Optimizing Health And Performance With Dr. Tracy Gapin

Your health is your greatest asset, and optimizing it can transform every aspect of your life. Today, Adam Markel is diving deep into the science of health and performance with Dr. Tracy Gapin, a renowned expert in health optimization. This conversation explores the essential strategies for managing stress, improving sleep, and enhancing longevity. Dr. Tracy shares powerful insights on resilience, recovery, and the importance of balancing high performance with well-being. This episode will leave you buzzing with inspiration and ready to rewrite your story of health and performance. Prepare to be utterly captivated and empowered to unleash the extraordinary within!

Show Notes:

02:40 – Mindset Matters Most In Golf Performance
07:52 – Scottie Scheffler And The Cost Of Distraction
17:13 – Understanding Sleep Issues And Their Impact
28:09 – How Lifestyle Choices Affect Sleep Quality
33:44 – Tracking Sleep Data For Better Recovery
39:37 – Why Entrepreneurs Prioritize Health For Peak Performance
43:03 – Daily Rituals To Manage Stress Effectively

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Optimizing Health And Performance With Dr. Tracy Gapin

Welcome back to another episode of the show. You’re going to love my guest. I’m going to get right into it, give you his intro, his bio, and then we’ll get after it. I know it’s going to be a great conversation with Dr. Tracy Gapin. Doc Tracy is how I’ll refer to him later. He is a leading men’s health optimization and longevity expert. He is the founder of the Gapin Institute for precision medicine and a board-certified urologist with over 25 years of experience. I noticed on his website it says that he’s a recovering urologist.

Dr. Gaping helps high-performing entrepreneurs, athletes and executives reach peak performance through cutting edge, data-driven, and health strategies. He is a bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and a trusted top professional to optimize others professional health and energy. I’m looking forward to this conversation for a number of different reasons personally and professionally speaking. I know it’s going to be exciting so buckle up and stay tuned.

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Doc Tracy, I love that. You have a very substantial CV, a wealth of knowledge, information, and experience and all those things that. The question I’ve got for you at the outset, which I know from our community, they love this question. What’s one thing that’s not in that bio that you would love for people to know about you from the outset?

I love that question. With that question, my immediate response is my why. My big purpose in life is to be an amazing dad. I have two incredible kids. I have a little princess. She calls herself Slay Queen. She is nine days different from buddy. He is just like me. He is a mini me, and he is a competitive high-level golfer. He started at age five. He is been competing at world championship level. He scratched from the Whites. He’s been smoking me for years already.

That’s a joy to get to be his caddy daddy and be there to support him. It’s good for personal development. Not just for golf skills. It teaches you about the challenges of life. It’s great to see him competing. My daughter is now doing figure skating competitions as well. For me, that’s more important than anything else we can talk about.

I’m newly addicted to the sport of golf like any good parent does. I’ve infected my children or at least some of my children with that addiction now, primarily the sons. How old is your boy?

He is eleven and he started playing when he was five. Grandma got on the setup a plastic club set, when he started hitting in the backyard with plastic balls and he fell in love with it. If I had tried to push on him or force upon him, he wouldn’t have taken to it, but it’s his passion and love. He has a natural God-given talent to where he started competing at age six and he was crushing it from day one. Here we are now and he drives it to twenty. He is a scratch golfer from the Whites. It’s so amazing to see. It’s like a course on my part.

Mindset Matters Most In Golf Performance

Some people are reading this perhaps and they are not into golf, and I appreciate that. For those folks, we’re not going to spend the entire episode talking about golf, so you don’t have to worry. In those that are interested or addicted in some respect, then you’ll love this. I want to get at the mindset piece because for most golfers, including the best golfers in the world and then down to anybody else who’s like a duffer but wants to be better.

The hardest part of the game is not the physical piece and I know part of your work. I’m going to dovetail this into the work that you do in the world because you work with athletes and with high performers on stuff. Physical is important and we’re going to talk about the physical to be sure. At least in my own experience in golf and in watching some of these great players over the years, it seems like the physical is not the difference made. It’s the stuff between the ears and you got an eleven-year-old who’s a scratch golfer. What can you tell us about that?

It’s a challenge. It’s a battle. It’s a life lesson in resilience and perseverance in what do you do when you’ve been knocked down? What do you do when having a bad shot? That’s been our biggest thing from day one. His skills were there, hitting the ball. That was never his problem. It was, if you miss a putt, or a birdie putt and you’re devastated by a par, then you’re not going to do well long term. You have to be able to move on and deal with it.

