Joel Jamieson on Longevity, Preventing Cardiovascular Disease, and Training the Individual

Joel, man, thanks so much for coming on the show here today. I believe this definitely puts you at the top of the pecking order, top of the mountain, as far as podcast gaskets. Top of the Robertson charts. Yes, you are top in the charts, my friend. I've been on the show more times than I can count, so. It's a lot, it's a lot. So for those of the people that are listening that have never heard of you or unfamiliar with you, could you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself? Well, so I started in strength and conditioning 20 plus years ago. University of Washington, works with a guy named Bill Gillespie there, a great strength coach, fantastically, amazingly powerful human being in general. Followed him to Seahawks for a year, opened up a training facility. That training facility happened to be next to a mixed martial arts studio that happened to be the best in the world, so I was fortunate to start working with very high level combat athletes for many, many years, and going to Pride, and UFC, and Dream, and K1, and all sorts of big events, and working with different teams along the way. So as part of that, I dove really deep into conditioning, and started writing about that in 2009. Put out my website, launched my website around then, 8weeksout.com. Kind of along that same track, I was using heart rate variability very early on in my career. I was introduced to that in the early 2000s. So started diving deep into conditioning, HRV, recovery, which is really relevant for the combat athletes I was working with, and everybody else besides that, and then just started educating coaches, and offered a certification, and working with different companies and people, and just lots of stuff in those spaces. So over the years, I've done a lot of different things for a lot of different groups and people, but the two biggest areas I've talked the most about are HRV, heart rate variability, conditioning, the intersection of those two, and how they all play together to help people reach their goals. I love it, man. I love it. And what's new since the last time we talked? What have you been up to these days? Lots of stuff. Well, like I've talked about, I was on the Peter Pieck podcast a few months ago, which we'll probably talk about. So that was an awesome experience, and drove a ton of awareness. I, on a personal note, had a pretty negative thing happen, and I found out I have some pretty bad cardiovascular disease which we can talk about, which is very unfortunate. Obviously, something I would prefer not to have, but at this point, I'd like to be able to at least learn from that myself, and help other people learn from what I'm dealing with now so they can prevent it, because this is something I've talked about for a long time and I was aware of it, which makes it even more frustrating. But hopefully by helping other people understand, just because you work out and you're fit and you don't have the traditional risk factors doesn't mean you can't get cardiovascular disease. It doesn't mean you're immune to it. So that's something we can definitely dive into. Absolutely, man. Well, like we talked about, we were texting back and forth last night. We got a ton of stuff that we want to cover, and I think it's interesting because one of the things that at least I initially found out about you for was conditioning, right? And I think that's what, for probably the first 15, maybe even 20 years of your career, I heard a lot of people talking about Joel Jameson and conditioning, but it's been cool because over the last couple of years, not to say that conditioning isn't at the forefront because it's always kind of behind the scenes, but you've also started to be known more for longevity. So I would love to know what made you start diving into that or when did that really start to shift for you? Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things happened. The first is I started dealing with, my mom had a stroke in her early 60s. This is 15 years ago plus now, and so kind of she fell in the same bucket I'm into now. She didn't have a bunch of traditional risk factors for it. She didn't smoke. She hadn't really drank in a long time. She was active. She was definitely not overweight. She didn't look like somebody that you would typically think is a high-risk candidate, but certainly she had a stroke, and the biggest thing is there was a family history there. So as I started taking her to doctors and visits of blood work and scans, I mean, you just kind of realize the system is designed to treat disease and not really prevent it in the medical side, and so I wanted to really start to understand more on the conditioning for longevity side and just fitness for health in general, plus at that point I was 30 and starting to get beyond the years where I could just do whatever I wanted and recover from it the next day. So I dove more into it across those years, and then as I've now turned 40, it's the same thing. I'm getting older. All the people around me are getting older, like you and Luca and everybody else. We're all in our 40s now, and the older you get on a personal level, the more you want to understand how to stay alive as long as possible, and fitness can play a key role in that. So I've just started to, again, dive into that, and it is really the intersection of conditioning and heart rate variability and recovery because those things all matter and kind of how they play and interact is a big piece of telling us whether or not we are developing our conditioning or fitness in a way that is going to promote longevity versus subtract from it, which is obviously not what we want. So yeah, I've just had to dive a lot deeper into it, especially now that I'm dealing with what I'm dealing with. It's become even more important for myself, but also, like I said, to really help other people understand the nuances and the individual characteristics at play here because it's easy to, again, kind of fall in this trap of like, well, I work out every day. I don't smoke. I don't do all these things. I'm not overweight. I must be just fine, and you find out maybe that's not the case. Yeah, so I'm really interested because, again, as you alluded to, we're both over 40 now, but we all came up kind of in this same era, right, like powerlifting, Olympic lifting, T-Nation, Elite FTS. There was a lot of just bravado around being strong, being really jacked, and obviously, there's pros and cons to that, right, and as you age, for a lot of reasons, right, maybe you don't have the same desire to carry around a certain amount of muscle mass or you don't care about being X, being able to bench press X amount of pounds, so I'm really interested because you've read a lot of research, and I know you're in this world all the time. What advice would you give to somebody that's over 40 that's looking to extend their lifespan or their health span? You know, how would you advise somebody to train or shift their training to help them live a longer, healthier life? Sure, I mean, that's a big topic, obviously, but I'll give you some high-level stuff what I've learned so far. I'm just digging into all the research and just anecdotally looking at people around me and then just myself. I think the biggest thing is you have to recognize that as you age, it takes longer to recover from everything. That means, you know, you're a bad night of sleep or an extra night out drinking alcohol or a lot of mental stress or workouts, all of those things tend to have a bigger