Episode Highlights

• The keys to understanding your sleep data
• Breaking down Heart Rate Variability
• Decoding your circadian rhythm (sleep chronotype)
• The variability of individual’s sleep needs
• Your ‘Readiness score’ is the one number to rule them all
• How activity works and it’s impact on your waking (and sleeping) life
• Infrafred vs optical sensors during the day (and why HRM is still necessary)

Useful Links

• Chuck Hazzard
• Oura Ring

About Guest

Chuck Hazzard is an entrepreneur and technology expert, with a current focus on the wearable industry. In the past, Chuck has designed and built computer networks, developed software applications for large corporations, helped build a successful telecommunications business from the ground up, and more recently, helped a large telecommunications company develop and bring to market products and services yielding an additional $500M in annual revenue.

Chuck earned his BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Maine, where he also earned his JD at their School of Law. Chuck is also a graduate of the FDN program and is a licensed Heartmath Provider.

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Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Chuck Hazzard, who is the VP of sales at Oura. He’s also an avid trail runner, and he’s the creator of the Human Optimization Project. So, it’s probably no mystery why I’m having you on the Optimize Yourself podcast. So, Chuck, it is a pleasure to have you here today.

Chuck Hazzard: It’s great to be here, Zack. Thank you.

Zack Arnold: Well, this is going to be exciting for me, because I am a bit of a wearables junkie, I love quantification, I love numbers, I love having the awareness of my behaviors and seeing how I can compare them over time, and knowing that at any moment I can go back into my Fitbit account from March of 2014 and see how much I was walking that day versus yesterday, so to me education and awareness is so super important, and that’s why I have you on the show today. But specifically, the reason that I have you on the show is to talk about something that’s pretty, pretty, pretty awesome, which is the Oura Ring. So, just talk to me a little bit briefly, so people can understand who you are, what your background is, and what this technology is that you and I are going to really dive deep into today.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, so we’re kind of kid-red spirits. I’ve been a sort of, I guess you’d call a biohacker since the mid 80s, and have tested almost every wearable that have been brought to the market, and continue to do that, because I’m very fascinated by what other companies are doing, besides Oura. My background is sort of smattered. I’ve done a little bit of everything, from driving forklifts to being a software developer to a practicing attorney, heart math coach, and helping a bunch of startups, you know, sort of business mentor. And so that’s it in a nutshell.

Zack Arnold: So, what is it be, besides being just kind of a biohacking junkie, and being into all this stuff? What is your actual background when it comes to the tech side of wearables? Because you and I have exchanged a few emails, and you clearly know your terminology, and you know the tech behind this stuff. It’s like, for me, I can say, “Well, this is what Fitbit does, or “This is what Oura does, or whatever, but if somebody asked me, how, I’d be like, I don’t know.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah. Well, so I mean, I guess a combination of having been a software developer, so I understand that side of the equation, and then also having spent a lot of time studying electrical engineering, and then working with in the early start off phase. Some of the, you know, common wearables you know of today, like Garmin on the ground floor, so I was able to appreciate some of the challenges and what they were trying to accomplish, and then on top of that, I also spend quite a bit of my day combing through research on physiology, you know, heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep, all kinds of different things, so you know, and again, as a tester of, you know, a lot of different wearables that I swap out, you know, every week, you know, I have a good understanding of what people are trying to accomplish in general.

Zack Arnold: Well, what I want to do is really dive into some of the terminology, so people understand what the Oura ring specifically does, and am I saying it right? Is it aura or aura, or like, what? What’s

Chuck Hazzard: Here in the US? I mean, I probably be slapped by some of my peers at the company. I call it Oura. I think the pronunciation varies if you’re finished versus the US, so I can’t say for sure, even after you know, working with them since November 2016 it’s still a challenge.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I’m glad you brought that up, actually, because I wanted to make sure that people listening understood that this is actually a product that was developed and is headquartered in Finland, which I think is the reason I bring that up, is because I’ve actually had a couple of other podcasts for other products that didn’t originate in the US, one of them being the Human Charger, which I’m a business as well.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, and I can tell you a little bit about that too. But yeah, it’s interesting. There must be something in the water,

Zack Arnold: Right? That’s that’s what I was thinking, like what is with these Finnish people coming up with all these really amazing wearables, like what’s..

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, so the university where our headquarters are, and I think it’s pounds, Ulu is really, really strong in physiology degrees, and yeah, so the people don’t, a lot of people realize this, but just in, you know, the sort of the central northern part of Finland, you’ve got, you know, Polar was started there, bed, it EM thick QS, which is another bed-based system. The human charger was created by one of the top scientists at Polar for many years. His peer at Polar works for URR now, and so they were sort of did a lot of the, you know, development of the analytics for Polar over the years and did some really incredible stuff, starting way back. I mean, they were the, they were the early people studying heart rate variability, and how that could be used to gage the performance and recovery of athletes,

Zack Arnold: And that’s definitely an area that I want to go into, but before we dive into heart rate variability and all the really intricacies of how the Oura works, or even how other wearables work. Where I want to start is my guess is most of the people listening probably are not terribly familiar with this device. So, if I were coming to you just saying, “Hey, I heard this thing about guess is called an oura ring, like what is it? I don’t understand it. What does it do for me?