It’s about dealing with adversity and challenges. How do you pick yourself up? How do you remain confident and focused? How do you not look backwards when we look ahead? All of the life lessons that are so important for all of us, it stills in all of us. It’s about resilience. You just never give up in perseverance and focus on your goals at hand and all stuff that comes into play. That applies to golf at any age applies, to entrepreneurs, to founders and running a small business. It applies to a parent and focusing on your health. Everything. It comes down to that resilience. There’s a strong parallel so I love that you went down this this path.

I thought you were going to maybe share with us a bit of how somehow his mindset is different than the mindset of a person who is bit older and gets attached, the attachment to results for example. That attachment to the result to winning or to some of the result is so strong that it impacts how you approach the pre-winning and the pre result. Is that true for him or not really?

It’s almost like he’s successful so early. He almost had to learn how to deal with loss in golf. Almost every shot is a miss. You only make eighteen good shots on a around. When you’ve sink the ball in the hole, every shot is technically a mess. I’m writing my second book, and this is how my books start. I’ll give you the preview of the story.

Golf is a life lesson in resilience and perseverance, teaching you what to do when you've been knocked down or when you hit a bad shot. Share on X

I mentioned this in my TED talk as well that I gave a couple years ago. He was six and we’re in a tournament up in Tampa. We’re on this par five and he’s at second shot. There’s water in front of the hole and the caddy daddy that I am say, “Gram, let’s lay up here and go for the green on your third shot.” He looks at me, true story. No lie, at age six, and tells me that, “Dad, I didn’t come here to lay up.” I look at my wife, who’s on the side. We both laughed and going, “I’ll just step back. I’m just the caddy here. I’m not playing.” He pulls his five wood. That’s his big wood and he smokes it.

He crushes it over the water. I didn’t think he’d make it. I figured he put in the water but let him learn. Whatever. He smokes it over the water, lands on the green two putts for birdie and he wins that tournament in Tampa that day by one stroke. To me, it was such a powerful moment to just see how he was so confident and determined that, “No, I’m not going to lay up. Why would I lay up that, Dad? I could do it. I’m going to make it.” If he failed, he would have failed and that would have been okay also. It was quite a moment at age six.

Let’s just say he didn’t have a lot of experiential lessons in life that would contribute to negative self-talk. He wasn’t thinking in that moment, “The last time I tried this or I remember back when I tried to do that and I ended up it going sideways on me.” There wasn’t that conflict happening he said. Has he seen the movie Tin Cup?

We’ve talked to him about that. He hasn’t but I told story of that scene. The kid doesn’t have attention span for that movie, but I’ve shared the amazing ending.

Scottie Scheffler And The Cost Of Distraction

That might be one for him to see. The number one golfer in the world is a guy by name is Scottie Scheffler. At the end of 2024 or somewhere around that time, maybe it was with the holidays, or could have been at the beginning of the year. I think it was in December. This story goes that he’s home. He’s new dad. He and his wife have a baby. Maybe the baby is like a year or so old or whatever. He is a family guy and pretty much everybody likes this guy or loves this guy. He had an amazing in 2024. He is the number one golfer in the world and all that thing.

As I understand, he got a cut in the part of his hand. He might cut his finger or a part of his hand with a knife as he was preparing food for dinner. It was might have been steak. He might have been carving a steak or whatever. Here it is when you and I are recording this episode, it’s months later and he missed a good part of the first part of the season. A good number of tournaments. While he still ranked number one, if it were just based on his performance, he would not be ranked number one. He might even not be in the top ten, frankly.

I’m bringing that up, not just because it’s related to what we’re talking about in the golf or sense of it being about the sport of golf or a performer in that. It’s an interesting thing that I’ve been not just noodling on. Our research has taken us to this place. We’ve been speaking to leaders in various organizations about this particular thing. That is the degree to which we are depleting ourselves, exhausting ourselves, or even burning ourselves out trying to do too much. Multitasking to a degree that that is not sustainable.

Frankly, also not being present in the thing that we’re doing. My theory with regard to this guy, his hands are vitally important to him. These are multi-million dollars hands. He is one of the most coordinated people on the planet. He’s a consummate athlete. For him to cut himself and somebody might be chuckling at this. How many people have cut themselves while cooking or cutting garlic or whatever it might be. Here’s this guy with this massive financial career that involves so much money who injures himself in that way and directly impacts his performance for some period of time later.

You go, “What was he thinking about in the moment that he was carving that steak. Was there something going on in the room that distracted him? Was he thinking about golf? Was he thinking about something else? Was his head in a different place that he wasn’t fully present?” That would be my theories to how something like that occurs, but I want to get your sense of, is that something you’re noticing? What’s the real cost of not only not paying attention, but not being fully committed in the moment to what you’re doing?