impact on the body than when you're younger, and there's a lot of reasons for that, and part of it is really interesting. I've started digging into some more research lately that's shown us this idea. You kind of have this idea in your head that you age progressively, and there's this kind of steady decline over, you know, 30 or 40 years, and they're finding that's not actually the way that it typically works for a lot of people. There's actually these periods of time where aging is accelerated, and we see much bigger changes, and this most recent paper that just came out showed like in your mid-40s, you tend to see a big decline and a big change in different markers of aging, and then the same thing happens in like early 60s, and so these periods are where things rapidly decline rather than, it's kind of like this slower, steady march, you know, towards death. There's a bigger drop, and I've experienced that myself. You know, just from a training standpoint, an injury standpoint, I had very few to little injuries ever prevent me from continuing to work out. You know, I slept great. Just didn't really have any physical ailments that limited me, and then I hit 40s, I had a back injury, which you know about. I've noticed my sleep is not as consistently good and deep as it always has been for years. I'm waking up more times, and I'm like, just weird stuff like that that you just start to notice accumulating, so anyway, my point, I think, as we age, the first thing we have to do is recognize we can't train as much as we did when we were 20. It sounds obvious, but there's a big part of me that's, you know, done two days, three to four days a week for decades. I'm like, oh, I can still do it, and then I start to look at HRV, and I start to just pay attention to how I feel I can't, and so I've had to scale back volume pretty heavily, and the second thing is just, you know, decades of heavy lifting has resulted, and now I'm starting to feel the price of that, and so I don't lift as heavy. I do a lot more unilateral work. I do a lot more offset work. I do a lot of more asymmetrical work type stuff because I don't want to be lifting as much just heavy pounding on my joints because I, again, I feel the effects of that, and then, you know, I think third, the biggest thing is you really dig in the research. You find, again, there's a lot of stuff out there, but if you look at different papers that look at what people have done in their lives, and you look at longevity, which is what we can mostly do at this point, is we can, there's papers that will track people for 20, 30, 40 years in different groups. They'll use questionnaires to, you know, ascertain what they've done for fitness. They've looked at longevity in terms of, you know, number of people they've tracked that have had cardiovascular disease, and death, and stroke, and all those sorts of things, and you kind of find that there's a very consistent theme that when people start doing, okay, again, this is correlation, not causation. We see that when people are lifting weights four, five, six days a week, we start to see their risk of things go back towards the high risk side, or actually, we put it that way. We see that basically when people lift weights around two, three times a week, we see a risk reduction. We see them lift more than that, we tend to see that risk reduction decrease, and they start to go back towards the neutral, and then we see actually in some paper even show a higher risk in people that are frequently heavy training and doing a lot of heavy lifting, and then there's other papers show kind of the same thing with people that are lifelong athletes. They'll measure risk factors like calcium scores for coronary artery, you know, coronary artery disease, which I have, and you see that lifelong athletes often have higher calcium scores than people that are in a general population for some reason, and so, look, I think that exercise is a net benefit. There's absolutely 100% certainty that it's hugely beneficial and you need to do it, but I think we need to be a little bit more deliberate in how we do it, and so the way that's worked out for me is I think it's pretty safe to say that two to three sessions a week of strength training plays a real strong role in metabolic health and bone density and supporting movement and doing all the things that are really valuable, and then you really wanna build the highest level of VO2 max and cardiovascular fitness that you can while you're able to still recover, and so for me, that's really the recipe now. It's be as cardiovascular fit as I can. You know, my strength and everything else is certainly not going to ever be a limiting factor. I had a bone density scan from DEXA. My bone density was about five standard deviations above the normal. I did 4.5, 4.56 actually. Wow, that's pretty good. Four and a half, four and a half standard. It was actually, so it was four and a half standard deviations above a 30-year-old, and I'm in my mid-40s. Oh my gosh, wow. That's just probably some genetics plus a lifelong history of lifting weights since I was 13, and I'm 45, so that's a lot of lifting weights, so I don't think my bones are going to be brittle as I age, but I don't need to keep lifting at the same level I was lifting at when I was younger, because if I did that, I wouldn't be able to put in the work on the cardiovascular side, so I think, again, that's the big picture, but if you can build a big cardiovascular fitness base and you can maintain enough strength and muscle mass to have good metabolic health and bone density and be able to move as you age, and you can recover along the whole way, that's really the recipe for longevity in that show. All right, so I got two follow-ups. The first one is on the strength training side, and if you recall, I think it was two times ago when we were hanging out, so when we were in Vegas, and just, if you're listening in, whenever Joel and I hang out, there's definitely this sweet spot where we can have some really great conversations. Part of the problem is I'm on Eastern and he's on a very late Pacific time, so there's this great window where I'm still awake and he's just kind of waking up and hitting his stride, so we have these great conversations, and if you recall, we were actually diving into this one paper that talks about how maybe you only need 30 minutes of high-level strength training a week to see the bulk of the benefits. Do you remember that? Could you talk a little bit about that? Because again, I think it speaks to the point that you were alluding to where it's like, hey, you don't have to be in the gym banging weights five, six days a week. Like, as little as 30 minutes a week may be all you need to see a lot of the longevity benefits. Yeah, so this was a paper where they looked at essentially dose-response curve in relation to longevity. So again, we just have to recognize there are a lot of limitations in these papers, and the retrospective studies were like, so they just, they follow people over a long period of time. They follow what they do as reported in questionnaires. They're counting sets and reps and workout drills, and then they measure how many of them die and how many of them have stroke, blah, blah, blah. And so this paper looked at that basic outline, and it found that people that did about 30 to 40 minutes a week tended to have the fewest of these cardiovascular events and have the highest, or lowest all-cause mortality, I should say, and then when they saw people start, the people that did a lot more than that and did hours and hours, they