Boomer Anderson is a is a health and lifestyle specialist as well as an entrepreneur and podcast host. He works with high-performing professionals to overcome stress and health issues.
https://www.decodingsuperhuman.com
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In today's podcast, I want to talk to Boyle Hacking Sensation, Boomer Anderson. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long-chevages? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Row Man Podcast. Roman, Roman, welcome back, it's Wednesday, it's our full form interview, I hope you got to check out yesterday's interview with a happy pair, they're some cracker aren't they? The lads, did they switch it on like that for interviews or they literally sitting down at their dinner table with that level of energy and enthusiasm about life and the day? I tell you, my jaw was actually sore after chatting to the lads from Smoill and Laugh and at them, they're just, they're great value from money and it's not hard to see how they've built such a massive online following but also really what central to what the lads do. It's that little community they have in Greystones that meet every morning and it's brilliant and we talked about that yesterday. If you haven't checked it out, go back and check that out. Today I'm chatting to Boil Hacker, Boomer Anderson. He's a health and lifestyle specialist. He's an entrepreneur, he's a podcast host. He works with the top 1% with high performing professionals to help them overcome stress and health issues. His story is super interesting because he was a Wall Street investment banker on the up and up and up and he got a cardiac incident, a cardiac moment and at a tender age was diagnosed with heart problems and he decided to channel all that ingenuity, creativity and talent that took him to the top top of Wall Street and channel it into decoding what it is to be healthy, decoding super human. And I've absolutely fascinating chat. You know from listening to the podcast, this is an area I'm super interested in. Boomer Anderson breaks this down and talks to us about how to biohack your physiology. So much in keeping with our tagline of cycling for health, happiness and longevity. So Boomer is just on point. Guys, I'll ask you please to head on over the patreon because that's how the whole show goes. It's the gas in the tank, it keeps us moving. There is no show sponsor on this podcast as of yes, I'm open to offers but as of yet there is no show sponsor and the user generosity from your friends, your peers on patreon is what keeps this going and I know it's a tough time for a lot of people with covid and if you can't afford the price 5 euro, price of a beer once and once, there's no hard feelings. If you can, please go to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore waltz and make that small donation. I beg you, I implore you because honestly it really does make a difference. And also what it does every time I see a patreon ringing in. It just lets me know the content is good and we're going in the right direction. So please spread the good word on that. Guys, I'm not going to push this one off any longer. It is the Boyle hacker, Boomer Anderson. Thank you for having me, my friend. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Boomer, I'm super excited about this because I think of all the speakers that I've had on the summit. Your philosophy is very much aligned with what I think makes us unique at Roadman Cycling and a lot of coaching companies are focused on cycling coaching and a lot of sports science principles around it. But we've try to make it more multi-factorial adding in stuff like morning routines, cold therapy, light therapy. And when I look at your stuff, I'm seeing so much of this. So to bring this into a question, I want to start off with decoding superhuman and tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. Very good question. So decoding superhuman is a little bit of a passion product, a project, if you will, gone wild. In the sense that I left my former industry, which was investment banking around about five years ago. And part of the reason why I left was due to a health scare, which we can certainly get into. But I was just kind of thinking of what is the way to hack conversations with really frontier researchers, people, high performers. What's the way to just to be able to speak to them without having to pay enormous amounts of fees and consulting. And so I ended up launching this podcast, which at the time I was just throwing names on a board and trying to figure out what URL worked and what was I going for. And so I'm all about just kind of unpeeling the layers of the onion and everything I do is pretty data driven. So decoding, I came up And what are we actually trying to decode in that for me was superhuman. And so ultimately you threw that into GoDaddy and magically that URL was available. And so decoding superhuman was born and it was really born just more out of my desire to speak to all these frontier performers, researchers, et cetera, who were doing amazing things. And so that's a podcast that's been going on for a couple of years now. And what we do is we look at everything through the lens of time constrained high performance. We're speaking, my audience is predominantly executives and entrepreneurs who seek to really get the most out of life by optimizing their health. And that podcast in itself, which is just kind of one aspect of the portfolio of the things that I do, explores everything from productivity to some of the things that you talked about in terms of recovery and sleep and chronobiology. We look at exbizomics, we look at metabolomics, we look at pretty much all the omics technologies. We look at just esoteric supplements sometimes and esoteric chemical compounds, but all of it within the lens of performance, of course, we look at movement as well and nutrition. And again, it's just how do I get to live my best life with very little free time? So to step back even before the go.itrol and this brand on coming up with decoding superhuman, had you noticed trends in society or your own health or maybe both that were worrying you or that you felt there was a need to address this problem? Yeah. So let's go through that a little bit. So I find the idea of how people treat corporate, so let's go back a little bit further.