I love your shedding light on stress and how stress is a massive culper in a lot of the chronic disease and health issues that were suffering from. It causes from the medical physiologic side. It effects hormones, causes inflammation, and tear up our gut health, which controls neurotransmitters in our brain, controls metabolism, and our immune system. Almost everything in our body, in some way, affected by this chronic stress that most entrepreneurs, founders, professionals, and leaders fail to acknowledge is affecting them.

As you said, we grind, multitask, and you go. It’s like you’re pushing a race car in the red for so long and eventually it’s going to blow. It’s so important to emphasize there has to be balanced. For anyone, I don’t care what position you are, CEO to bottom level employee. Everybody needs to create balance in the life so that stress doesn’t overcome them. Being present with your family, for example, is a big part of that. Doing what you love.

For me, I hate golf. I am a hack. I’m terrible, but I go out there because I love being with my son, but what I love to do is playing tennis. That’s my freedom. That’s my space I was in. I’m much better at that than Golf. I schedule time for relaxation, enjoyment and things I love to do. I schedule time with my family for vacations and trips and what are called three days on my calendar. This goes to strategic coach model of buffer, focus and free day, where you have to schedule this balance in your life or else, it will never happen.

Everyone is so busy grinding in the Gary Vee model of keep grinding and push harder and harder. There has to be a balance. What you find when you have that balance suddenly when you do come back, you’re much more focused and more efficient and productive because you’ve had that chance to turn that engine off and let it cool off. A massive deal. One of the big things we work on with our clients is not the medical stuff, but the lifestyle stuff like how do you mitigate the effects of stress because it’s such an important component.

Change Proof Podcast | Dr. Tracy Gapin | Health

Health: Deep sleep is the most important stage of sleep. You want at least one hour of it every night.

It’s fascinating because the research is clear. At least, some of it is. I know our research points in this direction, but we’re not certainly not alone in it. Resilience is not about grit. There’s an element of being tenacious, persistent, and not quitting things easily in that thing. Your capacity to grind at times can be helpful.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that you cannot win a race that has no end. Resilience is much more about our method and our rituals for recovery it seems that it is about how you’re able to just grind your way through it. I’m a music fan as well. By the way, you and I have a lot in common. I love tennis and I don’t say I prefer tennis to golf because I’m addicted now to golf, but I know that my tennis game sometimes gets in the way of my golf game.

The swings are not exactly compatible like baseball. If you’re a baseball player, it’s tough also for some of these things. As a music lover, in particular the Grateful Dead, a band that I followed since the late ‘80s, through all of their iterations, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh dying and all this. They’ve got a guy named John Mayer that a lot of people know. He very successful artist in his own right. He’s a prolific guitar player.

He took on the role of being the Jerry Garcia piece of the band. Sometime in 2024, maybe in July or August, right before it was about to go and meet up with my brother and see him at the sphere inn Las Vegas. He slammed his finger in a car door, and lopped off the tip of his index finger on the hand that he chords with.

It’s like again, what does this tell you? He had million dollars hands. It’s important that we recognize that the model of grinding and gritting or thinking that you can continue to do that without a cost. It doesn’t have to be the tip of your finger or slicing your hand, but there’s a health cost to that stress that is not abated through recovery ritual. Would you agree with that?

Yes, and a good parallel to this that is pointed out is like fitness, exercise, and weight lifting. A lot of people may not be aware of this, but lifting weights does not build muscle. People quoted me online they know what they’re talking about. You are damaging your muscle when you lift weights. When you recover is when you repair bigger and stronger and you build muscle. This is why when you’re sleeping and when you’re recovering is when that muscles grow hypertrophies. That’s how you build mass. That’s how you build muscle, it’s the recovery time.

If you don’t have the recovery time, then you don’t build muscle. I’ve seen it so many times where this big body builder dudes are massively stressed, inflamed, and have cardiovascular disease and they’re not nearly as healthy as you would think because they’re overtraining and overdoing it too much. This parallels what you’re saying where there is a fine line and nuance of where, “You have got to push yourself. You got to work.” I’m not saying be lazy, but you also need to balance your recovery time if you’re going to get the best results.

Understanding Sleep Issues And Their Impact

Tell us about sleep. I know you’re not exactly asleep expert but you must as part of your work have to meet a lot of people and deal with a lot of people that are experiencing sleep issues. In fact, anytime I deliver a keynote presentation, I typically will ask an audience about their sleep and be shocked at the number of people that either have difficulty getting to sleep at night or staying asleep at night. Can you speak to any of the things that you know are not just the problems but if there’s some solutions or things that you recommend?

In general, people are focused on how long they sleep. I slept 7 hours, 6 hours, or 8 hours, but what’s much more important is the quality of sleep. By quality, there are different stages of sleep and how well did you sleep. When you first fall asleep, think of the ocean water and you go just below the surface of the ocean. That’s REM sleep or Rapid Eye Movement Sleep. When you’re dreaming, your arousable to sound and dog bark, etc. That’s a very important stage of sleep. You then go into non-REM sleep, which consists of light sleep, which is shallow water.