actually saw their risk increase above normal for these sorts of things. So again, we can't prove that it was, you know, five days a week of strength training that increased their risk. That's why we can't necessarily prove for sure that 30 to 40 minutes a week where they seem to be the sweet spot was causing the reduction in risk. But when you see the same pattern across lots of studies, and you see this dose-response relationship, and you see it replicated, I think there's probably something there, and I've, kind of on a personal note, I've talked to a lot of medical people that I trust that are smart in the cardiology side and the vascular side, and I think there's at least some consensus there that a lot of heavy lifting could very well be potentially problematic depending on your genes, because it can put a lot of stress on the vascular system. It's very high blood pressures and very turbulent blood flow. It can lead to inflammation, and I've seen this on a personal level. I've tested my CRP, which is a general marker of inflammation, a bunch of times, and a few times I did it, I did it fairly similarly or fairly closely to a heavy lifting session. My CRP was very high, and I was like, holy shit, and I waited a couple days to go to training, and it was back to normal. So transient increase is not a big deal, but if you're lifting weights every single day and that's pushing inflammation, and you're chronically elevated, then maybe that's a bad thing, and I think there's a lot of genetics here in play as well. Clearly, I've basically realized I have some mutations in my genes that cause my vascular system to be very pro-inflammatory, potentially produce actual cholesterol in the smooth muscles that make up the lines of my vascular system, and there's a bunch of things in there that are basically made it so that at normal, quote-unquote normal healthy levels of LDL, I have cardiovascular disease, which you wouldn't think would be possible, but it's because I am prone to inflammatory responses in the vascular system and other parts of it. So there are a lot of genetics at play here. I know people that lift weights, heavy power lifters their whole life, and their heart's great, they have no signs of cardiovascular disease whatsoever, and then I know a lot of power lifters and heavy lifters that have died in their 40s, 50s, and 60s from heart attacks, and we can all, we all know those people. I mean, I was at Mel Siff's house, who was a prolific writer and wrote Supertraining. I was at his house a couple of years before he had a heart attack, and that was his second heart attack and he died. He had a heart attack earlier in his 50s. I can tell you a lot of people in the strength training community that have had heart attacks early in life, and I can't imagine that's purely a coincidence. Now, could there be lifestyle factors? Of course, there are genetic factors. Of course, there are, but I think it's just kind of safe to say that depending on your genetics, there are probably reasons to keep your strength training in the two or three sessions a week and moderate volumes as you age, because I think there is the potential that if you do significantly more than that and you try to be a power lifter in your 40s, 50s, and 60s, particularly if you have less than ideal genetics, you could be causing some harm there, and I think that's just something to really be aware of. Absolutely. Okay, so follow-up number two. A lot of people are gonna hear this and hear, hey, I should probably do more cardio and try and build a bigger aerobic engine and bump up my BO2 max. Do you have a general guideline that you try and get people up to? For instance, I know Peter Attia talked, I forget where it was, but he talked about trying to get three hours, right? Start with a three-hour, I think he said three hours of zone two per week, but I would love to hear, do you have anything like that that you kind of prescribe to people? I know it's kind of general, but. Sure, yeah, I mean, I think it really, I mean, I'll give you the most generic answer possible, which is you should do as much as it takes for you to improve, and that's really something to keep in mind, right? So if your fitness is fairly low, like do you need 300 minutes? Absolutely not. Probably not, you can improve on a whole lot less, and so I did just look at a very recent paper where they tracked lots of people and kind of did the same thing, but at this time they looked at aerobic activity and they didn't look at zone two specifically, but what you kind of find is like the sweet spot was like somewhere between two and four hours of total aerobic work per week seemed to be where people got the most benefit. Now, as people went above that, they did see increases in benefit, but it was much smaller than the increases up to that point. Like going from nothing to 60 minutes, you see a really big risk reduction. Going from 60 minutes to two hours, you're gonna see a benefit there, but I think somewhere between two and four hours, which is a range, but again, we're all different, somewhere between two and four hours, I would say, of total aerobic activity, and about 80% of that should be in the lower intensity if you want to extrapolate that out, is the right range to get up to. Now, again, you don't have to start there. To go from zero to 300 is not the right plan. You wouldn't go from never lifting weight to lifting weight seven days a week or six days a week either. You don't need that, but I think kind of this, if you can work up to two to four hours, depending on your lifestyle, and I think the limiting factor there is what can you recover from. If you can recover from four hours and you have the time and you have the fitness level that it's gonna take that much to continue to improve, then four hours or maybe even more, but if you practically just don't have the lifestyle to support that and you don't have the ability to recover from that, then it needs to be lower. It's as much as you need and as much as you can recover from. Those are the two big limitations, because again, I think when you're doing more than your body can recover from, then you actually turn something really positive into potentially a negative because you are more inflammatory and you do have repercussions of doing more work than you can. Yeah, no, I love it. And just to clarify, if I said 300, I was wrong. It's three hours. So that would kind of fit right in the middle of your two to four hour, right? Two to four hours from, like I said, when you look at the paper, they detract about 417,000 some odd number of people for 20 plus years. And again, they have to do these self-reported surveys to track what people are doing, but they ask them pretty frequently what they're doing across their lifetime. And then they just look back and they say, oh, the people that, they run a bunch of correlative statistics and look at how many of those people died and look at how much that correlate to different amounts of exercise and blah, blah, blah. And that's how they get these numbers. But again, you tend to see the greatest risk reduction for level of effort was like two to four hours. People who did higher than that definitely got increased risk reduction as a whole, but it was much, much smaller amount. And then the other thing we'll get more into this is when you look at these papers, they show you risk reduction as a range. It's not like everybody had the exact same risk reduction. You need to keep this in mind. Like there are averages, but there are ranges within that. So let's say it was, let's say the average was