Written by Christopher Kelly
Sept. 5, 2014
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello, and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. I'm joined today by Jason Moore who is the co-founder of Elite HRV.
Hi, Jason.
Jason: Hi, Chris. How's it going? Thanks for having me on.
Christopher: Right, good. Thanks for coming. Tell me, I think we should start by explaining what Elite HRV is. It's an app that I can use in my phone, right? Can you explain what the app does?
Jason: Sure. So Elite HRV -- you may have heard of heart rate variability. In fact, if you were at Ancestral Health Symposium or Paleo f(x), you may have heard me speak about heart rate variability there.
Christopher: There's a link, actually. I can put that in the show notes. It's all on video. I was there in person, saw the presentation live. I'm pretty sure all of the videos are up now so anyone can go and see this now.
Jason: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, there's a link so look for that. That'd be great.
Christopher: Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes.
Jason: Send me whatever feedback because I always like to -- you know how us biofeedback folks are, we like to get feedback.
But anyway, heart rate variability -- I'll start there -- heart rate variability, it's a lot of things actually, but literally it means the variation of time between your heartbeats. So in a nutshell, if your heartbeat's at 60 beats per minute, for example, then you might think that there's one second between each beat, but in reality that's not the case. In reality, your heart may beat every 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 seconds. It goes up and down, up and down, up and down, but the average is going to be 60 beats per minute, for example. The 60 BPM is your heart rate and --
Christopher: Yes. So that's what most people will be familiar with, right? So when they think they've seen it on the strap, maybe they're going for a run, they see 140 beats per minute, that's the average, and so that what heart rate variability is is the interbeat interval, right? It's the how much regularity or dysregularity there is between the beats, which is different.
Jason: Exactly, exactly, and so it tells us a lot of things. So your heart rate variability changes throughout the day and depending on what activities that you're doing and even depending on what you're thinking about, and there's different measurements of heart rate variability for these different purposes. So over the course of 24 hours, your heart rate variability has a trend that's primarily affected by circadian rhythm and things like that, so as hormones change throughout the day naturally with light and with stimulation from outside, then your heart rate variability actually has a pattern that follows that.
Christopher: Yeah. So we see that with cortisol as well, actually follows the circadian rhythm. We've been doing lots of saliva tests on pretty much everybody and it's one of the things that does is it maps out circadian rhythm, which is obviously really important for sleep and recovery. Without a proper circadian rhythm, it's really, really hard to rest. So what you're saying is you can almost do that with HRV as well?
Jason: Yeah, exactly, and I'll talk about a little bit later when we're talking about maybe future features of Elite HRV. Right now, you could potentially hook up with a heart rate monitor and record for 24 hours or longer if you wanted on the app. What we're working on is making that performance on your smartphone to be able to mine that data afterwards useful.
Christopher: I've actually tried some of this myself, actually. I've got several devices and one of them is an emWave, and it annoyed me that I couldn't see the raw numbers for the data. So I found an article on Dave Asprey's site actually, the Bulletproof site, and wrote some Python code to extract the raw numbers. So I came up with the -- it's the RMSST [Phonetic] is that right? So [0:04:20] [Indiscernible] I did it but, yeah, it's interesting.
I think that's great that you're making the data available, and the sort of person that would like to do this in the first place is probably the sort of person that would like to dive in deeper and tinker with the numbers.
Jason: Oh, yeah, exactly. So I'll talk a bit more about how our business model works in a second but before we do, there's also the short-term part of HRV, which is much easier to package into a smartphone app, for example, and which we've done, and there are a few other apps out there as well. What you'll probably get from me is that I am pretty open about just saying, "Yeah, there's other apps so check them all out."
[0:05:07]
Christopher: Yours is free though, isn't it? That's something -- I mean, I'm pretty sure I paid for the other apps, didn't I? And I didn't pay for yours. Is that right?
Jason: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, it's free, and I got into heart rate variability several years ago. I've been into health and fitness for a while and I was a CrossFit coach for several years, ended up burning myself out, injuring myself, and then I got a little bit smarter about my training.