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, so I mean, a lot of people, we go to conferences, ask that very question, and they have a hard time believing that we can do what we can with a ring in a ring format, but what I usually tell them, in a nutshell, I mean, most wearables are trying to measure things off the top of your wrist. It’s convenient piece parts to build the things are fairly cheap off the shelf products, but it’s not a good place to measure anything. We chose to measure off the base of your finger because you happen to have two arteries that run at the base of your finger, which deliver all the blood to your fingers, so it’s a very good place to get rich data off the human body, and so what we do is we have two infrared sensors. Infrared is invisible light, it’s high – I always get this wrong – it’s probably higher frequency than red light, but it’s in the invisible spectrum of light, we use that spectrum because you can actually go deep through skin and bone to not that you collecting a lot of stuff off the bones, but anyway, you can get really rich biometrics off that signal, and we sample at 250 times a second off those sensors, nobody in the wearable industry comes even close to that, and we’re not doing that to be show-offs. We do that because that happens to be sort of the bottom of the sampling rate that allows you to get truly clinical grade measurements for heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiratory rate. Then we also have a temperature sensor. While you’re sleeping, your skin and core temperature are the same. It’s only time during a 24 hour cycle, and so that allows us to measure a thermometer. Our accuracy temperatures from the human body while you’re sleeping, and we sample once per minute on that, and then we have motion sensors and accelerometer and gyro that sample that 50 times a second, so we take all of that technology, we use it to accurately determine when you fell asleep, what happened when you were sleeping, and when you woke up. We then, so we give you all the detailed sleep tracking of stages. We also measure your heart rate and heart rate variability throughout the night. We measure temperature throughout the night, we measure how restless you are, aren’t how tranquil. We then give you a recovery score based on are you recovered from the prior day stresses, and then we use the motion sensors to track your activity during the day. Now the other thing we do a little different than most 99.9% of the wearables, and some of them will get there eventually. Is we create a single score for three areas that I just briefly went over, so there’s a score zero to 100 for sleep, there’s one for recovery, we call readiness, and another one for activity, and so if you’re not really into all the gory details of what we’re tracking, if you just look at those numbers, you can get a good sense of did I sleep well, did I recover well, am I getting a good balance of activity during the day, and you can think of it, is you know, so the circadian rhythm is, you know, what you do during the day determines how well you’ll sleep that night, and how well you sleep that night will determine how recovered you are, and what you’re capable of doing the next day, and it’s like a circle, right.

Zack Arnold: Well, I’m glad that you kind of broke this down, because that’s exactly the direction that I wanted to go, talking about the ring is these three different areas and I, it doesn’t seem that there’s any disagreement amongst the entire wearables industry that you guys have blown everybody else out of the water when it comes to sleep tracking. I mean, the sleep I’ve done sleep tracking with multiple other wearables and I’ve really spent the last two or three years trying to learn as much as I can about how to get better sleep, mostly because I do very intense creative work for long hours, and I found that if I wasn’t taking care of my sleep, I couldn’t generate ideas, and it just.. I was dealing with brain fog, and sleep really was the one thing that I had to focus on. So I’m pretty familiar with, like, how the Fitbit does it, and the different sleep stages, but it wasn’t until I put on the Oura Ring and slept with it for a few nights, that I said, “Oh my god, there’s so much more data that’s available to help me understand my sleep patterns. I thought I was sleeping pretty well, and then I put this thing on, I’m like, “Whoa, I’ve got a lot of work to do here. So, let’s just start kind of at the fundamental first stage, and you’d kind of broken down some of the different areas, but is it so? It’s using the accelerometer to track like the different stages of sleep, as far as if I’m moving too much, or like how does that work? Because with other wearables, like if you’re using your iPhone and the sleep cycle app or the Fitbit, it’s mostly based on like it’s the bed moving and is there movement. So how do you guys track how restless or not restless I am?

Chuck Hazzard: Let me start out with there’s there’s sort of two components of, you know, everything that has to do with sleep from the ring standpoint. So the first thing is identifying if somebody is actually in bed, in is committed to falling asleep, and so what we use for that part of it is the motion sensors in temperature, okay, because we can already see, you know, one, if you’re not moving a lot and your temperature is starting to trend in the direction of somebody that’s actually going to sleep, we can figure out very accurately when you fell asleep. I don’t know exactly how Fitbit and other people do that, they might use motion sensors only. They may be looking at heart rate, but heart rate could be a little dangerous, because even if you’re just sitting, your heart rate can get pretty low, depending on the person.

Zack Arnold: Well, and there have been times, too, not to interrupt you, but there were many times where my Fitbit said that I went to sleep at 830 at night, but that’s just when I took an hour to watch some TV before I went to bed, so it would almost say, like, I had a nap from 830 to 930 and then I went to bed at 10. I’m like, it’s not really terribly accurate, but I’ve never had that problem with the oura.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, there, there is a small subset of people who, they’re, they’re still, they could be reading in bed or watching a movie on the couch, and their heart rates are, I mean, their temperature is already starting to change, so there is these are like outliers, but we do have some users that have reported it saying they went to sleep when they really weren’t asleep, and we’re continually working to refine our algorithms to capture the outliers, and it’s a challenge because when you’re designing wearable. So you can think of as a bell curve, you’re trying to, you know, design for sort of the sweet spot of the bell curve, and you’re always going to have outliers on both sides, and it’s not always possible to capture all those outliers.

Zack Arnold: One of the things that I really want to make sure that I’m emphasizing is the having tracked my sleep for years, this really picks up, like you said, almost to the minute when I’m actually in bed, so that’s been a huge differentiator for me, because I think one of the false assumptions that I was working under is the amount of total bedtime versus total sleep time. I was really looking at the total bedtime more than anything and saying, well, my Fitbit thinks that I went to bed at 930 or 10, and for anybody listening, yes, I’m 100 years old, and I go to bed before, but that’s because I also wake up early, and I train really hard, and sleep is the most vital thing on the planet to me. So I protect sleep like four, but I was going under the assumption that, oh, I’m getting over seven hours of sleep every single night, and that’s great, and then all of a sudden I started to see the total sleep time versus bedtime, I was like, whoa, this is way different than I thought, and I had to start making changes to my evening routine, my habits, and that was a big shift for me. So, talk a little bit about what is sleep time versus bedtime.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, well, I mean, sleep time is what it means, is if somebody, you could have the motion sensor being activated right, and but your temperature could be deviating, so it looks like you’re at least in 10, intending to go to sleep, and likewise, in the morning you’re moving around enough that we can tell you’re awake, but you have actually haven’t gotten out of bed, and so the time, total time in bed is when you go to actually physically get in bed to the time when you get out of bed. Sleep time is when we determine you have actually fallen asleep, and part of that we show in the app and on the cloud is sleep latency, which is the time between when you physically went to bed and when you fell asleep. So, so that’s the difference, basically, is total time physically in bed versus time asleep while you’re in bed.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and to me that really was a huge wake-up call for me, where I was counting so much on just this generalized number of, oh, you’ve been in bed for this long, and I would get a little green star every day and feel good about myself, but then you guys really made me realize I suck at sleep, which is good. That’s why I got it,