a 20% risk reduction, right? Some people might have only gotten a 12% risk reduction. Some people might have gotten 25. Like these things exist in ranges, not like concrete numbers. And so that's another thing to really keep in mind here because this shows us the importance of genetics, right? This shows us the importance of recognizing that we are individual people and some people will get a huge risk reduction and some people are aerobic non-responders or some people have worse genetics and see less risk reduction. We're not all the same, obviously. So we just need to keep that in mind with these papers. We look at averages. That doesn't mean that's you. That just means that's the average. Right. Okay, so shifting gears just a little bit because I want to talk about cardiovascular disease. We are talking about this via text. It's not something we've ever really dove into on the show. And I feel like we've already talked about it a little bit, right, obviously working on VO2 max, zone two, maybe limiting weights. What are some other things that either you would recommend or things that you're even doing, right? Because like you said, you kind of had this health scare a little while ago. Like what are you changing to try and keep your heart as healthy as possible? Yeah, I mean, like the biggest thing I hate to say is pharmaceuticals, you know, they work. And there's a really interesting thing where there's a really big fear about statins and like they're almost the boogeyman and a lot of people are really, really afraid of statins because they're afraid they're gonna get muscle pain and different types of myalgia and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, unfortunately, like I've done the things from a lifestyle standpoint that make the biggest difference, right? Like my triglycerides are low. My LDL was naturally low for my lifestyle and we're up around 100, which is what you're supposed to be at. You know, my blood pressure is normal. I don't drink, I don't smoke. I get a good amount of sleep. I manage my stress. Like I do all those lifestyle things that everyone says you've got to do these lifestyle things. Like I can't really crank those levers much more than I have been because I've always been aware of this. And so I had to basically start taking drugs. It was really the only way that I was going to maximize my risk reduction and the level of cardiovascular disease I have. Like, you know, no cardiologist in the world is gonna tell me not to take them and I've done enough research on them at this point to recognize that there's always a cost benefit. And I started taking statins and, you know, I don't have muscle pain and I don't have all these massive side effects everyone's so afraid of. And obviously some people do get them and they're real and I don't want to pretend they're not but I think they're probably a bit overstated. I did a recent one where they were looking at people reporting muscle pain and myalgia and it was a placebo-controlled study and like the people that reported muscle pain on the placebo was just as high as people reported muscle pain on statins. So there's something that, you know, there's also, aside from a placebo where you're thinking it'd benefit when you're not, there's also this thing where you think you're having a symptom of something when you're not or it's the same thing if you expect a negative symptom then sometimes you'll have that negative symptom where people just have muscle pain in general and they're older and taking statins because most people are. So, you know, I think from just overall lifestyle standpoint I've already done a lot of things that I can do but if you have big changes there you can make then those are also obvious levers to pull. But what I want to just say is that again, I've done a lot from a lifestyle standpoint because I knew I had this family history. I talked to cardiologists multiple times when I was taking my mom in for various procedures and he looked at my blood work and he said, look, you look great. Like you're doing all the right things. We're gonna keep you healthy. Come back when you're 40. We do some more tests. And then unfortunately when I turned 40 it was the middle of COVID and I wasn't able to go in and sort of do that. Then my mom passed away. Long story short, it took me a little bit more time to go in and be able to get an advanced screening. Now here's the interesting thing is I went back to the same cardiologist. You know, I said, hey, I'm in my early 40s now. You know, I've done all those things from a lifestyle standpoint but I really want to make sure I'm not missing anything here. And so he had me do another blood test. He was like, look, your numbers look good. You know, we looked at EKG, like everything looks great. Like I really, I'm not worried about you. And I said, well, I want to do more than that. So I want to do what's called a CT angiogram. And a CT angiogram is where they can actually use contrast dye to look at your arteries and see if there's any blockages. Now here's the problem with our medical system. Like I'm in my 40s. I have a ton of family history. My mom had a heart stroke, like I said, and she had stents put in. My dad and grandpa's all died either late 50s or early 60s from cardiovascular disease. And none of them were overweight and had the traditional kind of risk factor that you would look for metabolic syndrome, all these sorts of things. Some of them did drink, which was obviously a factor. My grandpa smoked, both of them. So there were things there. But so I've been aware of this and that's why I've literally checked my blood work for 10 years and made sure my cholesterol, triglycerides, made sure everything where it should be. And so in my head, I'm like, okay, all my blood numbers look good. The cardiologist is telling me that they look good. I'm doing the best I can in the lifestyle factors. I'm doing all these things right. So I'm thinking like I'm in a good place. But I still wanna get screened. And the only way to really get screened was either the calcium score, which is a lower level test, or the CT angiogram, which is the higher level version that we use contrast dye. So long story short, I say, hey, I really wanna get a CT angiogram. What do you think? He's like, well, yeah, it's not a bad idea. It's certainly not gonna hurt. Insurance is gonna pay for it. It's about 1,500 bucks. So unfortunately, most people are not going to pay $1,500. They don't have that. They don't have it. And by all accounts, I'm healthy. I don't have any symptoms whatsoever. All my blood numbers have always looked good. From all accounts, the cardiologist, he didn't say, oh, you should go get one. I had to ask him for it because I had done my homework and figured what he talks about. So I wanted to make sure that I had crossed every T and dot all I's and all that sort of stuff. And so he said, here's a place you can go get it, which I was aware of. And I went and got a $1,500 out-of-pocket CT angiogram. And sure enough, they found I had blockages. And if I had not been that proactive and went that place, paid 1,500 bucks out-of-pocket to go get a CT angiogram, despite not having any symptoms and having any indications that I really needed it, per se, I would have never discovered it. And I would have probably had a heart attack in 10 or 15 years or whatever. My brother, at age 46, which is barely older than me, had to have two stents put in, which they don't usually do unless your blockages are 70 or 80% at least. And at least I'm not that far along. But I do have pretty severe blockages in