I actually stayed on CrossFit coaching after that but tried to help people getting started in it, learn how to be able to think for themselves, if you will, and try to get feedback. I found heart rate variability during all this time and started using it myself and realizing that I could -- not only did it give me immediate feedback on a daily basis of training and how things were stressing my body out but it also helped me think about it, which I think is a big deal.
I don't like relying on any one tool for anything, so I think it's important to always think about what this feedback is telling you so that you can start to recognize it yourself. What if you wake one day and your phone is dead? You need to be able to think for yourselves. Sorry, I didn't mean to get off on that tangent but --
So yeah, the heart rate variability systems that were available at the time were all pretty expensive. I started digging into the science and geeking out on it, just like I'm sure a lot of folks like to do, and realized that I could with my IT information background. Actually, what I do during the day is I travel the nation and the globe helping people track lots of data, big data, and make it useful to people who aren't necessarily data-oriented people. So in the oil and gas industry, there's lots of folks out on the field who are performing work on millions of dollars worth of equipment and they're not necessarily the most computer-oriented people, so how do I get all this data and put it in their hands and have them able to make decisions off of it?
So that's another tangent about my background. So you combine health and fitness with that and I was like, "I can do this. I can do this biofeedback and heart rate variability thing a little better, I think." I'm not going to say that my way is the best way or anything, but I will say that I keep an open mind and just try to learn as I go.
So that leads us into why I put the app out there for free, and one of the best ways to learn is to get feedback from people. So basically, we put the minimum viable product out there for free and then quickly, quickly evolve. My partner and I both have IT background. He's a computer science guy and really, really sharp, and I was on the research and face of the business and things like that, if you will.
We put it out there, we get feedback, and we adapt quickly, and if you've been around on the app since the beginning, which was only relaunched after Paleo f(x), the app has changed quite a bit since then, and if you're around in the next month or two, you're going to see a huge change yet again. So it's been a fun trip, but I didn't mean to get off on all that. We can shift back to heart rate variability.
Christopher: Yes. So I should probably just walk people through the process, what it means to actually record this. It sounds quite technical. We dived into the details a bit here but it's really straightforward. I mean, you've already got a heart rate strap. Most people have that. It's a really common thing for people to own already. Then you just hook your app, you pair it with the app, and then you basically sit quietly and record a number, and it really does come down to something as simple as that, just one number.
Jason: Yeah. So that brings us back to the short-term versus the long-term heart rate variability. So in the short-term, like three to five minutes and around those time frames, the primary thing that affects your heart rate variability is your respiratory system, cardiovascular system, and autonomic nervous system.
[0:10:09]
So the way you breathe affects heart rate variability a lot, and the way that your body perceives stress -- whether it's physical, mental, emotional, environmental, et cetera -- around you or whatever activities you're doing or thinking about greatly affects your heart rate variability as well. So luckily, the consumer heart rate monitors that are out nowadays actually are able to accurately calculate that variation between beats and give you -- through some calculations in the app in the system are able to give you a snapshot of what your body's stress situation is like at that moment.
So the way it works is, yeah, like you just said, you strap on a heart rate monitor, which is just a consumer heart rate monitor. They're like $50 or $60 depending on where you're at. We're looking into the hardware piece, which is the first time that'll be heard publicly, but we want to make that even cheaper too to get it into more people's hands. So basically, you strap it on, take a little two or three-minute reading and you have a picture, a little snapshot of your body's stress and recovery situation right there.
The important thing is that you basically just do this every morning. When you wake up is the best time because what you want to do is you want to eliminate those variables like circadian rhythm and things like that, because if you take it in the morning today and in the evening tomorrow, your circadian rhythm is going to have you in a different place, but if you take it at the same time, in the same position, in the same way each morning just to create a little habit out of it -- honestly, I don't even think about it anymore, but you eliminate all those variables and what you're getting is a daily trend of basically, when you wake up, how ready are you to handle stress, exercise or anything else that you can think of for that day.
Christopher: Yeah. So I'll tell you why I think this is so important for the people that we work with, and it's because all of them have been through a period or are still going through too much stress. So I think, as you already alluded to, there's many different types of stress but there's really only one physiological response, and the reason I like heart rate variability is it gives the person the ability to see that stress in real time.