So I've been obsessed with performance my entire life, right? When I was in high school, it was academics or athletics. I would do whatever it took to go to the next level. Part of this was because I was the son of a yoga teacher and an operations person. So I had this unique combination growing up where I was a very, very driven type A person, but I also had this nice balance from my mother as a yoga teacher. That eventually took me to Wall Street. And so Wall Street enabled me to really push the bounds of what was possible for me mentally and sometimes physically just staying awake because there was a very clear path to tracking how well I performed. Do you know if you performed well, you get compensated well, kind of A plus B equals C sort of equation. And when I was in investment banking, it was interesting to me that I went through my analyst year And I did put on some weight initially, but I lost it all. But unlike myself, most of my colleagues that I kind of went through those first years with, which is continue putting on weight. And then I would sort of look at the people ahead of me and they would be putting on weight. They'd be unhappy. They'd be going through divorce. They'd be going through all this stuff. And I kind of looked at that broadly across other high performing industries. I know you have a background in law, but also backgrounds in consulting, et cetera. And this sort of like mismatch of not using health to equate to performance was just interesting to me and fascinating. And so I thought that, you know, we talk a lot about corporate wellness programs. I think most of them are garbage, but there is a method to improving those. And I thought that there's more direct method to improving health. And so I started the podcast really because, Well, first, despite the fact that I was very attuned to my health, I was pushing things so extreme in terms of stress, sleep, et cetera, that I did end up with a heart condition at the age of 30. And so when somebody tells you that you have a 95% chance of cardiac event and you're 30 years old, you know, there's this moment where you just kind of say, okay, I could turn left or I can turn right. And if I turn right, I'm going down the same road. If I turn left, I'm going in a different direction. So it decided to turn left. And during that process, I kind of unpacked my own condition in a very methodical and data-driven approach, which I'm happy to get into. But what I ended up doing was along that process, I'm like, okay, how do I speak to that person who is sitting in the bank working 16, 18-hour days? And how do I get them to do one or two things that will make their entire life that much better. How do I get them to perform better so that they don't necessarily have to work 16, 18 hour days? And so when I started the podcast, the idea was how do I speak to this very finite audience, very, very small audience about performing better on a time constraint? And so for me, it was really just looking at the person that I was, the 25 year old that I was in banking all the way until the left one was 30. but how do I speak to that person and tell them like, hey, there's somebody out here that can help you out. And so when I created Decoding Superhuman, it is more of an observation that a lot of these guys out there were speaking to the masses. A lot of these guys out there were speaking in terms of spending three hours in a gym and not minimum effective dose exercise and not minimum effective dose anything. And so really it was just filling that need that I found a person in finance, a person in law, a person in consulting would really, really need or an entrepreneur. Do you wanna unpack for us a little bit? Yeah. Said you were at this turning point, this crossroads in your life where at the age of 30 you are faced with a choice of either kind of lean into this and just embrace that I am gonna be an unhealthy person and pack on a little bit of weight and the lifestyle restrictions that go around that. or take the road to be honest, has a lot more friction on it and try and figure out for yourself. Because I know from being plugged in on occasion to healthcare professionals, like no one is ever gonna give a shit about your health as much as you care. It's like the idea that you can hand off your investment to someone else and they're gonna care as much about your money as you do. It's, so what is that process or that journey you take and how do you get that started even? Because it's intimidating for a lot of people. It's intimidating as hell and to your point, like, if you don't take care of your own health, nobody else is going to. Just as if you don't take care of your own money, you're gonna probably end up in equal trouble at some point, right? And so let's talk about that. Despite, so let's, as I was going through my 20s, just to set the scene for everybody, I had this job where at the rifle age of 25, is basically the head of a financing desk, overseeing 14 different countries. It's an amazing thing to have at 25. I was being flown all over the world business class, right? 40 countries in four years. Getting a lot of pressure. I'll get to the pressure here in a second. Getting this day in amazing hotels, eating Michelin star dining, you know, I've been 25 and being able to navigate a wine list is a pretty incredible thing that I grew up with. dream of, right? But at the same time, let's set the rest of the other side of the picture that nobody really saw, which was I was changing time zones two to three times a week. When I lived in Singapore, which is six years, there was only one time where I was in Singapore for three consecutive weeks. Most of the time I was never there for more than four or five days at a time. I would fly to Europe 12 at least 12 times a year, and I would fly to the United States at least six times a year.
So you can imagine that all of this jet lag was playing like hell on my body. I began to develop panic attacks and you know the pressure was significant. I had a budget every year that I had to meet which is not something that most 25 to 30-year-olds actually have to face. I had an enormous amount of pressure to get the latest mandate. And I wasn't sleeping very much. From the age of 18 to 30 I slept four to six hours a night. But I thought I was healthy because I was this athlete, right? Like I was involved in everything from mixed martial arts until I cracked a rib fighting in the Philippines. I was involved in CrossFit for a very long time to the point where I had a sub four minute Fran time. So I was like in pretty good shape, had the six pack. And the only thing I really cared about was how do I sleep less work more and look good naked. And so come 30, I decided actually to quit my job first because I thought I did everything that was possible in investment banking. And then when I went to go quit my job, I decided like, hey, you have this insurance plan so why not going use it, why not get tested, get a coronary artery calcium test, which is essentially an x-ray of your heart looking for calcium, and find out that I had a calcium in my heart. Three days later, I had an angiogram, which I didn't need, and they found out that I had a blockage of my left interior to send me an artery. That's got me pretty scary. Yeah, it's terrifying, right? And so cardiovascular disease is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States and the European Union. And if you picture your heart, you have four main arteries. The only one that goes from top to bottom is called the left anterior descending artery, which if you plug that into Google right now, you'll come to find that it's also known as the Widowmaker. So I had a very minor blockage, but still, I had cardiovascular disease. And so I'm leaving the bank, I have this condition, what do I do? Well, I decided to forego what I was originally gonna do, which is to create an app, because back then everybody created apps. And I decided to focus on, yeah. And so, you know, I decided to forego that, and I decided to focus on my health. And what I did was I took a very data-driven approach. Initially it was genetics, and that was just because I was relatively familiar probabilities and risk assessments. And so I had my 23andMe done and I began to take a look at the data behind the 23andMe, the stuff that's actually somewhat useful. Although the proponents of genetics don't realize that it's probably less useful than it actually, they say it is. But that was 23andMe. Yeah, boxer. There you go. And so 23andMe, it did show me a lot of stuff, including things like statin-induced chest pain. So when I stopped taking the statin, the chest pain went away and I I thought I was on to something. And so I began to ask the questions, you know, what else could I learn from this data? And eventually I came around to this idea of health optimization, which is a foundation that I'm involved in today. And if it's okay with you, I would love to just explain a little bit about it. Yeah, sorry. So health optimization medicine and practice is something that was founded by my mentor, Dr. Theodore Ochikoso. And essentially what we do is we educate doctors and practitioners on how to optimize for health rather than treat disease. What's interesting