the LED, which is a window maker, that now I'm doing everything to regress through medications to some extent. But again, this is kind of a really eye-opening thing that you can outwardly be doing all the right things, that even your blood markers and blood tests can show that you're looking really good. And you can still be on the path towards cardiovascular disease if the genetics gods struck you down with whatever different mutations of genes I have. So this is just something to be very aware of, I think, for the people. Again, most people don't have the genetics that I have, fortunately. But you also have to consider that one out of every three people on this planet, at least in the United States and many other countries, will die from a cardiovascular-related disease. One out of three. And they're not, obesity and all these things are really bad and they contribute significantly to this. But there are a lot of really healthy people that have this happen to them. And when I started talking to the radiologist who does CT angiograms all day long, this is all she's done for the last 15, 20 years of her own career. She's like, this happens all the time. We see people come in. She said that the day or week or whatever it was before I was there, a marathon runner came in, had just completed a marathon. They put him on the CT angiogram to get the scan done and then they had to send him to the hospital to get stents immediately. And this is not uncommon. She said it's not uncommon. This is far more genetically driven than people realize. And it's easy to think that the lifestyle is the cause. And really, lifestyle can speed it up or slow it down. But, and I think in my case, it definitely did slow it down. I'm not like my brother, frankly. But she's like, it's pretty clear in her decades of doing this, that genetics play a very, very, very strong role in this. And lifestyle alone is often not enough to prevent it if you really are on the negative side of the genetic lottery like I am. So again, this is where I think a lot of people in the fitness community just need to be aware of this because if I had been aware of this in my 30s, like if a guy had said, my cardiologist said, hey, you should go get a CT and you're gonna be in your 30s, they would have found the earlier indication to this and I could have prevented the progression of it to where it is now. But I'm thankful, at least, that at least I caught it now before it was much worse because the number one symptom of cardiovascular disease is death. Unfortunately, it is the truth. So there's a lot of, a couple of silent deadly killer for a reason, a lot of people just aren't aware of it until they have their first heart attack. Hopefully they survive it and they can treat with different medications to at least minimize risk or at least reduce it, but you definitely want to prevent that from happening. And again, it was really eye-opening because you can look at all the things you're doing and think it's enough, but it isn't always enough and especially in the fitness community, it's important to recognize that. And we've all seen people in the fitness community have heart attacks and die or have heart attacks and live. Like it's common, it's not like this never happens. It happens all the time. Right. Yeah, I think two things that immediately come to mind. Number one, knowing your family history, right? Like knowing your- That's the most important thing. If you have close family members, brothers, parents, grandparents that have had cardiovascular disease or heart attacks, particularly in the younger years, let's say fifties or worse forties, you really, really need to be aware and get tested as early and often as necessary. And just don't dismiss that just because you have a healthy lifestyle and maybe they drank or smoked or whatever, that means you're immune to it because they can tell you right now you're not. Yeah, but family history and then being an advocate for yourself. Because like you said, if you had just taken it surface level, like, oh, blood work's good, I'm good. You had to be an advocate for yourself. You had to dig a little deeper and really go to bat and say, hey, look, I want to have this test. And yes, it does cost you something, but I think ultimately it's probably the right move for you. Yeah, I mean, it saved my life, honestly. And the cardiologist was absolutely surprised, I guess is probably a better word, that I was so proactive. I was coming in, initially talking to him about my thirties, coming back in my forties. He's like, this is not common. We don't see people that are healthy in their thirties and forties coming in to be proactive about cardiovascular disease. And we definitely don't get people spending money out of pocket to go get tests done that I didn't prescribe as a requirement. So it was incredibly rare for someone to do it. And I knew that my family history was there, and I really just thought, based on the blood markers and based on talking to him and based on my lifestyle, that it was enough to mitigate it, and it still wasn't. So again, family history and genetics are a bitch. And look, the same thing the other side, though. I have a grandma who, clearly I don't have her genetics, but she smoked for 70 years and made it to 86. Literally smoked packs a day, drank like a fish, was stressed out, didn't eat right, never exercised, literally. And she made it to her mid-80s. You could say smoking was preventative for her. She lived longer than the average person. Clearly it wasn't. But that's the other side of the genetic coin, is if you get away with a lot of things. I think this is where a lot of arguments and debates about these different things come from, because everyone's like, oh, well, this person did this, and they lived till they were 80. Well, does that mean you can? Right, exactly. Do you have their genetics? Yeah. No, you can't, like, oh, LDL doesn't matter because this person had high LDL and they didn't get a heart attack, or I have high LDL and I haven't had a heart attack, like this kind of shit. Right. That's just not how it works. These things are not guarantees. Like I said, my grandma, people smoke for decades and they don't all get lung cancer. Not every single person that smokes get lung cancer. Not every single person that drinks gets liver disease and cirrhosis and all these sorts of things. Does that mean that smoking and drinking are okay because they didn't get those things as a result that you should do that? No, obviously not. So it's funny, there's this big thing in the fitness community where there's arguments over LDL or keto diet, that you don't need, LDL doesn't matter, and blah, blah, blah. I know this person or that person. Look, it's just not that simple. There are no guarantees. We deal in probabilities and risks, and there are pretty clear patterns. Just because you know somebody whose LDL is really high and they didn't get it or someone who's really, LDL was normal like mine, they did get it, that doesn't mean LDL doesn't matter. It means it's just more complicated than that. There are multiple things at play here and it's not as simple as just one thing. Absolutely. Okay, so something that we talked about in our last show, but I'm not sure people are still getting the message on this, so I wanna circle back and talk about it again. Can you please explain why lifting heavy weights does not equate or equal your zone two work? Because I still get plenty of people that are like, oh yeah, I go in the gym and I average out to 130 or whatever, and what'd you do? I just lifted the whole time. So