at home and I'm on the phone, my wife laughs at me because like you know movies like pace when they walk. I like sprint. My heart rate's up to like 100 beats per minute. I'm running between rooms, I don't know why. I just have to move and walk. And when I track like a half an hour phone call, I have like 15,000 steps, and I'm like, the hell man.

SPEAKER_00: 45:56

It's great. And when you know, and that that too can be something that others can cultivate. Uh, if you aren't that way naturally, you can cultivate that. And actually, like you had just said earlier, building muscle, ironically, um, over time, we have found at least that uh in our community, people who build muscle end up also doing more steps and just being more active in general. And there's probably so many reasons that we're gonna learn over the years as the scientific research catches up to what practitioners in the field experience with their clients. And um, you know, probably even there's like a fear component to it. When you carry more muscle and you have good mobility and strength and balance, you're not afraid of constantly getting hurt. And that as people age ends up being a really big uh factor in activity level overall, and that compounds into elderly people not moving much because they're afraid as well, and then deteriorating faster, and then actually falling and breaking a hip or something, and then that's actually the beginning of the end for a lot of people, um, you know, and we're trying to get ahead of that.

SPEAKER_01: 47:13

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, Jason, just kind of ask you, where do you see one specifically your app going? And then two, on the flip side of where do you see this technology going overall? Because if I were to sit here and be like, wow, look back five years to where we are today, and then look forward five years. I just feel like everyone's gonna have an earpiece with an AI in it that's always analyzing your analytics through different smart devices you have tracked, and then giving feedback to you every minute. All right, go do this, go do this, go do this, because that optimizes for your specific genotype or whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 47:53

Yep. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty, you know, it probably won't be that far off from what you just described. Obviously, I think there's going to be like a bit of an annoyance factor if it's talking to you every minute. But uh, you know, basically what you really want and what the promise of this evolution of sensing technologies like ours, plus other AI and these systems as they connect together is trying to take the stress and decision-making headache out of all of this, right? It kind of becomes an algorithm, so to speak, that finally will be personalized and individualized to you as an individual. And I I personally think that this won't remove the importance of working with humans on this. I think as long as we are embodied in a human body, um, which is funny you have to caveat that a little bit in 2025 as a possibility. But in any case, our connection with each other is goes beyond just saying, like, hey, eat this much, do the lift these weights, you know, all this stuff. It's also talking to each other, feeling heard, being empathetic. You know, as a coach yourself, you know that like you become people's therapist and you become their friend. And it often goes way beyond just the mechanics of doing an exercise correctly or eating certain foods, etc. And so I think that humans will continue to play an important role in all of those other aspects of it. The algorithm is kind of taking over some of the spreadsheet side of it, so to speak, where it's like, let me tell me everything that you ate, tell me all the exercise you did, you know, tell me about your genetic, uh, your predisposition to heart, you know, conditions or whatever. I'll put it all in my spreadsheet, and then we're gonna try to calculate out. Here's what you should eat, here's maybe the exercises you should do. The algorithm's kind of taking over a lot of that load so that we can kind of focus more on the relationship and the practical application in the real world. I think we're pretty far off from AI having complete context about every single thing going on in your life. And um, it's like a self-driving car in a way, right? It's like the the 80-20 of it was here like years ago, but we're finding that the real world is just pretty complex and dynamic. And so um, as I think that's uh like AI-driven health and fitness is gonna take a similar path as self-driving cars, where we're gonna have this really big promise, which we already have, kind of we're getting there, and it will take some time though before it really kind of like can dodge a kid that jumps out in front of you, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 50:52

And uh that's well, must set it best like AI, we're at the pivotal point. Either it's gonna get so much garbage information, it's gonna be even worse.

SPEAKER_00: 51:01

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_01: 51:02

Or it might get some good information in there, then we can make it really good and worth our while. So, because it's all user input base, so especially like open AI technology. Yeah, it's really important.

SPEAKER_00: 51:16

The data it's fed. Exactly. And that's where we feel like we can play a role. And so you'd asked about our role and all that is basically saying that we know a lot of the answers are in your own body, and as much as we can unlock from your body, um, you can consider that as ground truth, so to speak. Because if you're putting in a bunch of work and your body composition isn't going in the direction you want, you know, maybe that work is still good, but maybe something else is holding you back, or maybe that's not the right thing to be spending your time and energy on. So as much as we can, we're trying to provide these feedback loops so that you as an individual or you as a coach uh who are helping others can figure out what works for each person, basically. And it and it changes, that's the other hard part is it's not always the same today as it is next week.

SPEAKER_01: 52:10

But yeah, I I I totally agree. Uh Jason, I do want to wrap this up of just asking two final questions. First one being, if you were to summarize this episode in one or two sentences, what would be your take-home message?

SPEAKER_00: 52:26

Um you don't have to track everything all the time, but if you track the right things at the right time, it can save you a lot of time and effort and money. And that's really part of that's like I spend all day thinking about that. So um, you know, uh hopefully that helps some folks.

SPEAKER_01: 52:47

I love that. And then the second part, how can people find you, get a hold of you, and learn more about your app?

SPEAKER_00: 52:53

Spren, s-pr-n. You can go to spren.com or you can find us in the app store. Um, we also partner with gyms and coaches and um, you know, health practices and things like that, tech companies now. Um basically, I think uh we're integrating we're trying to integrate our technology into all the different ways that people are looking to improve their health and fitness so that you can get those feedback loops anywhere. But Spren is the name of the game for us.

SPEAKER_01: 53:24

I I love it. Jason, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you guys for listening to this week's episode of Anthony and Michelle. Don't forget Finish is Medicine until next time. Thank you guys for listening to this week's episode of Help the Fingers Redefined. Please don't forget to subscribe and share this show with a friend, with a loved one, with those that need to hear it. And ultimately, don't forget Finish is Medicine. I'll see you next time.