about this is that when you think of the term healthcare, it's really a little bit of a misnomer in the sense that as a society, and I'm just speaking mostly about Western societies that although it could apply globally, we're very, very good at treating things like a gunshot wounds or having surgeries or certain infections, et cetera. But when it comes to actually optimizing for health, When I was 25 and 30 years old looking to go to the doctor and speak to these people about optimizing my health, it was just amazing to me that everybody just said, hey, you're fine, come back to me in five years. There was nobody that could say like, okay, you're at 80%, how do we get you to 90? Or there's nobody that's actually asking me about sleep at the time. And so what health optimization medicine and practice actually does is puts a framework around how to really take people to that next level. So that things like nutrient balancing and hormone balancing, rather than looking at certain symptoms, if you balance your nutrients and hormones, a lot of those symptoms, those worries that you have, fall away. And so in health optimization, medicine, and practice, it's I think it's important to reframe how we look at health. And so collectively, when we look at health in society, a lot of people just think of diet and exercise. Well, I think it's important to look at what we're made of in order to determine what our health is. And so when we look at what we're made of, the first thing that we need to realize is that our cells are actually a symbiotic relationship between the mitochondria and other ancient bacteria. It's actually articulated in the endosymbiotic theory of evolution, which is something that's been around since the early 1900s. Now, the cells of our body are not the only symbiotic relationships that exist in our body. We have gut bacteria that I'm sure you've talked about numerous times on your podcast. We have things like viruses that exist, albeit mostly dormantly throughout our body called the viral. We have things like fungi that exist in our body that a lot of people have issues with Candida called the microbiome. And collectively, all these ohms interacts with another ohm called our expo's ohm or external environment. And that comes together in a term that Dr. Lim Margolis coined, which is called the holobiant. And so the holobiant allows us to look at health not in terms of diet and exercise, but we are actually the collective health of our organisms. And so when I was going through this process of unpeeling the layers of the onion for myself, I was looking initially at genetics, but genetics is just really probability. What we can actually do is go down from genetics, go down past transcriptional mix, down past epigenetics, and all the way down to metabolomics, where we actually look at cellular level health, And we can see where your cells are when they have been.
We can see what the impairments are to things like the Krebs cycle, which is actually your cellular level of energy. And so when we look at cellular level of energy and seeing what the impairments are, you can test for that. There are things like heavy metal toxicities. There are things like presence of gasoline in your environment, micronutrient deficiencies, et cetera. And so with that whole framework, I've now been able to evaluate every one of these biohacks in terms of what is actually needed for me, rather than what some clever person who's ultimately got an affiliate code attached to it, is really pitching out there. So it's a novel framework that we're now rolling out to the rest of the world, but it's a fantastic thing, and it's helped me immensely in terms of optimizing both health and performance. And to make that actionable for people that are listening, what are the key tests you would recommend someone that's listening to this so much? Yeah, it's an interesting thing. So that's a very good question. So first off, I would hire a practitioner, just in a sense, and the full disclosure, I am a practitioner, but like there are numerous other practitioners out in the world. But what you're looking at are three simple tests, blood, urine, and stool, that the ones that I use are all made by a company called Genova, which is based in Asheville, North Carolina, but also has an office in the UK. And what they do is they, the blood test will assess things like plasma amino acids, they'll assess the heavy metal toxicities. The urine will look at neurotransmitters and whether or not you have dopamine serotonin balance as well as looking at things like adrenaline or adrenaline. And then we also look at stool. So I think there's kind of a funny situation around stool test out there because if you get the over-the-counter stool test, which there was this this company called Ubiome, which made a fantastic blow up a couple of years ago. But you get like one day's worth of stool, and you would kind of swab it and send it back into the lab. The problem with just simply one day worth of stool is that I don't know about you, but it's very hard to clear your entire intestinal tract in one stool passing. So you may may be missing the full picture. And so what we do is a three-day stool test. And what we're looking for there is the presence of bacterial imbalances, the presence of parasites, but also commensal or pathogenic bacteria. And so that's one aspect. And then the final thing that we actually look at there is food sensitivities. And food sensitivities are very shrouded in controversy. But from a clinical perspective, if you are able to assess somebody's food sensitivities and then have them follow a custom elimination diet, it does work. And I guess my whole point about all of this is that you're an individual and where the world has gone wrong over the past several decades is this idea of diet dogma. And it's like the one size fits all, right? Like you have an Irish background, I partially have an Irish background. Maybe potatoes are, do well for you. Maybe simple carbohydrates do well for you. I'm stereotyping there, obviously. But my fiance is Korean. She can do well with sub-book carbohydrates a little bit better than I can. And part of that has to do with ancestral history. But the point is that we're all individual. And so the way to assess this individual or the best way that I've found as of now is through this health optimization and medicine and practice framework. And isn't this a move that needed to happen? Because even when I look at cycling coaching, for a long time, cycling coaching, I got started in the industry. It was very template driven. You would say, okay, I'm a 30-year-old male and I'm looking to race my bike and I've got 10 errors available this week. And they'd go, boom, there you go. Take the photo copy, take the template. And as it's evolved and we've learned more about sports science, we realized that no two training plans can be identical. That a training plan needs to adapt, it needs to grow, it needs to be a dynamic document. The set menu doesn't work anymore. And we're seeing that the exact same in your business. But to my question on this one, one I know in cycling, coaching, the tactics specifically what we do change from person to person, but there are overarching principles that remain true. Is there a low hanging fruit for people where you can point in the direction and say, these key principles will hold true regardless of? Yeah, I mean, how long do we have my friends? There's several key principles because whether it's cycling or entrepreneurship, there's some foundational principles that people need need to do, right? Because if you want your brain to perform better, regardless of you on your body to perform best, there's foundational principles. And some of these you and I have talked about beforehand in this conversation. But, you know, I always like to point people to the thing that I got wrong when I was back in those banking years. It was the idea of rest. I was one of those people who said I'll sleep when, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead or sleep is the cousin of death, there is actually a song by Naz called New York State of Mind, which he actually said sleep is the cousin of death. And I took that to heart, which is ironic because it nearly, nearly killed me. And so, you know, the rest equals the stimulus. So what do I mean by that? Your ability to recover equals the amount of stimulus that you're able to put on the body when it comes from an exercise point. When I was doing CrossFit 10 times a week and sleeping four to six hours a night, that equation was broken, right? There was obviously something wrong there. But if you're, let's say, able to sleep eight hours a night consecutively, maybe you can get a little bit more stimulus in terms of exercise than others. And so one of my first points would be the rest equals stimulus, aka pay attention to your recovery. When it comes to things like optimizing circadian rhythms, getting sun, first thing in the morning, I know you live in Ireland, I live in Amsterdam, it's a little bit difficult, but you can see behind me right now there's a vitamin D lab there, and also numerous red light gadgets here that can help you optimize those circadian rhythms, particularly in winter.