can you please break that down for the people that consider their strength training their zone two? Well, look, I think we have to first define what are we talking about when it comes to zone two, because if all you're talking about in zone two is just this heart rate range, then yeah, anything can possibly get you, a sauna can get you into zone two, but sitting in a sauna gonna make you an endurance athlete? Probably not, because there are very big differences. So when we're talking about zone two from a cardiovascular health standpoint, we're talking about developing the slow twitch muscle fibers to oxidize fat more effectively. We were talking about the cardiovascular system itself and the heart expanding and dilating as a result of prolonged time under basically higher levels of workload that cause the heart left ventricle to stretch a bit, and we're talking about ways that are pathways, I would say, that are just developing metabolic efficiency is the best way to put it, and that's an aerobically driven process. We're talking about cardio, when we, just to back up here, generally speaking, we talk about cardiovascular anything, we're talking about the aerobic system, because the cardiovascular system is what's driving the flow of oxygen to our tissues, and then the tissues take up and produce energy aerobically. So we talk about cardiovascular fitness, we're talking aerobic development. Those two are linked. We're not really talking about cardiovascular system and power output, right? Your cardiovascular power, your cardiovascular system is not the limiting force there in how much you can lift in the anaerobic side. It's not the limiting factor in your sprint speeds. So cardiovascular fitness means doing things that are developing the cardiovascular system. So zone two in that respect is what I mentioned. It's a level of power output where we are primarily using slow twitch muscle fibers, and we're primarily getting better at oxidizing fat while developing the cardiovascular system in the way that's mentioned where the heart adapts in what we call eccentric hypertrophy that makes it possible to pump more blood and oxygen, which again, improves cardiovascular fitness. What does lifting weights do? Lifting weights makes you stronger, helps you build muscle and bone density, and it builds the anaerobic pathways because the vast majority of energy produced during lifting weights is without oxygen. It's anaerobic, right? Because you're producing in such high levels of force and power, the aerobic system can't produce much of it, and so most of it comes from the anaerobic side. So when we're lifting weights, our heart rate is driven not necessarily by the demand for oxygen, but by the increase in sympathetically driven hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline, all these sorts of hormones that get increased as a result of trying to produce so much force, and they attach to our fast twitch muscle fibers, and they help produce more force. But it's not this direct link between our heart rate and our oxygenation and our demand for oxygen and our cardiovascular system working the same way. They're very different things. So in a nutshell, when you are lifting weights, you are training anaerobically, you are at high blood pressures, you are having to do things that create energy anaerobically, and you're using your fast twitch fibers in addition to your slow twitch fibers, you're burning almost no fat because as you are sympathetically deriving those hormones, you are inhibiting fat at the same time because the fat cannot be broken down fast enough to produce the force you need. So how can we possibly increase what we're talking about? Slow twitch muscle fibers using fat, the cardiovascular system adapting in a way to increase cardiovascular fitness. By lifting weights and doing something that's not stimulating either one of those, you can't. So lifting weights serves a very important purpose, but it is not building cardiovascular fitness. Now, if you are coming off of the couch, then sure, just moving and lifting and being active is gonna increase cardiovascular fitness to some extent because something is better than nothing, and lifting does have increased blood flow when you're sitting on the couch, but no endurance athlete built their endurance by lifting weights, it's just not the same thing. And it's the same thing, I'm not gonna go for a bunch of, do a bunch of cardiovascular low-intensity zone two work and then increase my squat, right? Like, you know, that's just not gonna happen because we're talking about very different things. So again, long story short, use the tools for what they are designed for. Strength training is designed to build strength and hypertrophy and bone density and all those things we've talked about. Cardiovascular work is going to develop the cardiovascular system, and we look at zone two, we're talking about heart rates that are driving the slow twitch muscle fibers to get better oxidizing fat, and that does not happen when you're lifting weights. That's just a very different pathway. So actually, that's not a short story, it's a long story, but that's the story. Yes, well, okay, so staying on the topic of zone two. It's crazy because I feel like forever we were on this like fat loss everything, right? Everything was lactic, glycolytic, whatever you want to think about, right? Like really intense stuff, and then you come on and you start talking about the aerobic system, and then you're talking about zone two, and so we're finally getting to this point where people are respecting that, and now I feel like we're almost seeing this pullback where people are saying, especially, I don't know why, I've seen this a lot in like the women's training community where people are saying, oh, well, you know, women don't need as much zone two. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that a little bit because I feel like just when we're making progress, now people are pulling us back. Yeah, yeah, I know that's unfortunate. Look, I think the funny thing to me is like long, slow distance or whatever you want to call it, zone two, whatever you want to terminology, when you've been around forever, the first time somebody slowed down and was like, oh, jogging slowly is easier than sprinting. I'm just gonna do more of that. People have been doing it. Like it's been around forever. It's not like this is some like new thing because we're renaming it and being a little bit more specific in what we're doing, but yeah, there's this idea like, okay, women have more slow twitch fibers and they're maybe better at oxidizing fat. So maybe they don't need as much of that. So I'll say two things about it. The first one is sure, some women do, but that doesn't mean that all women do. And this comes back to what I talked about earlier. The reality is we're all very different human beings. And the important thing is the difference between you and everybody else on the planet, not just differences between you and the averages of the other gender. Because again, it's a mistake to assume like, oh, I'm a female. Therefore, I personally have higher slow twitch muscle fiber activity already and I have better fat oxidation already. And because of that, now I don't have to do as much of this because women are better at this. Well, not all women are better at this. Like when we talk about, again, when we talk about gender differences, now obviously there are some things that are very concrete, right? Like there are obvious biological differences that are just what they are. But when we're talking