Deep sleep, where you go even deeper into the night. Deep sleep is the most important stage of sleep that there is. Typically, you get all your deep sleep in the first half of the night in those first four hours, and then you come back up. It’s like about 90 minutes to two hours cycle of going from awake to REM down to light down to deep and coming back up. You have micro awakening throughout the night. You’re not aware of it, then you go back down again. You have about four to five of these cycles throughout the night or maybe less if you wake up early.

What’s so important is the deep sleep. The number to focus on is one hour of deep sleep and you want two hours of REM sleep. Those are the two stages of sleep to focus on and the only way to know that information is to track it. This is why wearables are so valuable. There’s Ultrahuman and the Oura. There’s several devices out there.

One way or the other, you want to track the quality of sleep. What I find so often is that people will say, “I slept 7 hours and 20 minutes, but I got five minutes of deep sleep,” for example. That’s when you wake up and you feel like crap. You thought you slept okay. You wake up and you’re still tired and struggling through the day. You can’t wait to go back to sleep again, It’s very common to see that type of picture.

The other picture we see is where typically is 22/33 calls right around that after two cycles of sleep in the middle of the night. You wake up and you think you have to pee. That’s the common trigger. Typically, that’s just the brain. When you wake up, your first response is a natural normal reflex, “I got to pee,” but that’s typically very rarely if ever what’s waking you up.

If you don't have the recovery time, then you don't build muscle. Share on X

What’s waking you up is stress and cortisol. I was telling you about going below the surface of the water, back down deep, and coming back up again. When you’re up close to the surface of the water is when you pop your head up from stress. Now you’re awake and you think about what you should have said, what you got to say, and all the things that you wish you did differently. The next thing is an hour later and the whole night is ruined. It’s very common and that’s all from stress. We can measure it with cortisol testing to show that that’s the problem.

A lot of times, we see folks who take forever to fall asleep. That’s more related to sleep hygiene and growth hormone levels and some other markers that can affect falling asleep. That’s the type of picture where you lay down at 10:45 and it’s 11:50. You’re still laying and stuff and you’re trying to fall asleep. Those are two very different pictures that cause very different outcomes in your sleep pattern. What do you do about it? The cortisol part I was mentioning is a whole different conversation. How do we mitigate cortisol and the effects of stress on our system especially.

Cortisol from a psychological stuff like, I’m more worried about finances or the house or my wife or kids. Not necessarily anything that did not distress from mine. That may be stress from things like alcohol or crummy diet or toxins in your environment, food or water, or gut health issues, or infections in the gut, or over training. A lot of different things are stressors to our system that can raise cortisol and calls that sleep disruption.

That’s a whole other long story of how do we mitigate. First is identifying the cause of that cortisol issue. What do you do? What I like to talk about is some sleep hygiene things that everyone can do at night to set yourself up for success. Number one, probably the most important piece of advice I’ll give is to have the exact same bedtime every single night, weekday, or weekend regardless. The same time every night you’re going to bed.

Your circadian rhythm senses that pattern, that consistency and it needs that consistency. Pick a time whatever it may be that works in your life and that’s your bedtime every single night. Things are going to come up, you’re traveling, but for the most part, you need to try to stick to that exact time. I would also work backwards. If you’re someone who has to get up at 5:30, count backwards. What’s seven and a half hours from there? 10:00 PM. You got to be in bed at 10:00 PM.

You work backwards and very quickly do the math. That tells you that your bedtime. Whatever your wake time is, it can help you set your bedtime. In the two hours before bed, that’s the most critical time. I would avoid eating food, if you can at all cost. In general, a lot of foods can be very stimulatory, so I’ll avoid food. I’d avoid drinking water if you can’t as well. If you need sips of water with your pills or your medications at night. That’s okay, but try to minimize any intake.

The biggest trigger here is blue light, so your phone, iPad, laptop, and computer. Any of these devices are emitting blue light. A special wavelength of light that is affecting your brain. It affects melatonin production and it disrupts your sleep. It increases the latency, which is how long does it take you to fall asleep. It’s a big factor in that initial part of the night. No devices for two hours before bed. You can use blue light blocking glasses when the sun goes down, which is fantastic. I recommend everyone do that when the sun goes down 3 or 5 hours before bedtime.

That still doesn’t mean you can use the blue light device in the last two hours because those glasses don’t eliminate 100% of blue light. They’re good but not perfect. Eliminating blue lights is a big deal. In the last two hours, people say, “What can I do then?” You can watch TV still. Although, I recommend other activities. I’m going to give you five things to do instead. Number one is read. The best time to read a paper book. Not a kindle, but national paper book. The best time to read is those two hours before bed.