When you look at, so recovery equals a stimulus, pay attention to your circadian rhythms, focusing on what you can control in terms of your environment. Actually, let's take this question out of the way. There's something that my mentor always said to me that just really, really resonated well. Eat well, sleep well, stress well, ground well, Well, sun well, move well so that you can have sex well. And what, I mean, all of that, foundationally just kind of gives you basis for how to perform at your best. You ask for something that people can universally take away. I would say that. So eat well. What does that mean? Avoiding fried foods, opting out of the vegetable oil, you probably don't need gluten and or derrying your diet. There's basic principles there. Sleep well. Seven hours plus a night. If you're at four right now, now that's pretty difficult, but micro habits help. So go from four to four fifteen, baby steps, right? Sunwell, trying to get 10 to 15 minutes of sunlight on your face, first thing in the morning. Great. You can't do it. That's okay too, but look for other alternatives that will help you anchor that circadian rhythm. So what would an alternative to that be that you'd recommend? I mean, there's, well, the ones that I have right behind me are pretty good ones. So vitamin D lamps, you can get UVB lamps that help your body produce vitamin D naturally. Is there a particular brand that you'd recommend? And so this, so the one that's most famous and the one that's signed off by the FDA is called SPERTY, S-P-E-R-T-I. I just did the old do it yourself lamp, which there's a doctor on, I forget his name, but I'll send it to you afterwards. I think there's Anthony Beck, that's it. Dr. Anthony Beck has a video out there on how to create your own, and you can do it for about one fourth, the cost of a buddy of a spurtie. So yeah, Sunningwell, that's certainly very, very important. I would add to Sunningwell getting out into nature. Well, the Japanese have, actually have a term for being overworked or worked to death. But one of the remedies that they use in clinical practice in Japan is to get people to go out into nature. It's actually prescribed in Scotland as well. Like forest bathing. Forest bathing. There you go. Shenrin Yoku, which is what the Japanese call it as. So going out and spending time in nature actually helps balance cortisol levels, which if you've ever had an experience where you wake up in the middle of the night or have trouble going to sleep, there's chances that your cortisol rhythm is actually off. So spending time in nature is certainly recommended. Grounding well. This kind of goes akin to to to studying well, but grounding well allows us to, you know, there's numerous benefits to putting your feet on the earth. First off, you know, feels good, right? Like you just want to put your feet on the earth. But aside from that, there's a book by Clint Ober, which is called Earthing. And he goes through some of the arguments for why, you know, grounding can be beneficial to inflammation. I'm standing on a grounding map right now. I'm inside all, inside, not all day. I try to take a lot of breaks. But I do spend a significant amount of time in front of the computer. So I do have a grounding map right in front of me. There's a company in the UK called Groundology. I have no affiliation with them. You can get one directly from them. So I've covered grounding well, covered eating well, I've covered sleeping well, covered sunning well. Stressing well. Stressing well. Stressing well is probably one of my favorite ones. So you gotta have a plan for stress. Because stress, if you're to live an ambitious life, stress is going to come. Even if you're live an unambitious life, stress is going to come. There's gonna be land mines that pop up, right? This is part of a natural way of living. And so how do you deal with that? Well, you got to build resilience. This is where things like our favorite polar plunges come in, but also my favorite is meditation. So just ensuring that you get that space for silence. And, you know, I was that person 10 years ago who tried meditating and I couldn't figure it out. And I just got, I was just like, you sit there and you're like, okay, I can't do this. I can't get my mind to stop. But it's actually, it's one of the yogis who was on the summit about this. And it's funny because there's almost a stigma which we need to renew for our meditation, where it's a meditation snobbery, where I'm like, oh, my way of meditation. Oh, you use an app. Oh, you're so shit at meditation. Yeah. My way of meditation is so much better and more enlightened than yours. And I think that's an obstacle to what a truly should be, is just switching the brain off. Yeah, and really it's just about being able to observe those thoughts and be non-judgmental and not letting them grab ahold of you, right? And so if you're able to do that, I don't really care about the format that you use. I don't care if you're using Headspace or Waking Up, which Waking Up is my favorite one, but that's because I'm a nerd. And so when you look at it. I like Sam Harris is a great guy. Yeah, Sam Harris is great. And he has a fantastic podcast as well, and has written a number of fantastic books. But you don't have, like for me, when I'm speaking to a client, it's just like, okay, I just want you fundamentally to meditate. Don't care about how you do it. If you want recommendations, I'm here for you. But really, just start with five minutes. That's all I need you to do. And if five minutes is too much, start with two. Because ultimately, incremental habit changes how you get things done is not gonna happen all overnight. And that's a great idea because I think a lot of people that are listening to this summit, they're already so busy and they're like, right, Anthony Boomer, great. I'd add another 15, 20 minutes to a day. It's already packed. But it doesn't need to become something big. It can be a small little habit. And, you know, there's a quote I love from the Dalai Lama and he tweeted it saying, Today is the busiest day in my year.