about like averages and different types of performance or different physiology of parameters and fitness, we're talking again about the average of women is higher or lower or whatever than the average of men. But that doesn't mean that every single person is higher or lower than every single person of the other gender. Like that's just not how it works. Like there are plenty of women who are terrible at oxidizing fat, who have very different metabolisms than anybody else. Look at how women respond to birth control pills, for example. Like do they all respond the exact same to every birth control pill? No, we all respond differently to different drugs because we have different physiology amongst each individual, not just across each gender. Like you are just not the exact same as everyone else in your gender. That's just not how it works. And there are always very big differences in that. And so again, what's interesting is you look back at that paper I mentioned earlier where they tracked a lot of people and looked at different levels of aerobic training and strength training. They actually show that on average, women benefit more from both strength training and from cardiovascular activity, which was pretty fascinating. It makes some sense they're benefiting more from strength training because yes, we can say that women definitely have lower levels of strength than men because they're much smaller than men on average. But they show that women, generally speaking, got better, even more risk reduction from strength training and they got more risk reduction from cardiovascular activity than men. But there are ranges on both of those. If you looked at that, there was a big overlap. It wasn't like the entire section of benefit from women was always better than every single man. It just was slightly shifted towards a bit more risk reduction than men on average. It wasn't like the worst woman got greater risk reduction than the best man got risk reduction. That's not how it works. So again, I think if you look, particularly too, if you talk to someone that does VO2 max testing, they will tell you that everyone's very different. You couldn't see a VO2 max metabolic test and predict whether that was a man or woman. There's no way that anybody could look at someone's metabolic testing and be like, oh, that's a woman or that's a man. You could not do it, it's impossible because there are too many individual differences. So look, I would say it's important to consider your gender. There's no doubt that there are differences between men and women, but it's also a mistake to just assume that because you are a man or a woman that it automatically guarantees you have some thing that you then therefore need to do less of it or vice versa. You can't treat yourself as a gender. You have to treat yourself as an individual person in all aspects. And that applies across, not just zone two, but I would say all training. Okay, I'm just gonna put you on the spot here and ask this. Why do you think we're seeing this? Is this just people that need talking points on social media? People that just need something different or unique to try and sell a course or a product? It just gets frustrating because I feel like a lot of us, you and I, I feel like we're trying to educate people and put them in the right direction and there's always these people that wanna cherry pick other pieces. And I just don't know why you feel like we see that. I mean, look, I think it's probably two things. I think one, there's no doubt that women have been underrepresented in fitness and training. And we haven't really talked outwardly about, look, there are differences. I'm not saying there aren't differences. There are. I'm just saying you can't automatically assume that you have some completely different thing just because you're a female and therefore X, Y, Z equals automatic different training program. But I think because women have not been discussed as much and because they probably should have been, that there's a push towards involving those different variables. I think that's important. There is certainly value. I don't wanna discount the value of talking about the challenges that females face that men don't. They do deal with menopause. They do have hormonal cycles. They do have these things that men don't have. So I'm not saying we shouldn't discuss the details of females and their physiology and how that plays into training. I'm just saying we can't make these broad assumptions as a result of that. It's good, I think, to have these discussions in some sense, but I think that it's bad in the sense when you use those differences to, again, kind of categorize people into one or two things versus saying, hey, as a female, here's some things to think about and here's some things to think about as a male or whatever. But don't assume that, again, you fall into the exact same category of everything in training just because you're one or the other. So again, I think there's a healthy balance here, but maybe it's just swung too far that direction because it wasn't discussed at all. Now it's being kind of taken to the extreme of like, oh, you're a woman, do this. You're a totally different species. You're not. You have differences and we understand. And then two, yeah, look, if it resonates with an audience, then people are gonna wanna capitalize on it and turn it into products and courses and education that they're generating money from. I mean, that's how fitness is. So this is kind of, I wouldn't call it a fad, maybe not the right word, but this is the latest trend that we're seeing. There's a lot of people talking about the female side of things and there's always gonna be people that are gonna capitalize on that. But there's also, I did a course with Alyssa Lenick out there and she's a PhD. She talks about women's physiology. I think she's got a much more balanced view and would share the same viewpoints that we're just discussing here. And I think more voices in the field that are educated in this is probably a good thing. But again, I just kinda wanna be putting it out there that we can't, you can't just assume like, I'm a man, therefore X, Y, and Z, or I'm a female, X, Y, and Z. It's on both sides. You need to be aware of the differences and you need to be mostly aware of yourself as an individual. That's really what I, the fear I have is that if someone just says, oh, I'm a woman, or I'm a man, therefore I'm gonna do this, that's a mistake for multiple reasons. You need to consider, I'm a individual person and here's the things that I have. And for the most part, testing and assessing should be what's used to categorize and understand these variables. Like use heart rate variability or get a DEXA scan and along with the metabolic VO2 max test done. Like understand your own physiology for yourself, not just assume that because you have, you're a male or female that you automatically have these traits because you may or may not. You need to test and assess and treat yourself as the individual you are. Yeah, I love it, man. Okay, one more question and then we'll dive into our lightning round. So we talked about this earlier, pretty freaking cool. You got to go on Peter Attia's podcast. It is long, as most of them are. I think it topped out at two hours. And side note, I'm gonna link to it in the show notes. If you haven't listened to it, definitely go check it out. I didn't know the whole story. Like I'd heard the HRV story before where you go to like the airport with Val. I'd never heard that whole story. So that alone is worth it and hearing how you got