Chuck Hazzard: Because the other thing you see, I mean, a lot of people think they, because they’re in bed a long time, but they still feel like crap. Then they get something like the oura, and they can track sleep accurately, or they go to a sleep study, and it becomes very apparent that they, they’re one of these people that they just like wake up all the time during the night because they’re stressed or whatever, and they just aren’t sleeping well, they’re getting just like little pockets of sleep throughout the night, but they’re never getting deep sleep.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I was the kind of person that would wake up and I wouldn’t remember being awake at all during the night, so I would fall asleep at around 930 or 10, wake up at maybe 536 630 in the morning, be like, oh, you know what, I don’t remember waking up, therefore I must have had a good night of sleep, but then it takes me two or three hours just to get going, and like, but I got a full night of sleep, and I couldn’t really understand why, but what I loved about this, and I’m going to just basically read this right off of the app, because I really thought that the when I got the Fitbit Blaze, and it actually broke down the sleep stages, like, wow, that’s pretty awesome. But then I got this, and I realized that that is like light years behind what you guys have. So, when I read down the list in the app of all the things I get from a single night of sleep, it’s total bedtime, it’s total sleep time, there’s efficiency, there’s also tranquility, which is the number of times that I wake up or don’t wake up. Then you break it down versus REM sleep and deep sleep to the minute, and there’s also latency, which you talked about already, which is how long it takes me to fall asleep. But then also timing, because you can have, and you can explain this in further detail, but from what I’ve learned about sleep, is that you can pretty much have the same environment and the same behaviors, but if you’re usually going to sleep between 10 and six, and now all of a sudden you go to sleep between one and nine, that’s going to change your circadian rhythm, and that’s what I’m assuming that the timing function is.

Chuck Hazzard: Well, yeah, so the for most people that matter, and we can talk about circadian chronotypes and skating rhythms, but the timing has to do with people, unless you’re a shift worker, the midpoint in your sleep should be between midnight and 2am and that’s what the timing is about. The other thing you mentioned, efficiency is of the time you were sleeping, how much of it were you actually asleep? So that’s sort of another spin on how tranquil your sleep was.

Zack Arnold: Well, another question that I have along those lines, and we don’t have to go, you know, deep into the science or the biology of this, but just for me personally, just knowing that I have an expert on the call with me, I’m having a hard time still getting enough deep sleep. REM sleep, I knock it out of the park, but deep sleep, I’m still not getting quite enough. So, what is the difference between those two for those that might not know? And what could I be doing to get more deep sleep?

Chuck Hazzard: Right, so from a scientific standpoint, and this is a little different than marketing by wearables, and is they really categorize sleep is REM sleep, and then non-REM sleep. The non-REM has been further divided into deep and light sleep. Deep sleep is defined as any non-REM sleep that has at least 20% of short wave sleep, and so you could take that and say, well, maybe all of light sleep potentially has some short wave sleep. So one thing I tell people is, don’t get too caught up in how much deep sleep you have. We’re still learning a lot about, you know, what happens to the human body while we sleep. It’s evident that, you know, we need it, it’s good for us. A lot of cool things happen, but as far as deep sleep, I mean, the key point, I guess, would be a question is, How can I get more? Deep sleep tends to occur mostly in the first half of your sleep, so anything that’s going to rev you up when right before you go to bed will potentially cause you to end up with less deep sleep, so some of the main things are is going back to chronotype. We in the app you’ve probably already seen because you’ve had the ring long enough, we provide guidance on when you should go to bed, and this is based on looking back at your past history, and this is part of our first stab at circadian rhythms, is determining when you got the highest seat scores based on when you went to bed, so we can then give you guidance for you individually on the window when you should go to bed, because if you have a mismatch in your when you go to bed, typically, or even on a given night in your chronotype, you will definitely not have this structure of sleep that you really need. So, in other words, you might not have any deep sleep because you’re going to bed too late for your chronotype. So, by example, say you should be a person like me that’s supposed to go to bed between 830 and 915 pretty early if I stayed up till midnight or 1pm I’m definitely not going to feel good the next day. I’m not going to get any deep sleep, and I’ll probably have a very restless night. Other things, late meals, especially if they’re rich, can rev up your heart rate, which will you won’t get much deep sleep because of that blue light exposure, both housing lights, LEDs, compact fluorescence, computer screens, any electronics, TVs, reading email in bed is a no-no, especially if it’s from your boss, you know, certain movies, if they get you too jazzed up, any of those things can raise your heart rate, which lowers your heart rate variability, and will basically prevent you from getting into the right physiological state that you can achieve deep sleep.

Zack Arnold: Well, the one of the really cool things that I want to bring up, just to emphasize again, that it’s been such a game changer for me with sleep, like you said, is the fact that it’s not just pulling data, saying this is when people should sleep, or this is how long people should sleep. It looks at your data and says this is when you need to go to bed, this is how long you need to sleep, and that’s something that you do not get from any other wearable that I’m aware of, at least that’s actually getting an idea of who you are as a person individually, and then changing the information to your own type, which, like with Fitbit, you know, at best you’re going to get the little graph that’s like you had this much REM and this much deep sleep, or whatever, but it’s not changing over time, it’s just giving you the same data based on their tables,

Chuck Hazzard: Right, and that’s the thing, where our goal is to help people become, you know, the better versions of themselves, and so one of the missing things you know we have that we’re still working on is learning more about the individual user of the ring, so as you, if you played around the app, out the little plus sign on the bottom, you can add notes and tags, and so once people start using notes and tags, we can then take that information about them, look back at their data, and help them find ways that they can improve sleep, improve recovery, and improve how they function during the day.

Zack Arnold: Well, in the fact that you bring up recovery is perfect, because that’s exactly where I wanted to transition to next, and that’s this readiness score, and I think before diving too deep into readiness, what I want to talk about a little bit, and I’ve done an entire podcast about HRV in the past with Rhonda Collier, who I’m assuming you probably..

Chuck Hazzard: Yes, I know her very..

Zack Arnold: I’m sure you do, and she’s great. So she and I talked about the foundations of what HRV really means, or heart rate. Variability, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to someone who wants a super deep dive for an hour all about how this technology works, but just kind of give people a brief two to three minute synopsis of what HRV is and why it’s important, especially if you’re trying to recover either from stress or from strenuous exercise.