So rather than me running a 4-point saliva test on them, which is quite expensive -- it can only be done maybe once or twice a year -- and telling them, "Oh, yeah, the last six months, that was way too much stress, so I don't know whether you overdid it with the training or whether work was too much, or whether it was the kids that were driving you nuts. I really don't know, but I know there's too much stress." HRV then, this number, can actually tell you how much stress you're under at the moment, which is I think really important.
Jason: Yeah, and so it tells you -- that's exactly right. And it's funny, stress is a big topic, you're right, and it touches so many areas like athletic exercise and work and relationships and all that stuff, and so before we had gone on recording -- I had mentioned that I was doing a podcast earlier and it's actually a podcast about stress, but I just mentioned to you also that I have so much on my plate that I don't know how regularly I'm going to be able to post episodes on there, but --
Christopher: It's funny how they say it's going to turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, like I gave up my job to start a business to help people with the deleterious effects of stress, and of course starting a new business is probably the worst thing you can do for yourself personally in terms of stress management, so it's not --
Jason: Oh, yeah. Exactly.
Christopher: -- not a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's so ironic. That's what it is.
Jason: Yeah, and so having that rate variability measurement which is -- like you said, it's an objective measurement because sometimes you wake up and you're like, "Well, I feel like I could feel better, but I'm just going to try to tackle everything anyway." A lot of folks too make that decision a few times in a row or a few times and they started getting used to just pushing through when they feel stressed or when they maybe not feel optimum, and then they forget what it's like to feel optimal and to feel ready to tackle anything for real. This helps guide people back to that. That's one thing.
[0:15:19]
If you're ever involved in the Ancestral/Primal/Paleo community, a lot of folks who make lifestyle changes in that direction say it was like they were waking up again from a haze that they had been in that they didn't even realize. So getting a handle on your stress and recovering properly, whether it's from exercise or mental work, whatever stress, can really, really boost you in that direction.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. In theory, you should be able to know this. It's one of the things that a coach said to me at one point is you don't need this tool. The thing that makes you better than the other guys that you race against is you're not a meathead. You know when it's time to take a recovery day. In theory, the best athletes, that would be true, that they would just know instinctively without having a number to tell that that they're overtrained.
But the reality is nobody can actually do that. It's crazy, and it's probably another trait that makes people successful athletes is they're extremely motivated, disciplined, hard-working people, and it takes something like HRV to get them to slow down to even know that there's something wrong.
Jason: Yeah, there are several things going on there, especially with athletes. If you have a culture where everybody just pushes as hard as they can --
Christopher: Yeah, more is more. Everybody us practically, "Why have you not posted that right on Strava yet? Are you not doing it?"
Jason: Right. And so if you're operating in that kind of environment, there will be actually a few people that manage to succeed, and everybody will look at those people and think that this is what we should all be doing.
Those people succeed. Possibly, there's no way to know exactly why, but they may have a different perception of stress at work or at home, or maybe their nutrition is spot on. Maybe their genetics are optimized for this type of activity. There's no way to know, but the reality is that 99% of people cannot go "balls to the walls" -- excuse the language -- and succeed over the long term.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely, and I think there's something else going on there. When you look at any competition sports, the person that wins probably didn't kill themselves to do it. You only go as hard as you need to to win. It's the guys that come in second, third, fourth, those are the ones that have given 100% and still not achieved the win, those are the people, I think, who are going to be more vulnerable to this type of overtraining because the guy that came first, he's pretty fast. You can come back and do it the week after.
Of course, everyone else has killed themselves to try and achieve the same and failed, so perhaps they might be -- so if you come in second, third or fourth, you might find HRV even more useful.
Jason: Oh, yeah, for sure. Honestly, it was interesting at Paleo f(x). There was a panel on the "modern athlete" -- or something like that it was called -- and there were Olympic athletes, an Olympic coach, and other high-caliber coaches on that panel.
The main message, the main takeaway was that most successful athletes train less than the people who are tailing them to try to get up there. They said it much more eloquently than that, but the key message was basically that if you train smartly -- and there are times to push hard, that's for sure, but those athletes also know when to take it easy, and when I say that they know when to rest and recover or take a lighter day, it may not actually be them.