I'll have to meditate for twice as long. It becomes such a powerful deal for you. Yeah, and Russell Simmons said it, right? Russell Simmons was basically like, if you don't have five minutes to meditate, you should meditate for three hours. And so it's, in Russell Simmons, found a depth-down records. But look, I sympathize with the people out there that are busy. I'm involved in about six different companies right now, three of which take a lot of time. And so, you know, I can sympathize with the idea of not having time. And so where habit change is very, very instrumental and important is thinking about breaking it down into baby steps, right? Because if I told you to change your life over a night and do a 180 degree turn, are you going to be able to do it? Hell no. It requires just breaking it down into 1% increments, which this is where the work of guys like James Clear and a few others comes into play. And the stress one, let's dive a little bit deeper into that because the stress is so fundamental to everything we do in Saikal and obviously we're creating it's a very necessary stress. I look to break stress and think of it down as what's the stressors that are non-compromisable in our day. We need to go to work. We need to get our training done because we're boycrowders. There's a certain amount of stress that goes around the maintenance of any relationship, whether it's, you know, a partner or a family or so on the far end of that, to balance that equation, you're looking at things like meditation, like sleeping well. Is there any other strategies you'd recommend for reducing stress on the far end? First off, let's set an objective of measuring stress too. Because I think there is some truth to that wrongly attributed quote by Peter Drucker that what gets measured gets managed. Start measuring your stress levels and you can do this with heart rate variability. heart rate variability is essentially the distance between your heartbeats. And there's this misnomer or malinformed idea that our heart beats at a consistent rhythm. That's not necessarily true. In fact, you don't want it to be a consistent rhythm, but we can measure that distance between heartbeats and the greater that distance is and the more variable it is, the better it is for our nervous system. And so in a simple, simple ultra simplification of it, the higher the heart rate variability, the better. So the first objective that I want people to do is to find a way to measure your stress. There's numerous anxiety surveys out there that you can certainly look at as well if you don't have the the funds or the wherewithal to go out and buy something but you can do it with like order ring or something like that. If you're going to go out and buy something and order ring is it has a multi-fold purpose and I like to evaluate wearables in terms of there's a multi-step checklist that we can certainly get into, but when I look at wearable technology, does it have more than one purpose? And so, ORA's predominant reason is predominant use as a wearable is for sleep. And if you have a sleep issue, it's certainly a good wearable, but it also does track HRV. But you can simply get this with like a polar H7, or I think they're up to the H10 now, you know, chest strap. You just take this, you plug in and add a free app like Elite HRV. And the moment you wake up in the morning, you put on your chest strap and you go and sit down for a nice long minute doing some nice breathing and you figure out where your nervous system is that day. Now that will tell you a little bit about what you can do in terms of workouts and how hard you can push yourself. But let's talk about other ways to just sort of let's say now you've defined your measurement, which is always useful in terms of plotting a long-term goal, but also tracking your progress, right? In terms of ways to modify or improve stress, I think the number one that you have to go to first is just breath work because it's very easy for us to modify our nervous system through breath work. One of the ways that we do that is just simply nasal breathing, but there's a company called awesome labs in New York, which produces one of the better breathing trackers that I put out. Quantified Bob is a good friend of mine. And it's just essentially a way to monitor your breath and it has a breath timer for you and you can do everything from four by four or a simple four by four breathing. You can do Patrick McCallens, which is he's a in your neck of the woods actually. And he's for, he's for an inhale, six exhale. And then you have everything from box breathing to four, seven, eight breathing. And you can go nuts on breath work. And it's a beautiful tool to improve your system. Yeah, we actually had one of the guys on the summer. One of the way in Van Haff guys, he spoke at Lent about bread work on the power of bread work. And I think James Nestor in his brilliant book, Brie, is the kind of this year. I think he's brought bread work a little bit more to the mainstream. Yeah. So James Nastor is a great face for breath work and he nailed the timing in terms of releasing that book. I would encourage people, especially if you're athletic driven, to check out Patrick's book at Oxygen Advantage, because he does a lot of stuff with how to naturally increase erythropoietin, which is something that all cyclists love because it's just a little bit of a colored history, so to speak in the cycling world, but you can naturally increase it with breath work. And so erythropoietin, nitric oxide, all of that stuff, it equates to better blood flow. And so you're able to do that through a lot of the stuff that Patrick has touched on in his book. And a lot of our listeners are balancing work with family, we're training. And they're trying to figure out, kind of, you know, I love the Pareto principle, this idea, the AC20 from a leader. Yeah. So, I'm trying to get what is the 20% of stuff that you're like, that's the non-negotiable. If you had to peel back all the lamps, the wearables, the gadgets, the different disciplines and routines, and you could only, you know, pass on 20% to your child or, you know, someone who, who values what would that 20% look like?