Chuck Hazzard: I mean, a lot of people are not familiar with heart rate variability, and they falsely believe that the human heart beats like a metronome, which it doesn’t. In other words, you know, it doesn’t change the timing between each heartbeat is exactly the same to the millisecond every time. That is not true. Your heart, if you’re healthy, the more it varies between beats, the time between beats, the more healthy your heart is, and so that’s that’s what’s being measured here, in the way we measure the same way that Sweetwater Health does. Rhonda’s company is, we use R M S S D, people do not know what that means, but we, you know, again, we sample it 250 times a second. We take all those samples, we run, run them over five minutes, and determine what your heart rate variability is for that five minute period. So, if somebody sleeps for, let’s say, eight hours, that would be 96 distinct HRV samples that we then, you know, we give the average of the max of, and we show a graph of in both the app and on the cloud. Now, one of the biggest uses for heart rate variability is to determine the level of stress of an individual. The higher the HRV number is, that shows that somebody is more what’s called parasympathetic, which is rest and relaxation. If it’s lower, it shows that your stress, which means the bite or flight. To explain this in sort of late people terms, a high stress situation for us, from a biological standpoint, is you’re walking through the jungle in a tiger attacks you, which happened to our ancestors, and so your respiration rate rises, your heart rate rises, your blood flow increases to get your muscles pumped up with energy, so you can run away from the lion, but after you get away from the lion, you should get back into a parasympathetic place where your heart rate slows, respiration rate slows, but the problem in today’s society is we have social media, we work long hours with jobs that are stressful, we have toxins in our environment that cause stress, so people are walking around just chronically stressed now, they’re always in fight or flight mode, which is not good, and so one of the things that the O ring can help you do, as far as the recovery, based on our HRV that we measure every night, is we can show people that you can make some lifestyle changes, and it will be reflected in your heart rate variability, and included that, then your readiness score.

Zack Arnold: Well, and one of the really cool things about HRV that I’ve discovered, having measured it almost every morning for years, is that it’s an amazing predictor of when you’re going to get sick. So I’ve actually known before I’m getting sick, just because of my HRV, like, whoa, my HRV dropped 35 points. That’s weird, because I feel fine, and then 12 hours or 24 hours later I come down with a cold, and I’m like, okay, that’s just creepy, because my body knows before I do. Yeah, so we’ve seen, I’ve seen this personally in a lot of employees and users of the Oura Rim, because we also have the temperature sensor. I’ve seen my temperature rising in the app, you know, get yellow, you know, like two or three days before I come down with, like, the flu. Well, and just to exhibit this, this specific week I traveled on Monday and Tuesday, I did like this quick 24 hour round trip flight from the West Coast to the East Coast, and when I landed, I’m like, “Oh, I don’t feel too bad, and then on Wednesday I felt pretty good, but my heart rate had basically dropped in half. So, if I’m looking at this week’s scores, so from Saturday to Tuesday it was 8483 8480 So I’m pretty consistently in the low to mid 80s with my HRV, which isn’t perfect, but it’s fairly good from my understanding. And then on Wednesday it’s 49 and then I woke up on Thursday, which is yesterday, because we’re recording this on a Friday. So I woke up on Thursday morning, and I thought I had been hit by a truck, and I could barely function all day long. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t get any work done. I think I got like two or 3000 steps. I basically felt like I had the 24 hour flu. And then I woke up this morning with a 73 and like, oh, I feel pretty good again, but the point being, the HRV knew it was coming before I did, so when I saw that, I’m like, oh, something’s coming on, which to me is just really cool that I can do that. So one thing that I want to ask about HRV is, because I’ve been doing it for, I think it’s been at least four years, I’ve always done it the way that Ron. Under recommends where you wake up and it’s the first thing you do in the morning before you’re really active at all, but from my understanding, I was just getting one five minute sample, and the numbers that I was getting were different than the ones I was getting with the oura, so you’re saying you’re doing that sample continuously the entire night,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? In the reason, one of the reasons for doing it at night is you remove any of the confounding variables, so when you take, and I like you, I’ve taken samples. I actually, I think, crashed Sweetwater Health servers because I wore a chest strap for several days just dumping data into their server, but when you take a, even if you do it, you wake up, you know, you roll over, grab the heart strap or some other gizmo, take the measurement. You know, the kids are already awake, you know, so you hear them, you hear pots clanging, dog whining to go out. You’re starting to think about work, or in my case, I can consciously or subconsciously, I want a high score, I’ll drive my HRV higher because I’m thinking about it, and I want it so badly I conscious, subconsciously change my breathing and achieve a higher score than I might have otherwise. So, taking the morning, if you’re trending it in the same, you take the same time of day over time, the trends could be interesting, but if you take it at night, the trends are even more interesting, because I believe it’s a more accurate assessment of where you know your state.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the reason that that’s been so important to me specifically is that I decided this year that I was going to go from being somewhat sedentary, somebody that you know made sure that I went hiking once a week and tried to get my 10,000 steps, but it was pretty much, you know, I work in front of a computer for a living, so I was trying to stay healthy, so to speak, but I wasn’t athletic. And then at the beginning of this year, I said, “You know what? I want to do something stupid. I want to train for American Ninja Warrior.

Chuck Hazzard: There you go.

Zack Arnold: You know, just short of 40 years old, got two kids, got a full-time job, but you know what, I’m going to become an American Ninja Warrior. And it was a dramatic shift in my lifestyle and the volume of activity that I was doing, the intensity levels of the activity that I was doing, and I got to the point over, I don’t know, probably the first four to five months where I was just completely over training and I really wasn’t able to monitor myself very well, and I just, I have a very type A personality, and push through things, and measuring my HRV once in the morning just wasn’t cutting it, because it would, oh, my HRV is in the 60s, all right. Well, if it’s in the 60s, I can probably still push today, but once I started getting my readiness score in the Oura ring, that was a game changer, because there are just so many different levels of readiness. Talk to me a little bit, not just about HRV, but the whole readiness section of the tracking app, because this has really helped me understand how to modify my training volume to my body and my abilities.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, so the way the way we kind of look at the readiness score is the one number of are you recovered or not is sort of akin to a, you know, the charge on your mobile phone, so if your cell phone is not, it only has like 50% battery charge, and you have no time to charge it, for you’re heading out to a meeting, and you’re going to be at meetings all day, you’re not going to feel too good about that, because if you rely on it, it’s going to be dead by lunchtime, and so it’s similar with the human body, so we, it’s a very comprehensive number, so instead of just looking at high rate variability, for instance, so that what makes up the readiness score is we look at how restorative your sleep was, and which is huge, because that’s when you recover, so that goes into the, you know, the calculation. We look at your lowest resting heart rate, not only how low it goes, gut versus prior days and trends, but also the timing during the night. So, if your lowest resting heart rate happens in the second half, your sleep, that’s evidence you’re revved up by one of the main things I mentioned earlier, late meal, late exercise, blue screen, whatever, alcohol. So you want to have your lowest resting heart rate should be in the beginning of the night, because if you are revved up, you’re not going to get as much deep sleep. We also look at heart rate variability, we look at your temperature, is it deviating beyond a certain amount? If it is, you could either be over-trained or sick, or coming down with something, and you know, we look at some other things too, but those are sort of the big things that go into that number.