into HRV. So I'll put a link to it in the show notes. If you haven't listened, definitely go check it out. If you are listening and you're unwilling to listen to two hours of the show, Joe, I'm gonna put it back to you. What is like one big takeaway or one thing that you wish they would take away from listening to that show? Yeah, look, I think it comes back to what I just mentioned which is if there's one thing that everyone should understand it's that you are an individual person and that the way to think about that is you are the sum of your genetics interacting with your lifestyle and your environment throughout your entire life. That's kind of what equals you in a lot of ways. So the more different your genetics are from somebody else and the more different your environment's been across your life, the more different you are likely to be in terms of how you respond to training, in terms of how you deal with mental stress, in terms of the types of foods you should be eating or shouldn't be eating, in terms of all of these different variables. So heart rate variability helps us sort that out and understand how our body is reacting to the world around us based on all those things. And that's really what HRV can help do is help us just kind of unlock some of those layers to understand our own bodies, our own physiology and our own journeys throughout fitness because the unfortunate part of fitness is it's a copycat industry in that we sit there and search around social media for what someone else does for a workout. We read where somebody else's diet is and like, oh, this person feels great on this diet so I'm gonna go do that diet. Well, okay, sure, try that diet. I'm not saying don't try things you should but don't just copy someone because it worked for somebody else. You have to find your own path and that's what is gonna lead to the best long-term sustainable results in health and wellness and everything else. And again, HRV is a tool to help us track that journey and get some answers and find out what works for us better than just guessing along the way. Right, I love it, man. Like I said, I'll make sure I put a link in the show notes because it was great. I loved it. And again, the story of you and Val and getting into HRV is worth the price of admission. So, okay, my friend, last but not least, we got our lightning round. This is always fun because we know each other pretty well. So question number one, you get to choose one dessert, Pop-Tarts or frozen custard? Well, I know what you would choose. I know the Pop-Tart, we take the Pop-Tart. Yes. But I would definitely go custard. But what if we put a Pop-Tart in the custard? See, I'm here for it. You can only choose one, but the question is why did I choose one? I would break that rule and try a Pop-Tart in the custard. Oh my gosh. Create something new and then immediately take a statin or something. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Yeah, Joel's wife, Ariel, made the most amazing homemade Pop-Tarts the last time we were out there. So, so good. I'm still dreaming about those. They were amazing. Okay. Probably she won't be here next time you come, so maybe I'll have to have her prepare it for you. It might be a little stale, but still good. Oh my gosh, that's sad. Okay, well, number two, sushi in Seattle or sushi in Japan? I mean, you can't compare the two. Sushi in Japan's, it's good as it gets. I mean, you can definitely get some good sushi in Seattle for mainland, you know, US food. Sushi-wise, they're solid, top of the charts. But sushi in Japan is just a, it's just not a game. Yeah, it is. You can't beat it. Anyone who's been to Japan will confirm that, but sushi in Seattle's good. If you've never had any sushi in Japan, you probably would think it's as good as it gets, but trust me, it gets better. Sushi in Japan. This is why I can't get Joel to come back to Indianapolis. He doesn't want sushi here, so. That's why I go to Seattle. That's half the battle, is going there to get good food. You need to go to Japan with me is what you need to do. I know, that's the next level. Yeah. Okay. We need to talk to Travis and Kaori and get them to bring us over. That'd be fun. Number three, fly a plane or fly a helicopter? I mean, I think you know the answer to this one, too, don't you? I do. This is for the people. This is for the people right now. Okay, helicopter is the answer, unless you are flying into a lake somewhere, which my amphibian is pretty damn fun to fly, but just general rule of thumb, helicopters beat airplanes. Unless you're trying to go somewhere fast, in which case, again, you might choose the, you would choose the airplane, but my purpose is the helicopter. You do a lot of flying into lakes? Yeah, with the plane, a fair amount. I kept the plane down in Vegas. Oh, okay. Last few years, so we'd fly down to Lake Mead and the Colorado River. I've heard that's awesome. Yeah, it's pretty fun. I want to go to Lake Powell and make that trip yet, but yeah, Lake Mead's cool to fly into, and then the Colorado River's pretty sweet. There's some places you can stop in the Colorado River and pull up in a sandbar and go to some restaurants, do stuff like that, so. Oh, that's sick. It's fun, and then actually, I flew the plane back from Vegas to Seattle, and we stopped at Lake Shasta, which was really sweet. Okay. It was a lot of fun out there, so yeah. Flying airplanes in the water is fun. Flying airplanes from airport to airport's kind of boring compared to helicopters, but still awesome. You can't really lose. Can't lose. Flying anything's fun. Yeah. Okay, last one. What's next for Joel Jameson? What are you working on? What are you excited about? Anything. Yeah, biggest thing is I'm, I've been talking about this for a long time, but I'm going to build an HRV recovery certification course for coaching trainers because I think there's just, again, it's been fascinating to watch HRV evolve from this really obscure metric that very few people knew about into this thing that's on millions of watches and millions of devices. And coaches and trainers really need to have a decent grasp on it because there's a good chance that a fair percentage of their people are using it, or at least measuring it, whether it's with Morpheus or a different system. So I had a conditioning certification since 2016 or 18. I can't remember when I launched that. Somewhere around there. Long time ago. And I've just kind of taken my time, but I'm going to be launching an HRV and recovery cert probably November or so of this year. So I'm focused on that and then just doing a bunch of stuff to Morpheus to make it better and continuing to build that thing. So those are the biggest things that I'm working on that are going to be new. I love it, man. Well, Joel, as always, it's amazing catching up. Love everything that you're doing. Where can my listeners find out more about you or what is the best place to follow your work? 8weeksout.com, number eight, and weeksout.com is the home website there. And you can find everything on there, but if you want to go directly to Morpheus, so we've talked a little bit about the HRV system and cardiovascular training system I've got, that's trainwithmorpheus.com. And then you can always find me on the old IG at coachjoeljameson.com. I'm just coach Joel Jameson. I got it, man. I'll get all those links in the show notes so everybody can find you easily. And man, Joel, again, thank you so much, my friend. I appreciate it. Sweet. Great to be on for the, I don't know, 10th time, maybe? Yeah, it's probably 10. Look forward to the next one. Yep.