So I also like to point out that even if you have heart rate variability data on a daily basis in an app, that's never going to replace a good coach or a solid nutrition plan. There are a lot of other lifestyle things that you should definitely look into because HRV is not like a silver bullet, but it can definitely help indicate and let you know when you make a change one way or another whether or not it's for the better or for the worse.
[0:20:15]
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. So some of the tests that we run, the urine, stool and saliva, they come back with many -- particularly the urine test has 46 different markers on it. Sometimes, someone will say to me, "Well, I see that's elevated or that's low. What should we do about it? How do I treat that?" and the answer is you don't treat it. It's just a piece of evidence. It's just a clue that tells you about what might be going on with your physiology, and I think of HRV as being just another one of those biomarkers.
So if you get up in the morning and you notice that your HRV is awful but you feel fine, then you need to balance the evidence and make the appropriate decision, but I think it's quite a powerful piece of evidence that is difficult to ignore sometimes.
Jason: Yeah, and the neat thing is -- let's say that that test that you were running, let's say you could have that test without much effort. You could have that test done all day, every day or any time you wanted, or every day, for example --
Christopher: Of course, I would do it. I run them on myself quite frequently but I would do it every single day. I would look at an Organix profile every single day if I could.
Jason: Right, yeah. If it wasn't very time-consuming or expensive or invasive you can do it every single day, and then you could have your own personal data to work off of to where you could eventually start making smart decisions for yourself -- because we're all different -- off of that data, right? I mean, immediate ones.
I mean, there's obviously some things that you can make decisions off of from that test especially with you all's help, but when you put the data into the person's hands on a daily basis and they can start creating trends and you could see trends for that person, then on a daily basis you can start making little adjustments that over the long run will make sure that you're heading on the right track.
So that's how the app works is those morning readings that you take each morning, they build you a baseline that's specific to you. So what it says is -- let's say this morning when I woke up, my HRV was 88 and that's a green for me, which is green means I'm pretty well able to handle stress or intense activity or something like that today. But the past few days, I had a red two days ago because my HRV had dropped ten points and that factors into my personal data points, whereas somebody who's like an Elite triathlete, for example, may have a yellow or red if their score is 88 because their aerobic capacity is much higher than mine and that sets their HRV score threshold a little bit higher.
So that was a roundabout way to get into that, but basically what I was saying is everybody's trend is personalized to themselves. The power is you take that reading for a couple of minutes each morning and it gives you immediate feedback and a recommendation saying, "Compared to you, your personal trends, you are doing much better today," or "Maybe you should take it lighter today," or "You really need to take an off day or just do some guided breathing," or something like that. So it's all based on you, and that way, your trends can always be improving based on your goals.
Christopher: Is there any point of which you could say this is a pathology? So if I check my HRV and it's 12, at what point would you recommend someone go and see their doctor? Is there a cutoff or is it really --
Jason: Yeah. Twelve? I've never seen anybody who scored a 12.
Christopher: I just pulled that number out of the air, but...
Jason: Yeah, so definitely -- but there's a couple of interesting things going on there, so I'll take a step back. You want a high degree of variability, which basically means a higher HRV score generally when you're at rest. But it's okay to have a much lower HRV, a much lower variability when you're exerting yourself or when you're very stimulated.
[0:24:58]
So the reason why is this variability from the autonomic nervous system that we talked about happens because your autonomic nervous system has two branches. One is your sympathetic "fight or flight" branch and then the other is the parasympathetic "rest and digest" branch, and these two branches are both pushing and pulling on your heart to speed up and slow down because each one of them has their own priorities, and typically the sympathetic fight-or-flight branch has more authority than the parasympathetic branch, for example.
So it's much easier to be overly stressed out, overly fight-or-flight than it is to be nice and relaxed and resting and digesting, if you will. So typically, a higher HRV means you have more rest-and-digest activity going on, which is generally a good thing. It can be bad, which I can talk about in a bit. So you have this push/pull, speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. Typically, a lower heart rate is correlated with a higher heart rate variability. That's also not always the case, which I can also talk about.
So let's see. Where were we going with that?
Christopher: Yeah. So tell me about what it means then if I see a very, very low heart rate variability. Should I at some point be worried?