Zack Arnold: Well, the one of the biggest struggles that I’ve had with my training, that was just wasn’t something I ever thought was going to be a problem in my life was because I trained so much, I’m always hot, always, and I never had problems going to sleep in the past, but I could not fall asleep because I was always ridiculously hot, and I’m now experimenting with, like, the chili pad and the, you know, all these other different options that you have for lowering your body temperature, but even before I started. Using that technology, the Oura ring told me that that was the problem, and I never had that measured with any device before, and it was saying, you know, your body temperature is at point four or point eight degrees above whatever it should be, like, no kidding, it is, that’s why I can’t sleep, but it was cool to me, because I actually had a device that was confirming it, because my wife was just like, why are you up all the time? Like, what’s going on? It’s like, because I’m always hot, I can’t hit goal. But then this device was tracking that and also telling me how ready I was the next day, or not ready, because I was always hot,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? And that’s a good point, though. I mean, people, for getting the highest quality sleep, you should sleep in an environment which is actually 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and if you don’t have air conditioning, a chili pad, and the upcoming product there, the same company is releasing, calling the Ur is definitely a good solution for that.

Zack Arnold: Well, and it certainly doesn’t help that I live in Los Angeles, in Woodland Hills, in summer, where it’s been continuously at least 100 degrees, and it costs you basically an extra mortgage payment just to run your air conditioner 24/7 so I’m never – I never have a room at 68 degrees. Best case is the low to mid 70s, just because I’m cheap,

Chuck Hazzard: Right?

Zack Arnold: Talk to me a little bit more about resting heart rate at night, because this was something that I had never tracked before, and I found really interesting, because I’ve always tracked my heartbeat in the morning, when I woke up, like I did with the HRV, and was using that as just some indicator of just my general health, my general cardiovascular health, and I noticed that as I was doing more training, that number was going down, so I always thought, well, hey, if I can get my resting heart rate in the low to mid 60s, I feel like I’m in fairly good shape for my age, and then all of a sudden I was noticing that my resting heart rate at night was like 40 or 41 so talk to me a little bit about what a number would be for somebody that’s either just, you know, general decent health versus an athlete, like, because I know that this is kind of a point of pride with people like Lance Armstrong or Ben Greenfield, where they talk about their resting heart rate being in their 30s, so talk to me a little bit. How resting heart rate corresponds to cardiovascular health?

Chuck Hazzard: Right, so having an elevated heart rate all the time is not a good sign. I mean, that’s why a lot of the risk-based wearables now, like the Apple Watch, Garmin is doing it. I think Fitbit too, where they have a feature you can set like a trigger heart rate during the day, so if you, you know, if your activity can’t otherwise explain it, they set up an alarm because you could be having a cardiac event, so that’s the example of where the higher heart rate is assembled, you know, definitely a sign that you something bad could possibly be happening, like a cardiac event. The same thing can happen on the low end, if like the new Apple Watch was just announced, the Apple Watch Four, and they’ve also now got an alarm on the low end. So, if you chronically have a low heart rate, that I’m not sure exactly what sort of, if that’s a fib or some some other cardiac issue, but too low heart rate, if it’s otherwise not explained, could be bad in the middle for just normal people having a resting heart between, you know, probably 45 and 60 is probably reasonable, as you just pointed out, you know, some high-end athletes, you know, can be down in the 30s, that’s not common, but you know, they can get that low. I’m fairly active endurance runner, and you know, I think on average, you know, I usually don’t get much lower than 45 or 46

Zack Arnold: Well, speaking of endurance running and activity, that’s where I want to transition to next, because when it comes to sleep and readiness, I knew the basics of most of that information, and I knew that the Oura ring was basically going to take me to the next level, beyond what Fitbit does or what HRV measurement might do with an HRV app, but when it comes to activity in the Oura ring, I’m still a little not necessarily confused, but I’m of the mindset where I wear something on my wrist, it tracks my steps, and I’ve actually, I’m OCD enough that I’ve actually walked for half an hour and counted every single step and looked at my Fitbit and said, How accurate is this? Because I’ve also put my cell phone in my pocket and I’ve done the same thing, and realized that, oh, putting a phone in your pocket, not terribly accurate when it comes to step tracking on the wrist. It was really, really close. The problem with the wrist is that I have a tendency to be very animated when I speak, so whenever I do public speaking, or I’m recording a video, my step count shoots through the roof, and then I sent you an email, just saying, ‘Listen, I’ve compared the step count on the ring compared to the step count on my Fitbit, and they were pretty different. So, talk to me a little bit about how you’re doing step tracking and activity tracking,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? So, first one thing, right off the top, is we do not allow people to calibrate motion sensors, you know. Of so if you’re looking at step counts like just normal walking, that’s where, like with a Fitbit, you’re able to actually able to calibrate it over time. Garmin does the same thing. We aren’t really measuring steps in the traditional way that most wearables do. We are using the same kinds of motion sensors, but what we do to sort of calibrate the motion sensors is we actually used high-speed cameras and these carbon exchange devices people wear, like a mask people wear, and we try and figure out how many metabolic equivalents somebody burns while they’re moving, just general all kinds of movement and walking is one of those, and so we’re more interested in tracking how many metabolic equivalents or calories you’re burning over time during the day, and I believe we’re doing that as better than anybody, but when it comes to steps, I mean there’s a sort of a discrepancy, we show steps because Fitbit sort of dictated everybody needs to show steps. I wish we didn’t have to do that. I think people would do better off by just focusing on are they active or not, and how active are they, and that’s something we show in the app. Does that make sense?

Zack Arnold: It does. So then basically you’re saying that you have the step count just because everybody kind of expects it, but if, if I were to go out and walk 1000 steps and come back, it might not say exactly 1000 steps, but on the flip side, for example, when I’m podcasting right now, I’m standing up, my hands are flailing all over the place, I’m very energetic, I’m going to have 0.0 steps over the hour, you’re saying that it might give me like an extra two or 3000 steps, because it’s the equivalent of what I would burn if I walked two or 3000 steps. Is that about right?

