HRV up 20% in 2 months with breathwork
bought a whoop in feb because I was stressed, but didn't know how stressed, and wanted to put a number on it. 29 HRV is pretty low generally, but really low specifically for me. I'm not a pro athlete but I did win the boston triathlon in my age group.
it took two months to really show in the data, but 5 minutes a day of breathwork (inhale 4s, exhale 6s) really does work. rick rubin does it again.
my other observation is stress is the real killer. takes a while to come back from it, nice to know it's possible. but friends, don't let it get this low if you too are cooked.
Rick Rubin has low heart rate variability.
So he looked up everything that raises it, picked one technique, and started doing it every day.
It worked.
The technique: coherence breathing. 10 to 20 minutes a day, at least once, sometimes twice.
Now he and @hubermanlab do it together on camera so you can follow along:
New " health stack" = genome + labs + wearables + food diary + mental health/therapy
all this will be thrown a chatbot you can talk to AND get things from (more labs, meal plans, workout recs, and Rx).
monitor > intelligence (we are here) > intervene.
I suspect every company who does one piece of the new health stack will go vertical and try to do the full thing.
i don't know if "fitness up" (meaning, can a wearable company make a good AI-shrink) or "mental health down" (therapy app doing your lab work) will do it better.
But I am pretty sure that the big prize problem in all this remains *continuity of care*. That is to say, it's still the same human being seeking to understand their body (these apps) and mind (other apps) and jumping back and forth. That gap is an clinical in-take problem, which means it's a context problem for software.
I think there's a huge opportunity for health agents to grab all the things, and tee-up your specialist, or your other app, with all the context to give you the best care/outcomes/advice etc. In real life this is still done on paper forms and clipboards in a waiting room. Doing that with agents as infrastructure would make any of these biomarker apps (HIMS, Superpower) connected to your mental health apps (Talkspace, and honestly ChatGPT/Claude) to put the whole picture together. Would be cool to see.
NEW: Hims & Hers just launched its first AI care agent, “Labs AI.”
It analyzes 130+ biomarkers, identifies patterns across lab history, and generates personalized insights with provider oversight.
Consumer health AI keeps pushing to expand from chatbots into longitudinal care.
one on hand, riding bikes in prospect park at 6:30am everyday before work with the same 5 guys was religion to us. we laughed more doing loops and drinking coffee than I ever did at a club, and we did it daily.
on the other hand, we were pretty monastic everywhere else. we took our bikes to Spain once for a week, the same group. before they arrived I bought a 12-pack of beers. 9 of them were still in the fridge on our last day.
then other times, with a different group, we've been obliterated in the lower east side and I wouldn't trade those memories either.
the hard part about trends is they're new and changing, but talked about as if we were all supposed to be consistently living them for a while, and radically adherent to them. "the future of leisure is fitness" is an economic comment about where volume of hours/spend will be, but often confused for (and confuses people) about a lifestyle comment.
that is to say, people take hobbies extremely seriously now and anyone doing fitness for leisure (strictly) is de facto not being leisurely. there's no leisure in doing anything consistently, it's hard as hell to be consistent.
fitness is a trend with legs, but my economic comment is anyone building treadmill-based night clubs without also serving beer is you're going to get the monastic (i.e. wrong) crowd.
don't conflate volume of spend with consistency in lifestyle.
The future of leisure is fitness, running clubs are replacing night clubs for young people, alcohol consumption is falling, and oral GLP1s are going to melt literally billions of pounds of visceral and subcutaneous fat in the next decade in America.
The future is gonna be fit as hell (and a little bit boring)
I ran today, then looked at it on Strava and noticed everyone else ran too. Everyone’s obsessed with health and AI. Everyone I know, granted I’m your exact demo for a Whoop enjoyer, is building their own health app with Codex (everyone I know has moved off Claude, too). And everyone’s throwing everything in it.
Two weeks ago, maybe by causation or correlated by Patrick’s tweet, I noticed a new “health stack” clicked for people. That stack is: genome + labs + wearables + diary entries (what you ate/drank, etc).
It will become common to “track everything”, then have AI or AI paired with professionals (MDs, dietitians, running coaches) help you “know everything” to best help you “do anything”.
What I’m really interested in is bioconsumerism with pharma to "make anything”. It seems, the natural next step is paying a subscription to Lilly dot com to get custom gummies/vitamins/peptides from a (a) trusted source and (b) manufactured for you.
It will be seem total foreign that we all used to buy vitamin C chewables from TJs and take the same things & same amounts (insert any other supplement here)
The big shift here will be when you have really detailed and complete diagnostics always available + costs to make the perfect supplement for you goes way down.
Everyone's running agents on their health data because GPT5.5 and the like are finally good enough we can we move on from "track everything" to "know everything". Make Anything will be very wild indeed however.
@maxmarchione very cool and genuine question: what’s the next product once it’s mainstream where everyone has labs + wearables + agents? obv first thoughts are “the services” of dietitians or fitness coaches, but beyond that curios if you have a 2.0 to that offering as a product
my dad lives on a farm in illinois among a soy bean field
during peak harvest season he can’t see out the windows because the stocks grow high they block the view.
then in winter, it’s cut and flat and he can see for miles.
highs and lows man
I'm on the tail end of 3 handshake agreements gone horribly wrong, but still think this is right.
Mithril is a very bad analogy to make, but you do come out of it with a lightness and extreme resiliency
the function of your professional life is to find the most natural structure that allows you to turn the things you do as naturally as breathing or walking into compounding capital and joy over decades
this, necessarily, requires rotating quickly out of things that aren't it