So going back to what I said earlier about bio-individuality, I would rather present this in a framework and then I'll give you what my 20% look like. Low-friented text. Yeah, so, because I find frameworks are useful because rather than me telling you go buy this, I would rather just tell you the why and you can buy whatever fits in that bucket. So let's start with element number one of the framework, which is a tool for measurement. And so why am I so big on measurement? Because measurement helps accelerate the feedback loops. What we're gonna be talking about in terms of, what we are, have been talking about in terms of behavior change is micro have it change. That requires some data point to help accelerate. And if you think back to the days when you took calculus, right, and dv over dt equals the slope of the curve, If you want to increase that slip of the curve as fast as possible, measurement is a tool for that. So I want somebody, and it could be a simple spreadsheet, but initially have a tool for measurement. So what are the examples of the tools for measurements that you would use? Yeah, sure. So most of my clients are entrepreneurs, and so they usually come to me with issues with sleep stress or nutrition. And my usual go-to tool, assuming that they're willing to wear a ring is the ordering. Now, the other tools that kind of fit this broad category of generalized wearables, whoop, Garmin, I have a Phoenix 6, I also have an ordering, but I think they've come out with a, it's a Phoenix 6 now, I always get lost in the numbers. But the Phoenix 6 has come out, and then you have the whoop, which they just raised in both load of money and evaluation that I don't necessarily understand. It's a smelly yolk, can we use the woop, yeah? I have, I have. Yeah, so as a boy, right, or you're in the elements a lot, and you're sweating a lot, but then you're using this one tool for tracking and sleeping. And it's this like cloth band I had mine on for six weeks. And you're like, people are kind of looking at you going, just do shower or what's going on. Yeah, so the trick there is to get one for everyday life and then one for working out. But you're right. You're still, it's a brilliant business model in the sense that you have to reorder the bands a lot faster than you have to reorder the actual device. But it's an interesting tool. I have one over here. But so grabbing the wearable, that's just sort of the first step. Then when it comes to non-negotiables, other things, I wanna have a framework for a morning routine. what is going to get you up and going. First thing in the morning and kind of primed for excellence. Now with that morning routine, I want something that's gonna prepare you to be resilient. My favorite there is meditation, but you can also use breath work, you can also use stretching, yoga, all of that stuff. I want to get your blood moving. So some form of light exercise or even heavy exercise, if it's the only time you have during the day, is totally fine. And obviously I want to get you out in the sun or some sort of tool to help sink your circadian rhythm, sun grounding, all of that could be done. The idea here is not to give so, like none of the people I work with have time. And so a lot of these things can be stacked. You can work out outside. This is something that cycling is great for, right? You work out outside. And in most places of the world, you can work out without a shirt on, and it's okay. So just making a little cold, but that's about it. And you know, it's taking me a while to realize what my morning routine, the order matters. Because say if I'm gonna journal, I want to journal after I've changed my state. So for me, I get into the cold shower. I'll do two and a half to three minutes in the cold shower, do some bread work in the shower, and then I'll come out in a different state where I'm seeing solutions rather than problems when I'm journaling and running on my day. Yeah, and so it's very interesting. Again, we're all unique. And so for me, when I wake up, first thing I go for is the glass of water rehydrate, right? But then I'll go right into meditation. I'm not touching the journal right away. Meditation is how I change my state. But also I'm going to, and you just touched on another part of the framework that I think is essential is how do you change states? For me, gratitude practice is the ultimate way to change states and it costs fricking nothing. So you can do it in a computer. I do it right now. I have room research as sort of my note taking up. And I do it first thing I put into room research as gratitude, three things. And it's just done five minutes. And immediately I'm in a state where it's positive and that any stress that comes my way, whether it be physical, whether it be mental, whether it be use stress or positive stress or negative stress, I can handle it that much better. And so, you know, just having a framework by which you put yourself into a state of mind, whereby you're able to take on anything that comes your way, is ultimately the goal, right? I want to be expressed gratitude, you know, on the days when I am not sitting down to write it for whatever reason, I'm actually just in the early part of my morning routine, the first 30 minutes, just trying to express gratitude in a very functional way. So it could be just I'm making my coffee, but I'm not just rushing through it. I'm actually taking time to appreciate where that coffee's come from. The journey is gone through. Farmers that have picked it. I'd be very deliberate in the process. It's almost like I had a podcast guest a while ago. He's famous in the cyclone where Lauren's 10 damn and his philosophy is live slow, ride fast. And when he's off the bike, it's all about everything being meaningful. He's chopping vegetables and cooking with the family. It's not like podcast on in the background, and then one hand that's very deliberate. But I try to bring a little bit of that to my morning routine around, especially the coffee making part.