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, that’s that sort of could happen if you wave your arms enough in the, it could be mistaken as walking, so you could get steps from there. We try to rule out certain common type motions, so they’re not counted as steps, but certainly you know in some wearables are better at this than others. There are other things that can increase steps. People, you know, using a push mower to mow their lawn. The vibration of a lawnmower is right there with 50 hertz, so you can rack up a huge number of steps on the Oura ring by mowing your lawn, so it’s, you know, again, it’s imperfect in that respect, but I think what you know people need to realize is that the key to health is moving throughout the day, it’s not necessarily, you know, how, how intense your running, or your bike cycling was, or your gym workout, you know, they have shown there’s benefit to those, but it’s the overall movement during the day that historically made us healthy individuals,

Zack Arnold: And that’s something that I’ve been preaching for a year, so anybody that has listened to this regularly is like, “Yo, yeah, we’ve been hearing this every single week episode. I’ve built an entire online learning program called Move Yourself. It just helps people move throughout the day, regardless of how much they exercise or they train, because you can train for 90 minutes a morning and then sit for 12 hours a day, and you’re going to be just as about unhealthy as somebody that doesn’t do that exercise, so it’s going to make you stronger and maybe improve your cardiovascular system to a certain extent, but just as far as general health and longevity, like you said, you just have to continually move throughout the day and not be stagnant,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? And saying a couple things I like to, you know, kind of elaborate on this is another thing, is you know, Fitbit started the whole 10,000 steps a day, and there really isn’t any science behind that, meaning someone’s gonna be healthy if you hit that number or not. There was one quote unquote study in Japan that looked at that, but that was it. In Fitbit, you know, again became so huge they created a sort of a standard around that. The other standard is 150 active minutes a week, and that’s the US government has put that one forward, and so everybody is building that into their wearables now. What we’ve done, like on a day-to-day basis, that’s different than anybody else, is we give a calorie goal of how active you should be, and that that goal changes day to day based on how recovered you are, which is pretty cool. So, if you have a day when you’re, you’ve got an elevated temperature, you suck crappy, your HRV was in the tank, your heart rate was really high, you know, all these things, you know, you’re going to have probably a calorie goal of 150 calories of active calories, which is not very many, so you might just want to go for a short walk with the dog that day. If you have a super recovery, your goal might be 650 active calories, so that changes day to day based on your recovery.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s. Thing that I found tremendously beneficial, so I’m just in the app again, and I’m going to read through just the stats for this week. Where today my activity goal was 500 and it’s 1030 in the morning here, and I’ve already reached 514 because I went to the gym this morning, but I’m also moving, I’m active. But then if we go back to that conversation we had about that low HRV reading just the day before, my activity goal was 300 Yep, and that’s not something that you get on any of the other wearables, because it asks you what is your goal for the day, but this is telling me what my goal should be based on my actual makeup and my data, which to me is tremendously more beneficial,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? And one thing where we’re going to be working on as a future release is allowing people to specify in their profile under the settings, sort of what type, you know, sort of what their goals are, just in general in life, you know. Are you an elite athlete, you know, super competitive versus the other extreme, you know, you might have some medical issues, so you’re handicapped, so that calorie goal can be adjusted appropriately, so if you’re an elite athlete, like for today, instead of having 600 and let’s say you were one of the top competitors on Ninja Warrior, that goal might have been 2000 or we might say, for you, because you’re such an elite athlete, we’ll give you the option to say don’t even give me a goal, show me what I’m, how I’m doing towards calorie, you know, activity during the day, but don’t actually give me a goal, because I don’t really care.

Zack Arnold: Sure, yeah, and then that definitely makes sense. And as long as we’re still talking about activity, the next thing that I wanted to talk about, which for me is tremendously important, and it’s what I’m really trying to do is get the minimum amount of wearables possible, because for example, like right now, and part of this is because I’m testing, but I’m wearing an Oura ring, I’m wearing a Fitbit Blaze, and when I was working out this morning, I had a heart rate monitor on, so I had four different wearables trying to compare all this different information, which I don’t advocate anybody doing, right, the point being, what I really want is just one wearable that rules them all,

Chuck Hazzard: Right?

Zack Arnold: I just want to have one thing on,

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: And when I, if I’m somebody that doesn’t care about step count or reaching my 10,000 the one thing that was really kind of bugging me, just because I’m OCD about the details, was that with the ring, I wasn’t seeing, I didn’t seem to get an accurate step count, but now that I understand the way that it’s interpreted, I don’t really care about the step count. I care much more about the energy that I’m expending during the day. So, if that means that I’m on an assault bike and it’s, you know, giving me an equivalent number of steps, or, you know, whatever the activity might be, that’s actually more useful to me.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: But you guys have recently added the option to add activities as well, and I want you to help me interpret this a little bit, but on other programs, like for example a Fitbit, when you say you can add an exercise, so you hit the plus button, you say I went and did my CrossFit class, and then you kind of have to estimate the amount of calories. All I’m doing on this one is I’m giving it a time span, and I noticed that all of a sudden, all these like bars are showing me the different levels of intensity. Is that based on the data and the heart rate that it’s already getting, and it’s calculating all that information, because I don’t have to enter anything but the time frame.

Chuck Hazzard: No, actually, that’s not the case. So, if you manually enter an exercise or an activity in the Oura app, what we do is, if you say CrossFit, there’s a standard compendium for, like, how you know how much calories are burned for a given exercise, and they, it’s quite extensive, you know, they have everything in there, and so you tell us the duration, and the was it, did you feel it was low, medium, or high, and in most cases, people’s rate of procedure exertion is quite good, so it’s in its relative to your own perception, which is accurate, where it should be. So, if you’re not truly fit, and you felt, man, this really, this kicked my ass, and the person next to you, super fit, they’re like, this was nothing, this is my recovery workout, it doesn’t matter, because if you said it’s hard for you, it was hard for you, so we basically take the duration, the type activity, and the intensity, and we do a look up in this metabolic table and say this is what you know what it looked like, and we show in the activity graph, you know, is five minute averages for that level of effort,