Jason: Oh, that's right. Okay, so if you're resting, let's say you just woke up in the morning and you have a very low heart rate variability, especially if that is trending downward for you, then that could very well mean your circadian rhythm is off, and you would likely see cortisol being off as well, but you are not in a very good recovery state. You're not starting your day in a rested state typically, and there is -- I don't have any medical advice at one point you should go see a doctor, but that is interesting because right now we're working with developing more of a patient-practitioner dashboard or a coach-client dashboard.
Christopher: That'd be great. If all the people that we're testing with these other tests I could just get them to check their HRV every day, and then just check in and look at a dashboard and see it all, that would be really cool.
Jason: Yup, exactly. So that's already in -- we're about to release the beta testing version of that. I had actually traveled to Colorado and talked to a doctor there who formally started out as just a chiropractor, and then, as many do, moved more into the ancestral living space and lifestyle optimization. He actually is taking heart rate variability measurements with the device in his office, and so he's getting kind of a -- every six weeks he would do a five-minute reading with his patients and he was using that to track progress with diet changes, exercise changes, even manual adjustment changes, and he started having such great success with it that he started moving away from a lot of his other metrics because it was so easy to take that heart rate variability measurement.
I explained to him that a five-minute reading every six weeks is better than zero readings, but if he could get this every day or if he could look at a dashboard and just see every day, check in, like you said, or even look back at the past week for this client and see the ups and downs and what's been going on -- and part of our goal too is we make it really easy to correlate some popular lifestyle activities with that HRV.
So when you take a reading, right after the reading and before you see your results so that it doesn't mentally fulfill what you're about to write --
Christopher: I see, yeah.
Jason: -- so you don't take the readings, see that you're red, and then put, "Oh, yeah, I had bad sleep last night because I'm red." So right after you take the reading but before you see the results, you record optionally sleep duration, sleep quality, mood, exercise duration, exercise intensity, notes; that section is growing rapidly, too.
[0:30:18]
So then, at the touch of a button, today you can actually go into the app and correlate all of that data and look at the dashboard and say, "Where are all my long exercises? And then how does that affect my HRV the following day or two or three days?" or it depends. So you can start making decisions like, "Am I exercising enough or too much? Or the wrong type? Or maybe I'm not getting the same stimulation from this exercise as I used to," stuff like that.
So he was excited to see that there are things like that coming and that was a while back, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of data we get as people like him start using that over the long term. Then, we may be able to make some better medical recommendations.
Christopher: Yeah, you should get me on board with that. You say beta testing; that makes me think there's people off-site helping you and I'd love to be part of that. Most of the people that we work with have a strap anyway, so --
Jason: Perfect, yeah.
Christopher: And of course, everybody's got a smartphone now, so I'd love to be part of that.
Jason: Definitely.
Christopher: But I wanted to know more about -- so I've seen this on other apps -- SweetBeat, in particular -- there's these low and high frequencies that some people try to glean some extra information from, but my understanding is it's slightly controversial what the different frequencies mean. Does this mean anything to you? Can you shed some light on what the low and the high frequencies mean?
Jason: Sure, definitely. So you're exactly right when you say there's a lot of controversy. The low frequency is typically correlated with sympathetic nervous system activity, and the high frequency is typically correlated with both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity. Then there's also very low frequency and ultra-low frequency and things like that. I wouldn't say it's a waste of time to look at these, but I would say that if you're the type of person that wants to see really solid evidence and studies that it's not quite there yet.
So in theory, what these are showing you is the power of each of those branches and also the ratio of which branch is more dominant than the other. So it's -- let's see, what's the best way to say this? What I found from my research -- and I'm actually going through the BCIA certification for HRV right now, and I had done a lot of my own independent research prior to, of course, launching the app and all this, but BCIA is the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance and they have a whole program that certifies people for heart rate variability. I'm going through that program right now.
Most of the information I've found independently but it's filling in a few gaps for me as well, and one of those was just how much we could dive into some of these HRV measurements that people like to throw up and say, "These are the things that you need to see." So HF and LF is one of those.
They also agree -- in their program, they list out that this is in theory what you're seeing is the power of your parasympathetic and sympathetic branches, so your fight-or-flight or your rest-and-digest branches, but there's so much conflicting data. There are just as many studies disproving it as there are proving it, and so I haven't felt comfortable putting it out there as part of the recommendation portion of our app.