Yeah, me too. And I think there's this, and you have a background in law, but there is this tendency in investment banking to wear a flag on your sleeve for how many tasks you were able to complete at one given time. And I now realize that that was kind of one of the, one of the faults of the job or things that didn't serve me so well. And so when I look at kind of ways to change state, present moment awareness, yeah, you do that any moment in the day where you just start to feel the wind on you, you start to feel the ground below you. It's gonna help you change your state. Yeah, that's awesome. I absolutely love that. So just to walk us through for anyone that's pulling out the pen and paper here and frantically taking all morning routine, shit, I keep hearing this is a recording team across the whole summit. Because I know I pressed pause on, we briefly touched on my background, I'd set up a bunch of businesses, and then I pressed pause on cycling. I'm sorry, I pressed pause on all those businesses. I was looking to have an amazing mentor. And he said, press pause on everything and find out what the next step is here. Like start and figure out what direction you want to point your ship. When I came back, sorry, before I came back and I was on this journey, I went studying top performers around the world in every niche from, you know, looking up my contacts got the chat to a lot of top athletes, but not just top athletes, top business people, top achievers in academic indie arts. A morning routine was consistently one of the recording teams that was prevalent. Everyone has a slightly different morning routine, but I feel like they have the same principles through it like that change of state, like something that builds momentum. Making the bed was also one that just kind of reoccurring, reoccurring, because no matter how much you fuck up your entire day, you can still come back to put beds. And you made your bed. Yeah, I love that. But so just for the people with the pen who've now scrambled and finally got it out, do you want to take us through? Boom, boom, boom. What your first 20 minutes of your day looks like? The first 20 minutes is rather easy. So let's go through the first hour. First things first, I wake up hydrate. That's a glass of water. I have a murky filter. You can probably see it right behind it. Sorry to cross the memory, I'll even step back one step forward. How do you wake up? Do you wake up with a phone alarm? Do you wake up with, you know, one of these Philips-Saw? Absolutely, no. Shine, no. So I'm an early riser and I've always had a body that's been singed to the sunrise, which in Europe this time of year, you'd think would mean that I sleep late, but I usually wake up around, I wake up naturally between 4.30 and 5.30. Currently. So when I wake up and I'm comfortable waking up anytime between them, so it doesn't really matter to me. I don't need an alarm. When I wake up, the first thing that I do is hydrate, and so I'm going to that burky filter, pour out a glass of water, a quarter teaspoon of sea salt. And so right now that's Celtic sea salt, but I'll rotate them in that water and I'll chug it. Right after that I go into a meditation. Meditation is for me the first, I meditate several times during the day, but the first meditation is always the longest and it's about 25 minutes. So by the way that just shows how much value I put into meditation is that I do it multiple times during the day. Given that you're a very, very busy dude as well. Yeah because it allows me to refocus and allows me to, if I can bring that much more focus to whatever I'm doing, I'm not much more effective. And what I care about is effectiveness, not necessarily time in front of a computer. So after meditation, I'll play a series of songs while I make a coffee, to be fair. And always the same series of songs? It's a fairly similar series of songs. So it's all about, and I'm happy to share them with you if you want. Let's go for it. That was your music choices here. And this is one that I don't necessarily talk about publicly because it's not the type of music that I listen to normally, and the sense that you'll probably won't catch me on like a Friday evening listening to songs, but it's designed to put me in a state of mind of action. And so the songs that I'm listening to while I'm making my AeroPress coffee, my shot, which is from the Hamilton soundtrack, Defying Gravity, which is from the Wicked soundtrack, and I'm not a big Broadway person by the way. And then what's the other one? And then there's a song by Arm and Van Buren that just kind of makes me excited and ready to rock. So it's a series of songs just designed to help me take action. After that, I'll do some light stretches, and then usually it's right into the computer, but I'm starting with gratitude. And so the thing, like I have my gratitude journal on my computer because I have my computer open to room research, which is just an impact for me. Go into gratitude, and then I set my priorities for the day. That takes about another 10 minutes, and then I'm ready to rock. And I set my priorities not in terms of like one, two, three. more here's what I need to get done today. Here's the deliverable that I will get done by the end of the day. And then it's all based on the framework that Gary Keller put together in his book The One Thing. One Thing for the book. Yeah. So I, like I said earlier, I work on about six different companies, three of which are more than full time. And the question is, is what is the one thing, the Archimedes lever that will make all of the rest of the things not matter. And so I do spend a decent amount of time prioritizing. I've had Greg McCowan on my podcast too. He's the author of essentialism. And it's something that kind of hit me in the head in the middle of the year when I was actually working on much more than six different projects and just sort of made me realize like, hey, you can't possibly produce the work you want to in the world if you're working on this many projects.
So I'll get the priority set and then I'm off. And because morning is also my most productive time because I want to, I just want to kick some ass. I've definitely got to try that soundtrack tomorrow. Bill, we're just finished to finish up because I know there's so much talk always about morning routines. But evening routines can be super important as well. Do you have a last? So glad you asked this question because I always ask this question Because more of your routines are so sexy, right? And everybody talks about them on your routine, but nobody talks about the evening routine. And so it's just one of those things that gets so overlooked. And I'm so glad you asked this question. So evening routines, I make every single one of my clients put one in. And the idea is how do I take this brain, make it quiet enough so that I can sleep through the night consecutively, right? which if you're an entrepreneur, that's very hard to do. If you're a busy professional who is cycling, has a family and has a job, that's very, very hard to do. So what do you need to do? The journal comes back out here, but it comes back out in a paper form. So around about seven ish pm, so actually right after this, I'll go off tech. Seven APM, I work with a lot of people in California, so sometimes that doesn't work. but I go off-tack and go into analog mode. I love that because there's something beautiful about that tactile feel of pen on paper. It is, right? And so one of the things that I have to do before I go to bed is something called a brain dump, which I just take anything that's on my mind. And this is just, can be very, very messy and I'm okay with it. And just start writing whatever's on my mind, just so that it gets out of my head. And my brain knows that that journal there the next day. So when I'm redoing my priorities, I can always open up that journal. But as a result, it helps me relax. I may put on something on Netflix just because, I mean, it's a great way to unwind, to be fair. I will meditate again. And then I'll have a cup of tea. Now there's certain teas that I will have that help me relax more. So Kava is at K-A-V-A, not to be confused with the Spanish version of Champagne. It's for a learning Friday night. Yeah, exactly, right? But don't tell anybody. But Kava Kava is a beverage that is served as a happy hour beverage in places like Vanuatu. But it's also an anxiolytic meaning it could help people deal with anxiety. And it's a very powerful one too. So Kava is useful, especially if you're a person who is facing a lot of stress. Valerian root has been shown to help people relax and actually