Zack Arnold: And that was one of the areas that I found interesting, so for example, I just entered cross training for my activity, so from seven to eight in the morning, and I put moderate because it was a more of a mobility and recovery routine than it was like one of the balls to the wall throwing kettlebells at other people in the classroom kind of workouts, but I still had a couple of bars where it said high between seven and 8am so that’s why I was interested about how it’s calculating it, because I just put in moderate, so my assumption was it would just be the moderate line from seven to eight, but it actually has a couple of peaks that are high.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, I haven’t, I haven’t played around with that. I mean, one thing I should point out, because you mentioned it, is because we use infrared sensors in the ring, they’re not turned on during the day unless you’re super still. Because infrared sensors, you can’t take out any what’s called motion artifacts, so if there’s movement, the signal goes to hell. In other words, so we’re just using the motion sensors mostly during the day. So, having a couple of high ones, my understanding is what you put in for the manual activity overwrites anything the ring records, but I may, I may not be understanding that correctly, and I can certainly check into that light. No,

Zack Arnold: But so I guess then my other follow-up question to that is, even though it’s measuring the level of intensity, if I’m saying moderate for 60 minutes, let’s say that 40 minutes of that was really light recovery, and then 20 minutes of it was a bunch of tabatas on the assault bike or doing sprints, or whatever, it’s still going to say it was 60 minutes of moderate, not 40 minutes of light and 40 minutes of hot. Correct,

Chuck Hazzard: That would be my understanding. I mean, to get to get that effect, you would have to specify your workout in two segments,

Zack Arnold: Right,

Chuck Hazzard: Which is some people do. The other thing people can do, and I should mention it here, and I think I mentioned this to you already. Is if somebody still wants to use a risk-based wearable or some other wearable to track their workouts, we now support on the iOS side the ability to import automatically workouts from Apple Health, and so if you have a wearable like Fitbit, doesn’t talk to Apple Health, but there’s there are certain workarounds for wearables like that, but like the lot of the ones like the Garmins can actually export an actual workout to Apple Health, so if you have a Garmin watch, and that’s what I have, I sync it to Garmin Connect, I send it to Strava, because I’m a runner, and that’s where all the runners are. I then sync Strava with Apple Health, and then Apple Health then pulls it into the Aur app. So, even though the rings on my body while I’m running, it’s actually overriding that with the data it pulls from Garmin, which what they send over is the start and end time, the type of activity in my case, running, and then how many calories I burned as they calculated off the garment watch,

Zack Arnold: Right? And that, that was the.. if you know, we’re going to look at one stat above all that is going to be the most interesting or compelling to me when it comes to activity, it’s going to be number of calories burned,

Chuck Hazzard: Right?

Zack Arnold: So the question that I have, let’s say, and this isn’t really hypothetical, this is what I was doing two hours ago. Let’s say I’m wearing my Oura Ring, I’m wearing a Fitbit Blaze, and I’m wearing a polar heart rate monitor, and I’m tracking it. I use the app I Cardio. I know that there are lots of different apps, but I use I Cardio from Fit Digits, so of those three, if I’m doing a heavy, intense CrossFit exercise, or whatever kind of training I’m doing. Which one of those is going to give me the most accurate number of calories burned? I don’t even need intensity levels, but just for that 60 minute period, which do you feel is going to tell me this is as close as you’re going to get to the amount of energy you actually burn during that workout?

Chuck Hazzard: I would guess if you’re moving in different planes, probably the chest strap, and the reason for that, if you’re collecting the heart rate, depending how they do it, it would just purely be the calories burned for that activity, and the reason I bring this up is I’ll give an example, for me, Garmin, well, they compare it, so the way Oura works is, are you familiar with basal metabolic rate?

Zack Arnold: Yes,

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, so we use the standard Schofield formula. So, in the Oura Ring profile, you give us your, your age, your gender, your weight, and we use those to figure out, and we reset it at 4am local time every morning, your base, we figure out what your basal metabolic rate is, and for your listeners, that’s how many calories you would burn if you were like laying down all day long, not doing, not moving any at all. Now we do it right off, and so we put that as your total burn for the day, and then your activity adds to that. Also, if there’s any movement during the day that we don’t classify as actual activity, but it’s sort of background movement that gets added to the total, so if you’re looking at the numbers and they don’t match up like your basic metabolic rate and your activity rate, if the total is higher, that’s because of that background movement. Garmin, on the other hand, and throughout the day, they sort of mix in your basic metabolic rate, so if I go for a run, a piece of my calorie burn is part of my BMR, so that comes into Oura that artificially inflates my calorie burn for the day, a slight amount, because it’s building in more my basic metabolic rate, if that makes sense,

Zack Arnold: It does. Yeah, and I’m glad that you had brought up just kind of explaining what that was briefly, because I think that a lot of people will equate calorie burn with activity, but they don’t realize that they burn what I mean. For I think, for me, my BMR is probably about 1800 so that means if I did nothing, if I. Were motionless for 24 hours, I burnt almost 2000 calories,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? Right.

Zack Arnold: And I think that people are just so hung up on, oh, I have to move all day long, and if I need to burn all these extra calories, calories in versus calories out, it’s like you’re doing a lot of the work just by being alive, breathing and pumping your blood, like that’s actually where most your calorie expenditure comes in. Like, for example, it’s only 11 o’clock in the morning, and it’s telling me that my burn for the day is already 20 550 calories,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? Right.

Zack Arnold: And I’m assuming that that’s based on the fact that I was sleeping for the first seven hours, and then I did a relatively intense CrossFit workout from seven to eight, and since then I’ve either been coaching people where I’m standing and I’m very active and engaged, or I’ve been doing the podcast, so really, since I woke up at six in the morning, I’ve had five hours of relatively intense, moderate activity,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? And that’s the thing, is so a lot, this sort of the most common background calories that we take account for are the amount of extra energy over your BMR, you actually burn sitting, believe it or not, you burn extra working at a computer, and also standing, just standing upright burns more calories than your BMR background BMR. So that’s a lot of the stuff that doesn’t show up as activity once you start walking around in a room that starts getting counted as movement activity, you know, counter,

Zack Arnold: Right? Okay, so then for somebody that’s super OCD like me, that wants to have the best data possible, but with the most minimal amount of trackers and constantly having to stay up to date with this stuff, it seems like for all of my regular activity the ring is covering everything.