The good thing though is that we're recording all of -- so this may sound like Big Brother or something, but we're not actually looking at people's -- or selling it or anything like that, but we record every single heartbeat in our database. So if studies come out with calculations that are more meaningful, then RMSSD, which is the primary calculation that our baseline is based off of, we have all the heart rate data available and we can push it out to our users and they can look back at all their data and compare, and so you'll never lose any trending in our system, at least. So yeah, that's a tough one.
[0:35:30]
Christopher: Yeah, it's obviously cutting-edge. It's very exciting.
I was wondering, I went through a period of pretty bad overtraining and I didn't know about heart rate variability or any of those things at that time, and the main thing that I noticed was an extremely strong vagal tone. It was so strong that my heart rate -- I used to get to ride around in my bike and to keep up with pretty much everyone with a heart rate of 130, which was crazy, like I couldn't understand why I physically couldn't get my heart rate up. Then when I rested, it was extremely low, like the low 40 beats, and it was obvious that the vagal tone was really strong.
If I were to measure my HRV at that time, what do you think I would have seen? Would it have just dropped lower and lower and lower or would it have been something different?
Jason: Well, you see, that brings me back to what I was saying earlier in that heart rate and heart rate variability are not always correlated, and so there's a couple of things going on there. Heart rate in and of itself first reacts to maintaining homeostasis, for example, and so what that means is it's reacting to what you need for survival. So whatever you had going on, your heart didn't need to beat much harder to meet the needs of the exercise or didn't need to beat very fast at all when you're resting.
So I had that as well. Naturally, if I lie down, even at times when I hadn't done any aerobic activity in months, which was to much dismay of some of my fit friends, is that my resting heart rate would be in the low 40s. So that's pretty low.
But then, when I started measuring heart rate variability, there were times when I would exercise and my heart rate wouldn't go that high but my HRV would go really low because whatever exercise I was doing required a lot of stimulation. Maybe it was a new exercise to me or maybe it was mentally strenuous but my heart rate didn't necessarily need to spike up to meet those demands.
Then on the other hand, when I was recovering, I've had situations where I wake up in the morning and my heart rate is slightly elevated, like maybe even ten beats per minute, but my HRV is still nice and high and my nervous system is pretty balanced and I'm able to handle a lot of stress that day. So systemically I am ready for stress, but at the moment, for whatever reason -- maybe I'm still digesting something or something like that -- my heart rate was a little bit elevated.
So they do typically correlate, but the heart rate variability piece is much more about the stress on your nervous system than heart rate is. Heart rate is just a reaction to current activity. There's also the mental aspect of both of those.
Christopher: Yeah, it's just a better way of doing it.
Jason: Yeah, yeah. Essentially, it's a different side of the coin, yeah. It's a better -- a little bit more information.
Christopher: And then finally, I wanted to ask you about your business model because I thought that was interesting. So the product is free, but free as in bare rather than truly open-source like I would know as a software developer, but I couldn't even spot any way that you were trying to make money here. So what's the business model?
Jason: Well, we're in a fortunate situation to where we don't have to rush to make money and ruin the experience, so our goal first and foremost is to continually evolve and make a great experience that people will enjoy and get a lot of use out of.
[0:39:52]
So eventually, the plan of course is to make some money, but what we're looking at is having a baseline of really useful tools that are going to be free forever, and a lot of what you see in the app today is going to be part of that. In the future, this dashboard, for example, that let's a practitioner see all their clients' data and interact with the clients and help them make recommendations through that data, that type of thing is going to eventually be a premium service.
The other thing too is as our data grows and expands pretty rapidly and we have more and more moving pieces, the management of some of that is maybe you're going to be part of a premium service. It just depends on what makes the most sense, but from our perspective, we're trying to create a really low barrier to entry for folks that are trying to learn about this and get into it, and then down the road -- because we're not in a rush and we don't want to ruin the experience for anybody -- is where it makes sense have some premium services available.
Christopher: So you're going to entice people in for free and then they're going to be -- like me, I just won't be able to resist the premium. I could never resist that. The "freemium" model, it works really well on me.
