Breaking the silence

It has been way too long since I have written a blog. I hope to start back up soon. So why the silence?

Work as been crazy busy and we have been quite busy working on our small house here in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire/Vermont. Any of our spare time is spent running on the trails.

I am still testing various wearables and other toys which help improve sleep and recovery or otherwise help you track your the effects of your lifestyle choices and training.

Garmin has expanded the Firstbeat features they load on their running watches. I picked up the new Garmin Forerunner 945 which includes a PulseOx and the Body Resources (Garmin re-named Body Battery) feature. The PulseOx is not very accurate when compared to a Nonin Finger PulseOx. I assume Garmin will try to use this for sleep apnea screening but will need to calibrate a bit more.

The Body Battery is really a 24x7 simple stress level metric. It does OK at this but has no value for monitoring recovery from an athletic standpoint.

Next up is the Polar Ignite. This is the first mainstream watch which attempts to connect Sleep, Recovery, and Training Load. Polar has added detailed sleep stage and sleep quality analysis which they roll up into a Sleep Score. This sleep assessment is combined with analysis of your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which uses changes in HR, HRV, and Respiratory Rate from your baseline which is based on a rolling 28 day window. The recovery score, known as Nightly Recharge, is then used to provide training guidance (FitSpark) for either Strength, Cardio, or Stretching. Polar has knocked it out of the park with this watch and will be rolling out all of these features, with the exception of FitSpark, to the Vantage V and M watches in October. I expect great things from Polar in the next couple of years.

Finally, I was able to get my hands on the new Ooler cooling pad. The Ooler gets way cooler than the original Chillipad which is helpful when we are sleeping in our Hypoxico tent.

And really finally, I just upgraded our SaunaSpace lights to the new ThermaLight bulbs. These bulbs throw out way more IR light than the original bulbs and generate way more heat. The 4-light panel is hung on the wall in our utility room and the room easily gets up to 110F plus. I am able to achieve the same level of sweating as a traditional Finnish sauna. I have also found that completing a 15 minute session after first waking up in the morning has consistently increased my deep sleep each night.

Until next time, Enjoy!

Comprehensive Article on the use of blue blocking technologies

The below was just posted by Daniel Georgiev, the founder of Iris Technologies, the best blue blocking software on the market.  I say this as Iris not only supports the ability to remove any color you want from your screen, it also removes screen flicker, which causes eye strain, headaches, and is generally bad for overall eye health.

Blue light filter glasses, software or screen protectors


Enjoy!



Chuck

Blue/Green Light and Melatonin

The knowledge surrounding the negative effects caused by certain parts of the light spectrum are increasing with each passing month. Despite this, most people are unaware of how light emitted from lights and electronics impact sleep quality.

The lightwaves from 400-570nm have been shown to down-regulate melatonin. Unfortunately, modern lighting and electronics output strong signals in this part of the light spectrum.

Natural light contains the whole spectrum of light. Getting daily exposure to natural light is actually good and does not require "blue blocking" glasses.

So what do I do?  I wear Essilor EyeZen glasses when working on a computer. The EyeZens block 415-455nm which includes a majority of the blue spectrum given off by lighting and electronics. The EyeZens do not block the rest of the spectrum which your body needs to thrive.

After sunset, I wear glasses with red lenses such as the Ra Optics Noctural Red glasses which block up to 550nm or Red HDE Laser glasses ($10 on Amazon) which block up to 532nm. The Ra Optics are more costly but not as nerdy as the HDE safety glasses. Many people also opt for the Swannies. These only block up to 480nm so may not work for people with a lower sleep drive. Other "blue blocking" glasses are the BluBlox Sleep+ (up to 550nm), Carbon Shade (up to 550nm), and True Dark (up to 600nm).

Until next time, Enjoy!


Chuck

Finding Correlations

I have spent a lot of time over the past several years trying to better understand how my lifestyle choices affect my biology.  One recent correlation I found while playing around with the analysis feature of HeadsUpHealth was a strong correlation between insulin load and my resting heart rate, as measured by my Oura ring.

I have found that I need to keep my insulin load below 75g for optimal sleep and weight maintenance.  

My next area to dig into is morning glucose levels versus HRV.  Others have mentioned that these two measures have a strong correlation. 

Enjoy!

Chuck

The Best Tool For Helping You Better Understand Your Health - Heads Up Health

I was fortunate enough to become connected with David Korsunsky of HeadsUpHealth. HUH, as I refer to it, can be thought of as a Human API.  HUH allows you to connect a bunch of data from different sources to one portal. This is extremely helpful for having a consolidated place to review your progress, as well as seek out correlations.

Some examples of data you can pull into HUH include:

• Medical records
• Blood tests (Quest and Labcorp)
• Wearables (including Oura, Garmin, Fitbit, Apple)
• Scales/Blood Pressure from devices such as those made by Nokia
• Food loggers such as MyFitnessPal
• Glucose and Ketone

The top part of my dashboard is below:

I encourage you to check it out. 

Enjoy,

Chuck