Number two is journaling. I’m a big believer in the power of gratitude and documenting what you’re thankful for, what your successes and wins from the day. Talk about the whole gap and thee gain concept from Dan Sullivan. It’s focus on the gain that you’ve made for the day, the week, or the year. Instead of focusing on the gap of where you think you want to be or should be. That’s your time to practice, gratitude, journal, and your successes. Document your plan for the next day as well. Journal is great.

Third was meditation. One of the ways to affect cortisol that we talked about and also help get your mind ready for sleep is meditation. I’m a science guy. I’m a doctor. I’ve been a doctor for almost many years. For the longest time, I thought that was woo-woo, BS, and nonsense. There’s real science and real studies that show that genetic expression is affected and altered by meditation and mindfulness practices.

For those of you who have never done meditation, there are apps on your phone you can get. Headspace and Calm are two examples of apps that you can get that will guide you through it. It’s literally laying there and not thinking. If you do think, that’s okay. Try to not think, but if you do think, let it go. Let it flow. It’s an incredible source of relaxation and peace that helps set the tone for sleep.

The fourth one is the sauna. Sauna is great for mitochondrial function for recovery and repair. It’s also great for reducing stress and helping set your body up for sleep as well. Half an hour before you go to bed is awesome. The fifth one is sex. Sex is a great way to calm your body and mind. It gets your ready for sleep as well. Those are five things to do. I joke and say don’t do them all together. That’d be really awkward. For the last two hours before bed, those are great.

I’m going to say something awkward in honor of Dr. Ruth who may have been more than 100 when she passed. For those of you that don’t know who Dr. Ruth Westheimer was, look her up, and watch a video of hers. She’s like from the same era as, who was that fitness guy? She’s the skinny guy that would wear the tank tops.

Health: You can’t compare your heart rate variability to another person’s. What’s really more important is how your pattern looks over the last week and the last month.

It’s that era. All that say, you said sex. I want to ask you, does that include masturbation? For anybody was thinking, I “love to have sex before bed.” If you’ve got a partner at this moment, that’d be a great idea. I’m not a sex therapist but sex with your partner is great idea. That’s beautiful. If you happen to be not with a partner, does that mean that masturbation wouldn’t suffice?

That provides a physiologic benefit as well. There are different emotional factors that you’re missing with that, so there is a real difference there. If you’re by yourself and then that certainly going to have a beneficial effect as well.

How Lifestyle Choices Affect Sleep Quality

We’re staying on sleep for a minute because I use an app as well. I have an Oura Ring and I check out what my low resting heart rate. I’ve learned through trial and error and through reading and research that there are things that will raise your heart rate. My understanding is it’s important that if your low resting heart rate, whatever that might be, minus 47 or 48. At some point in the night, when it’s in the middle of my sleep, I wake up and I’m like shot out of a cannon. I’m ready to go.

When my low resting heart rate happens close to when my waking time is, more like 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM or something like that, then I wake up I’m groggy. Quite hung over or whatever, but groggy. Kinds of things that raise your heart rate and where it is that it takes a little bit of time for your body to recalibrate and get back to a low resting heart rate are things like alcohol.

Alcohol in the evening or eating or exercising in the evening are things that raise your heart rate. It makes it a little more difficult. The thing that I still don’t quite get and maybe you can explain this to me, the whole heart rate variability thing. I know this is not your full specialization area because you’re a urologist specialty.

That’s what we do. Here’s what we do. We are massive focus on data and how you interpret it and how you apply it to what you’re doing. We do a lot of stuff like hormones, peptides, supplements, and nutrition fitness and all kinds of different protocols. The data is how you can measure what you’re doing is working. Otherwise, how do you know if you’re getting anywhere? I love that we’re having this conversation. It’s right on cue.

What is that?

Heart Rate Variability or HRV for short, is a direct marker of stress. Our internal stress, I was telling you about earlier, can be measured through heart rate variability. Your heart rate may be 70, let’s just say, on the pulse monitor or when the nurse checks you but it’s not 70. It changes every single heart beat by millisecond. You may have from one beat to the next. It may be 70.01. From that beat to the next, it maybe 70.03, 69.9, 70, and 70.02. It very literally every single beat. There’s a variation in your heart rate, hence heart rate variability.

This is like one of those inverse things, where the numbers is supposed to be higher. The more the better.