Chuck Hazzard: Yep,

Zack Arnold: You’re saying that if I really am super OCD about this, which I am, that I should still be wearing the heart rate strap if I’m doing intense exercise.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, I mean, if you really, if you’re really concerned, right down to the fine detail of how much energy you’re expending. Absolutely, and especially if you know people that are in the sort of the gym environment where they’re using different cardio machines, lifting weights and stuff, there’s no way, no easy way the ring can pick up all those activities even close to accurate, but there is one consistent thing you can do when you’re doing different things, is heart rate,

Zack Arnold: Right? So you’re saying that the heart rate sensors that we have in the Oura ring are not going to be the same heart rate sensors or data that we get from a chest strap.

Chuck Hazzard: Well, chess strap doesn’t use optical, it’s a straight ECG, so it’s electrical measurement. We’re like extremely close to lab quality ECG, I mean, very close. It’s been the rings been validated off our optical infrared, but again, our optical infrared, if you’re doing a gym workout, they are not going to be on at all, because if there’s any movement, they don’t turn on.

Zack Arnold: I got, okay, that was the, the piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t figure out, because it seemed like this thing was laboratory grade. But what you’re saying is that the laboratory grade ECG is coming from the infrared, which really only happens when you’re at rest and asleep,

Chuck Hazzard: Right? But one, but one thing we are coming out with, I’d like to mention too, is we’re coming out with a new feature called On Demand Heart Rate, and so with that feature, we’re still finalizing what it will look like in the app, but I’ve been testing it, you know, you basically hit start and it will do a countdown, and you just, as long as you stay still, it’ll turn on the infrared sensors, and you do maybe a mindfulness protocol, or just some standard relaxation protocol, or just a spot check after you worked out, and it will measure your heart rate and heart rate variability for that session. Then you hit stop, and you’re done.

Zack Arnold: Oh, I like that. So that is pretty much the equivalent of putting on the chest strap for a short period of time.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, if you do, and that’s one thing that you know I would like to use it for. I mean, some of the watches do this. I know the new Apple Watch Four, which I just ordered, so I can test it. That when you, a lot of people after they run a lot of the watches, if you’re still for like three minutes afterwards, they’ll look at your recovery heart rate, which is actually a good indicator of how fit you are, but you could also do it with the Our Ring. You go out for a run or do a workout in the gym, whatever the workout is. After you’re done, you sit down, hit start on our on-demand heart rate, sit there for five minutes, and then stop, and you’ve got your what happened to your heart rate after you finished exercising in your HRV, which is pretty cool.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I like that. That’s great. That’s really, really helpful. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. I could go down this rabbit hole for God hours.

Chuck Hazzard: I could talk for hours, too. Believe me,

Zack Arnold: I get that sense. I get the sense that you and I are kindred spirits, for sure. But just to kind of do a super brief recap, just to make sure I understand, and make sure that my audience kind of grasps this, because I think that for some people listening, they’re going to be athletes like I am that are training and see the training efficacy, but I think for most people it’s just going to be, oh, wow, this thing is going to give me much more accurate sleep data, and it’s going to help me understand why I. Feel like crap in the morning versus when I don’t feel like crap in the morning. How can I apply this to the creative work that I’m doing, as far as step count is concerned? If I’m super, super OCD about the number of steps and it actually being the number of times that my foot hits the pavement, this probably isn’t the best solution. However, if I’m really interested in the total calorie expenditure or the energy in general, that’s the equivalent of steps. This to me seems like a better, more accurate solution than a Fitbit, so to speak. And when it comes, when it comes to activity tracking, if it’s just generalized activity throughout the day, it’s again going to be the most accurate, but if I’m a super crazy intense athlete, I still need to stick with the heart rate strap. Is that a fairly good summary?

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, I think. I think that’s what most people, I mean, I, you know, my circles I fly in tend to be mostly runners, all my friends and stuff. And it doesn’t matter if we had spot on, actually, for how many miles, and and we could actually turn on the heart rate monitoring while you’re running, they would still wear a garment, or a son to, or a polar, or a Fitbit, or whatever, I mean, you know, because they want the elevation gain, and their splits, and all that stuff. So, yeah, if you’re a serious athlete, and you need to have the finer details, definitely the ring is, then you know, it’s an augment, you know, it augments the Oura ring, basically. And, as I said, you can pull that work out right currently via Apple Health into the OR app if you want to see the data there now,

Zack Arnold: Right, but the biggest component for me, where this has been an absolute game changer, is the recovery and the readiness, because that has changed my entire routine, and what I found is that by training less, I’m actually moving forwards infinitely faster, so I was just of the mindset that, oh, I got to push harder, and you know, I’m just, I’m not getting strong fast enough, and I need to do another workout because of that. And then the ring taught me very, very quickly that that’s not the case, so I’ve cut my volume by, I don’t know, 20 or 30% but my gains have skyrocketed because I’m recovering more,

Chuck Hazzard: Right, and for me the thing I look at, if there was only one thing I could look at, I would look at the readiness score, all the other stuff, you know, like this, all the sleep details, I use those to sort of test lifestyle changes, because if I can, you know, alter lifestyle choices and get higher quality sleep, my readiness score goes up, but at the end of the day, I just want to have a good recovery.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. And that to me is the holy grail of all of this, is there’s all kinds of data and information and measurements, but like you said, if you just buy this thing and wear it for one number, just the readiness number alone, that can completely change your life and your behaviors and really give you a different viewpoint of what are the choices I’m making that are leading to the way that I feel every single day. Well, I want to be very respectful of your time, and I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and just letting me geek out and be OCD about biohacking and tracking and quantification and all this cool stuff that I probably lost everybody at about minute seven, but for those that I did, I didn’t lose with all this stuff. I hope that they are really inspired to go to the next level to track this stuff. And before I let you go, I just want to make sure that people know where to find more information about the work you’re doing, because you do stuff outside of Oura as well. And then where they can find one of these rings.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, so I’ll start with the if you want to know anything about the Oura Ring, go to Our ring.com that’s O U R A ring.com For me, the best place to go to is just Chuck Hazzard, so that’s Chuck, as in Charlie Hazard, is like the Dukes of Two zs.com

Zack Arnold: Awesome. Well, I’m going to make sure to put links in the show notes to both of those, so anybody that finds the page, even if they don’t listen to the show itself, they’re going to have those links. But I’m tremendously grateful for the time you’ve given today and your expertise, and I very, very much appreciate it. So, thank you so much.

Chuck Hazzard: Yeah, and if anybody has any questions, they send you, just send them my way, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Zack Arnold: I will definitely do that. Thank you so much.

Chuck Hazzard: All right, take care.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Elyse Rintelman. The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).