helps with sleep onset in certain cases. Camoile is kind of a classic one and sometimes a lot of fun with it and just see what the local t-shop has. But t is definitely an intricate part of the evening as is reading. And so the reading in the morning is usually something more scientific related, something that I'm trying to learn for business. The reading and the evening is usually something more spiritual and something maybe controversial too. I think that is a common trait as well with a lot of high-performance you say that it reads maybe fiction or spirituality and evening. It's just before bed. Yeah, fiction, spirituality, philosophy, sometimes you can get into really esoteric stuff that just makes you want to fall sleep like trying to rein the vatice before bed is a great recipe for sleep. So I think it's... Do you use blue light blockers? I do. Good point. So the moment that I get off this, so around that seven o'clock I will put on my blue light blockers. All of my screens have ample levels of protection on them as well. So I will have the company that uses called Blue Blocks and Andy's a good friend of mine. He also has taken out the spectrometer and measured the wavelengths that get through so I know stuff works. And so I used Blue Light Blockers going into the evening and actually if this call continues on for another 20 minutes you'll see that my lights all turn red in the house which in Amsterdam could signal for a number of different things but it could signal for another part of my business. There you go. The side hustle. One of the six that I didn't tell you about. So it's the entire environment gets set up for the evening. Sometimes we'll put on some music. It depends on what my fiance is doing as well. But usually it involves just to give the framework for people. It's like how do you disengage? For me, it's a good book, a glass of some sort of tea, the blue light boxers obviously, and then the journal to just get the shit that is in my brain out of it. Do you use CBD oil or water your salts on CBD? Yeah, so I'm positive. So let's talk about endocannabinoid systems in general. So the endocannabinoid system is something that we discovered in, I'm doing this just to give the, again, the framework care. The NOCANAB and my system was only discovered in 1999. Now we've had a 5000 year relationship with cannabis and we actually discovered Delta 9 THC, which is the psychoactive components of cannabis in the early 60s. And CBD was discovered slightly before that. But so the way that CBD occasionally or does act on people as it can serve as an analgesic as in it can help with sleep. Now the dosages that are required are individual but mostly higher than what is available in sort of the drugstore CBD that you can buy in most places right. So my only I like CBD it works well for me. Now it may not work well for everybody we're all individual and and we can actually look at our cannabinoid receptors and see what that individuality looks like. But it's usually you need to get a higher dose or a higher quality than what's available in the local drugstore. And I think for athletes listening, it's important to note that a lot of the CBDs aren't batch tested so I can look at it. Yeah, that's a THC, can't contaminate it. Yeah, I think, so I'm giving a presentation in a conference this week, which is all about how to evaluate these sort of compounds of controversy, especially if you're in the field of athletics or corporate, right?
Because if you're in finance and getting drug tested because you're in New York, you don't want to have a shitty batch of CBD be the thing that it gets you fired, right? It's like there are much, much better reasons to get fired than that. So when you're looking at your CBD, you know, good manufacturing practices are certainly a way to look at it. Getting pharmaceutical grade which is stuff that doesn't exist. In fact, sorry, it does exist, but it's very, very few. And far between, in fact, my main project right now is something called Triscriptions, which we are precision dose cannabis company. And when we say there's CBD in there, it is actually CBD. An interesting area, which I'm sure we'll see more of in the coming years, is a lot of our clients, if you think about your days of investment banking, that's a lot of our clients that we're seen with coaching. So they're coming in, they're typically up at 5am, they're out the door, you know, commute, office all day, bit of dinner as soon as they get home. And now because their identities change, they're also a banker, but now they're a cyclist, they have to get that session in. So someone might be getting up onto the indoor bike until 8 o'clock at night. And then we're talking about what is your recovery protocols, it's glycogen reabsorption with a small bit of protein. The idea of infusing CBD into this, because they're having it so late at night to take the edge you off and bring them back down, I think is a really interesting area and I'm looking forward to more companies kind of exploring that. Yeah, I think there's certainly a number of different compounds of interest, if you will, that could be useful in terms of taking the edge off, right? Like, okay, you can get to the basic things like magnesium and just sort of using the higher-dose magnesium because you are an athlete and ensuring that you have enough magnesium to help your muscles relax, right? You can get into some of the things that we talked about earlier about breath work. It's all about down regulating your nervous system at that point. And so much of what we talked about in terms of that stress component is directly applicable to the people that have to work out at night. And look, I get it. The first thing that I always tell people when they ask me the question of what time should I work out during the day, it's like, what time works best for you. And then if they say they have multiple times, then I can institute my preference, which is usually in the first half of the day. But for the people that don't, the key is just find a protocol that allows you to down regulate your nervous system. And again, establish a measurement here in terms of are you able to down regulate your nervous system? Is it a point where you can get deep sleep? And that will, you can use something like an aura to do that. Yeah, that's awesome advice. Bermer, I can end up chatting to you all night here. If somebody wants to follow up, learn a bit more about you, even work one-on-one, which is that possible, and where can they follow your journey? Yeah. Any given time, I have openings in my consulting practice, because again, I do with a very finite number of people. But everything my entire life is at decoding. Superhuman, if you want to check out the Precision Dust Cannabis Company, I talked about you can go to churchscriptions.com. I don't know when this is going to go live, but we can facilitate it to just count for all of your people. Awesome, awesome. Bumar, you're a legend. Link up all your stuff down below, and thanks for taking the time. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, my friend. Cheers, buddy. Okay, stop what you're doing. It's Anthony again. I wanna talk to you for one second about the next step in the roadman journey. I'm laying down a challenge for you. It's called the eight-week challenge. So for eight weeks, I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself, whatever that is. For eight weeks, I want to take you under my wing, and I want to personally build for you the customized training plan on our analytics platform. This plan, it's gonna be laser focused on your goal, and I'm gonna navigate around your life, your work, your social commitments, so don't worry about what your circumstances are right now. I remember after I took some time out of cycling, I went off and taught a really big business man. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling, But I knew after a bit, to try it on alone, it actually wasn't making me any fitter. I needed an entire system. It needed a 360 overhaul. So for the first time ever, I wanna share with you this exact system I used to get back in shape. I'm talking stuff like, I'm gonna give you my morning routines, the cold therapy I used, the cookbooks and recipes I used, and even the motivational audios might listen to it to get back on track. So right now, what I want you to do is pause this audio, or www.loudmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Or check out the link in the bio, click that. So one more time, it's roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Chatty all soon.
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