The way to think about it is when your body is rested, recovered, and in an optimized state, you’re dynamic, able to adapt, pounce, and do whatever you got to do. You can quickly dynamically adjust to situations like that in a split second. The heart rate variability measurement is measuring your body’s ability to very quickly and dynamically adapted environment. If you’re sick, ill, and stressed, what happens is your system becomes contracted and tight. You’ll have a maybe a high heart rate, but more importantly, your heart rate variability will plummet. It’s very static. It doesn’t change. You can’t adapt to your environment as well.

That’s how you can use that information. We are big on tracking HRV and it’s going to tell you how you’re responding to your behaviors and your environment so that you can adapt. Example, when you drink alcohol. You will see your heart rate variability plumb it. When you drink alcohol, you’ll also see your sleep. Your deep sleep score is plumbing as well, but it will affect your heart variability.

When you travel, eat crummy foods, and get a poor night’s sleep, you’ll see your heart variability plumb it. When you over train, the same thing. It’s a great way to measure how rested your body is. I love the fact that we started this conversation to talk about stress and how it impacts your body. This is the direct way to measure that on a daily basis. You could do it yourself from the comfort of your own home.

How do you measure it? This is important. A lot of people use their Oura Rings. I love Oura. They’re user Garmin and I’ve had that Garmin for years. They’re user Apple, Fitbit, and WHOOP. There’s all different devices, and I’m agnostic to device. The more important to point out here is heart rate variability is not something you measure all day. That’s the big mistake. I did that for years with my Garmin. It would be fluctuating all day and high and low throughout the day.

We grind and push ourselves relentlessly. Stress is like pushing a race car in the red. It will eventually blow. Share on X

The problem is, that’s comparing apples to oranges. One day, you may be doing strength training or intervals. Another day, maybe you’re traveling or you’re not working. You have a rest day. Maybe you’re doing light activity. Things happen throughout the day stress comes up. Us on a show now is very different from when I’m working on my computer on my next talk. You’re just in a different state.

Long story short, you want to measure your heart variability at one specific single time and setting every single day. What that looks like is at 6:00 AM, I wake up. The first thing I do, I get my cup of coffee. I sit on the couch and put my Morpheus strap on and I hit a two-and-a-half-minute scan. I get my heart rate variability score for the day and I’m done. I compare that from one day to the next.

Tracking Sleep Data For Better Recovery

Only for fun, I don’t know if you have your phone with you. Do you have your stats? My night was not as good as it’s been a couple of times in the last couple of weeks, but I’m going to share it anyway. I’m going to tell you mine first. I’m going to put it on the screen for those of you watching on YouTube. What I’m going to do is tell you what it is.

I was a 90 on my readiness, which says I got a crown. It was optimal. My resting heart rate was 47 BPM or beats per minute and my heart rate variability was 37 MS. My body temperature was up 0.4 degrees, which was interesting because that’s not typically the case. My respiratory rate was 12.6 per minute. What was yours? We’re not comparing. We’re just comparing. My low resting heart rate was at 3:00 AM on a total sleep between 12:04 and 8:00 AM. I stayed in a little bit.

This was my sleep score. Sleep score was 77. Not great for me. My total sleep 7 hours and 18 minutes, which is okay. My deep sleep is 43 minutes. That’s read for me. Not good. I dive into REM sleep, 1 hours and 57 minutes. Restfulness fair efficiency 90% and latency is 9 minutes. What I do at that is most importantly compared to other days to understand what has changed.

This is the context, the nuance of it all. People will look at score and brag or complain about what their numbers are. The point of it is the application interpretation of what the numbers mean. Your heart rate variability is it is what it is. You can’t compare yours to mine, for example. What’s more important is how does your pattern looks over the last week over or the last month?

If your HRV is 45, 46, 44, 45, or 22. What happened? You want to understand is what’s causing the delta like that. That’s the real value of it. The one thing to point out is, I don’t look at my data like it’s exactly 43 minutes of deep sleep because they’re not that accurate. They’re not 100% accurate. It’s the Gestalt 30,000 of your general understanding of where you are. When you see big changes, what caused it.

I feel like it’s important. When I’m sharing about it and I’m not sponsored by them. I don’t have an interest in the company and I’m not an affiliate or any of that stuff. For that particular device, the Oura Ring. It’s about awareness, because if you are an athlete, and it’s a good comparison again because we started talking about this.

Let’s say you’re a professional athlete, an Olympic athlete. You have an Olympic race. What would you be doing? What would you be thinking about? How would you be taking care of your body? Treating yourself, if that’s what you were going to be doing? People routinely are taking themselves for granted. It’s ironic because a lot of the work that we do, in the way of resilience training and things we do for health professionals. It can’t get any more ironic than that.