Jason: Yeah. No, for sure it's the way things are going and there's definitely that piece of it. One thing we won't do though is take away a bunch of stuff that you already have and then make you pay for it, or all of a sudden you have two years of data and then we're going to take it all away and say, "You can buy it from us," or anything crazy like that. But basically, the thing is when organizations start using it to help their clients, we hope that we can provide a good way for those organizations to add to their offering and at the same time make a little money for ourselves.
Christopher: Yeah. No, I think it's great, and I think you're likely to get better compliance as well once people start paying for it, especially if there's someone else involved.
So I'm not talking about, say, with SweetBeat, where I just paid five bucks for the app. I'm talking about if I'm paying a monthly fee for someone to look at the data and perhaps guide me with some intervention based on that data, I think you would get really good compliance with that. People would do it especially when it's so easy. You just put the strap on when you get out of bed or whatever, or even before you get out of bed. So yeah, I think that's going to work really well for you.
Jason: Yeah, exactly. So this will be probably the first time this is also announced and all kinds of stuff here, but given my CrossFit background, I've been developing a little bit of a system for CrossFit gyms. In a lot of cases, a CrossFit gym will have a daily WOD, for example, but it would be a really great differentiator for that gym and not very difficult for the gym to come up with a green, yellow, and red workout.
Christopher: Oh! Well, how about this? "You would get excluded from the competition if your HRV is such and such away from baseline." That would be cool. You can do it, but you can't compete unless your HRV is right.
Jason: Sure, yeah. So yeah, if you're doing a competition, that's definitely one angle, and then the other is just daily training. Some people -- like myself included, when I first got into CrossFit it opened a lot of new doors for me back then, and I got so excited I ended up going almost every day. In this case, going every day actually is good for the gym because then there are always people in there. They can up-sell t-shirts and protein powder if they want and things like that, but you don't want your clients to burn out or get injured.
Christopher: Because they'd never come back.
Jason: Right, and so this way, this provides an additional service to the client that makes their training more successful over the long run, and the gym avoids the injury potential and makes sure that the person is getting more of what they need and not more of what they don't, and it'd be very simple.
Create a -- your green workout of the day is the one you were going to make anyway, yellow could be as simple as half the volume or half the intensity or something like that, and then red is come in and do these structured mobility exercises. That's just a real high level I've outlined a little bit more in the program, but that would be a great start for a CrossFit gym to start differentiating themselves and it's so simple to implement.
[0:45:00]
Christopher: Yeah, it's fantastic. So tell me, where can people find the app? Where should we go? If I've got an iPhone or Android device, where is the best place to go to get the app?
Jason: Just go to the app store and type "Elite HRV" and it'll be right there, and if you want, you can go to EliteHRV.com. There's links to the app store on there as well, or EliteHRV.com/app if you want to even get faster to the app store.
Christopher: And then if I -- I signed up for the newsletter yesterday, so will I find out about the things that you've been talking about if that starts to happen, these CrossFit gyms that have this kind of features that we've been talking about? You'll find out about that through the newsletter, will you?
Jason: Yeah, definitely. So it was -- like you mentioned earlier is that since we're growing so rapidly, the users that are with us now are going to have the opportunity to access a lot of the future premium stuff for free because we appreciate your participation and your feedback, and so --
Christopher: So stop listening to this and go over to the app store now before he finishes these premium features.
Jason: And that ends in 20 minutes -- no.
Christopher: I've actually seen someone do that the other day. They're giving some -- it was a Lewis Howes webinar and they actually put a clock running on the thing. Are you kidding me?
Jason: Wow.
Christopher: Yeah. It works though, apparently. We're doing it.
Jason: Yeah, it is -- honestly, we are coming out with some of our first premium features soon, I mean, in the next couple of months which I feel like is soon. So it is coming but it's -- yeah. It's not in the next 20 minutes, but it's...
Christopher: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been great to have you on. It's a really interesting subject and -- yeah, I'd love to talk to you again and find out what's going on with some of those features. It's really exciting.
Jason: Yeah, I appreciate your time too, Chris, and I've had a lot of fun. I feel like we're going to be communicating more about this very soon.
Christopher: Brilliant. Thank you. Cheers, Jason.
Jason: All right. Thanks.
[0:47:07] End of Audio
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