You’re a doctor. I was not starting to baiting you, but if you lined up 10 doctors and 10 nurses and we did an evaluation of how they take care of themselves and what they are helping other people to do. Life-saving work is important work. Those people who are so nurturing to others usually nurture themselves dead last. I don’t know if you fit in that category or not, but that’s what I’ve noticed about the health profession and industry as a whole, if you see that as well. Do you speak to your own colleagues? I know you speak to the finance very prolific in the finance space and to the airline industry. How about your own people?

They don’t listen.

There you go. Thank you.

This is because our healthcare system is so broken. I can talk an hour about just this alone, about how doctors in this country, we’re seventeen years behind science. We’re so focused on just finding the right drug to treat a problem or treating it for the patient in front of us to get him out the door and move on.

Health: Your health can be your greatest asset or your biggest liability, depending on how you approach it.

You think they’re focused on their own health and thinking about sleep and stressing gut health. No way. It’s almost sheer survival mode. It’s all about diagnosis and drug and you get very siloed into what you’re doing. I don’t even bother. I don’t even try with my colleagues because they’ll come to me when they’re ready and open to learn more about the stuff. That’s when it’s fun but not until then.

Why Entrepreneurs Prioritize Health For Peak Performance

I’m so glad that we got to have that answer the space just now and chat about it. I don’t know if Dr. Casey Means is a name you’re familiar with, but the book has Good Energy, I think a lot of people have heard of this book. My son-in-law gave me that book over Christmas. Halfway through it, I’m loving it and it shares philosophy with you in that regard. I know our time is wrapping up.

I want to cover one more thing and maybe squeeze out a couple extra minutes here, the wealth-health gap. Before we started, we chatted about that. You do work often with people in the finance space and the family practice groups there, then you’ve also worked in corporate but that’s not typically what you’ve done. I asked you what’s the difference between those two groups in terms of speaking and your content then you share that nuance with me. Would you share that with our audience as well?

I work with a lot of high-performing leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, small business owners, professionals, some executives, a lot of retired athletes, NFL players, race car drivers, and Olympic athletes. All walks, but what’s interesting is, it tends to be the entrepreneur or the founder who is more on the cutting edge, open, and receptive to this idea around health optimization. Our traditional healthcare system is all about just treating disease and wait till there’s a problem.

It’s very passive reactive. Entrepreneurs get it. There are forward thinking and recognize that there’s a lot of conversation out there. Books like Casey Means’ and companies that are out there and a lot of voices are now starting to bring this to the public realm, and I love it. It’s awareness. It’s awesome. A lot of executives are so entrenched in their corporate office, in the boardroom and grinding. This is a generalization, but they tend to be less aware and less willing to make changes.

This is where executive help with such a big deal. I talked about this concept of health span, well span, what you were talking about. You look at guys like Paul Allen. He was the cofounder of Microsoft, worth $30 billion when he died at age 65 from lymphoma. Steve Jobs, we all know, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at age 48, and he died at age 56. These guys had all the money in the world, but they couldn’t buy one more day.

This is why it’s so important that we start to pay attention to our health and be proactive and start to take charge of it and not wait for our broken health care system to recognize a problem when it’s too late. One of my talking points is, I believe your health can be your greatest asset or your biggest liability, depending on how you approach it.

My big passion is to get people to start to wake up and recognize and pay attention to how much they can do to improve their health and how that translates into their performance at work. Their performance building their business or as a parent. Peak performance is not just an Olympic athlete. It’s me being a caddy daddy. To me, that peak performance. It’s probably harder on me than my son, but that’s what’s all about. The stuff we’re talking about applies to every aspect of your life.

Daily Rituals To Manage Stress Effectively

What I’d love to ask you, the one final question. When it comes to how you manage stress in the day, there’s a million things. You’ve given us a lot already. We talked and spent a lot of time on sleep. Thank you for that. I’m glad we did it because so many people are challenged by that. They struggle with it. Is there something that is a ritual for you each and every day?

We are simpatico and disrespectful. We probably have lots of rituals. I know we do. Is there one specific thing if you could recommend or share with an audience of people that may not be ritualizing their recovery or optimizing that opportunity that you would say, “Do this one thing.” I’ve got an answer to that question as well if you want to turn the tables on me. What do you say to that?

Spend your whole time with who you love. For me, I’m very intentional about organizing my day, organizing my life because my business can take over and consume me. I could work till all hours of the night, never stop, grind, and try to make more money. There’s so much more to it than that. It’s that human connection. It’s more of a core value as human connection. To me, it’s getting to sit down at dinner with my two amazing kids, my beautiful incredible life. That’s what it’s all about. That gives you the strength and the foundations that you do. That would be a big thing. Don’t lose sight of that because you have to schedule it or it won’t happen.

I’m such a big believer in that. You may think all the time there’s somebody in your life that you say, “I want to get together with you. Let’s get together. Let’s do something. Let’s go somewhere.” Whatever it might be drinks, eat, vacation, or something. We know those things tend to not happen. They tend to not happen when we don’t schedule them. An old friend who is somebody I’ve lost touch with. An interesting lunch with them.

I’m thinking about this lesson where the lesson originated was from that particular person, funny enough so. Thank you for sharing that. For those of you that want to get my answer to it, in the interest of time, I’ll refer you back to my start of the year show, where at the beginning of year, I do a solo cast about something important and noodling on.

Have the same bedtime every night regardless if it is a weekday or weekend. Consistency is key for optimal sleep. Share on X

This was around my start of the day practices. It doesn’t have to be a start of the day practice, but it was a particular activity that created a space for me to work on things and asking the question, what do I want more of my life? What do I want to let go of in my life and creating this wonderful opportunity to not only develop the list but check-in with it each day? In particular, in the morning. Again, into more details in that episode about that.

I have so enjoyed our conversation on so many levels, Dr. Tracy. I appreciate you and the work you are doing in the world. For our audiences, they know but I will remind them. There’s full information about how to get in touch with Dr. Tracy and find out more about his work in the world, especially how you may access it.

If you’re a leader or you know people that potentially could benefit from this. You got a new book that you’re working on. Is that right? I do, too. I have a new one that I’m working on. It takes a privilege. It’s a heavy lift. We got that to look forward to. Ciao.

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As promised I love that conversation with Doc. Tracy. I love the fact that we were able to navigate the distance or the delta between the initial statement he made about his son, his family, his wife, his daughter, and golf. We follow the breadcrumbs from golf to sleep and diving in at a pretty granular level. Something that’s sometimes difficult to do in a short form episode like this to dig into one particular area like sleep, but we did.

It’s very helpful to understand better what it is that promotes better sleep. We have to understand as well that sleep is number one. I think it was stated, but I want to be even more redundant in this statement to say, sleep is the number one form of recovery and number one recovery tool that we have access to. If you want to perform better, think better, feel better, and live better then you ought to sleep better.

There’s no question about it that if I had to pick one area and say, “This is how you’ll up in every area of your life that is important to you. This would be the first focus or first area that you cannot ignore. We understand through our experience and our research that’s many years of it now that resilience is created through recovery. The number one way to recover, as I just said, is based on sleep. That is if you did almost nothing else to aid in your recovery if you were sleeping great every night. If you are optimizing the opportunity for true restorative rest, recuperation, regeneration and recalibration.

There’s a whole bunch of other words that start with read that would help us in this area then your outlook on life, attitude, ability to think and think quickly, think rightly would increase exponentially. Your ability to navigate relationships more effectively. Any area that you can think of would be magnified and improved by an exponent by 2X, 3X, or 5X, whatever it would be if you simply focused on this one area.

The fact that we got to spend so much time thinking about and speaking about it, it’s brilliant. I also loved so many of the other things that Doc Tracey shared with us, wealth-health gap, the stories in that area great. It’s a great episode. If you know somebody that would benefit from reading this episode, please share it. Share with a friend, colleague, or family member. We’d love it if you would share all your feedback with us. You can go to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast and leave a comment, or a review using the star system on the platform that you consumed this episode.

We very much appreciate your time in doing that. It might take five minutes to just do that, and it’s five minutes out of your day. It’s super helpful to us to have this community grow and to help with the algorithms so that more people find out about it. I thank you for taking the time to do it. There’s nothing in it for you other than just giving something back if you feel like this was additive to you or a value. If you got anything out of it, you could share and pay that forward.

That would be spectacular. Again, we thank you, just for being a part of this community. I hope that that’s working for you. Again, always welcome to your feedback. Thank you so much as always. If you want to check out just in a snapshot, in a moment in time what level of resilience you’re at from a mental standpoint, mindset stand, emotional intelligence, a physical or a spiritual standpoint, which is about alignment, values, and about congruity in your life and that feeling of purposefulness. Any of that.

You can simply go to RankMyResilience.com. Two and a half minutes is all it will take. If you’re doing it slowly, it will take three minutes. It’s not a big time suck and you’re going to get a tremendous insight out of it. When you get your own personalized confidential report just seconds later, no one else will see it. It’s yours and also, its complementary. Please, if you haven’t done so yet, take advantage of that opportunity. Thank you so much again. Ciao for now.

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About Dr. Tracy Gapin

Dr. Tracy Gapin, a leading men’s health optimization and longevity expert, is the founder of the Gapin Institute for Precision Medicine and a board-certified urologist with over 25 years of experience. Dr. Gapin helps high-performing entrepreneurs, athletes, and executives reach peak performance through cutting-edge, data-driven health strategies. He’s a best-selling author, TEDx speaker, and trusted by top professionals to optimize their health and energy.