Know Your Physio

Interoception: The Art of Recovery | Rebuilding from the Inside Out | Part 2

• Carlos & Miguel Bertonatti • Episode 137

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In Part 2 of this powerful conversation, we continue the journey beyond quitting Adderall to unlocking true high performance through deep physiological awareness. I sit down with Carlos and Miguel Bertonatti to unpack the essential metrics of health—VO₂ max, HRV, and body composition—and how mastering these can transform the way you recover, perform, and live.

We explore why most high performers are stuck in chronic stress without realizing it, how proper sleep can become your greatest biohack, and how breathwork is the secret weapon to regulate your nervous system anytime, anywhere. This episode dives into the science of stress adaptation, the role of muscle as the "organ of longevity," and simple, actionable strategies to regain control over your biology.

If you're serious about optimizing your mind, body, and performance without gimmicks—this is your roadmap. Tune in to learn how real resilience is built from the inside out.

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Topics:

[00:02:24] Overtraining in competitive athletes.

[00:05:35] Sleep fitness.

[00:08:44] HRV and its significance.

[00:12:24] HRV and stress adaptability.

[00:14:14] Subjective nature of HRV.

[00:15:55] Breath work for stress regulation.

[00:19:40] Biological age and wellness insights.

[00:24:28] Peak performance through stress management.

[00:26:06] Muscle mass and longevity.

[00:30:40] Blue blocking glasses effectiveness.

[00:32:50] Human connection in health.

[00:35:32] Accountability in personal growth.

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Carlos Bertonatti:
You are listening to part two of the Biohacking Brothers podcast featuring Andres Preschel, applied physiologist and health coach.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, but by the way, quitting Adderall was the most difficult thing I've ever done. When you stop taking it, your brain feels like mush. It was the worst thing that ever happened, but the best thing that ever happened in the sense that I gained so much wisdom and strength from that experience, and now I can put myself in the shoes of people that I want to help. Most people aren't gathering objective data about their body on a regular basis with medical grade tools and devices and technology, so they don't know any better. empowering people to understand their biology at a deeper level. Most people have such high levels of baseline stress, of chronic stress, that when they do the training required to elicit increases in VO2 max, they get exhausted, they get burnt out.

Carlos Bertonatti: I'll tell you this, for all you guys that think that this is hocus pocus stuff, this stuff works.

Andres Preschel: I've never mentioned this on a podcast before, and you're really bringing up a lot of emotion right now, but bro, I remember I went to you, man. Don't cry right now. I'm not gonna cry on you, don't worry. I'll cry on you. No, please do, please. I'm not gonna cry, I'm not gonna cry. If you're not getting deep sleep, which is 99% of people, you're just going to feel brain fog and low energy and low mood all the time.

Miguel Bertonatti: And the brain cells actually shrink about 40% to 60% so all that fluid can go and clean out the debris that we build up, the cytotoxicity.

Andres Preschel: It's interesting because I work with the population. It's a variety of people, but what they all have in common is they are go, go, go, go, go to an extreme. So you don't only have to tell them because everybody wants to live longer, right? But it's like how can we get super precise through data to help you recover better, increase HRV and basically make you more adaptable so that you can recover when you intend to extremely efficiently. And then when you want high performance, you can tap into that and you're not going to get slowed down.

Carlos Bertonatti: So I've had to learn to do this in extreme and I really know that is what a true reception basically You know, what's interesting and I want to know if you agree how much of your strategy especially working with professional athletes because I do this all the time is Teaching them how to dial it back because it's so easy and it happens to us, right? We're you know, we're competitive athlete athlete level And it's so easy to overtrain, right? Because training for us is almost a form of therapy, right? And for a lot of people. And so when you're go, go, go, and you want to stack things and you want to do more, it's like, no, dude, listen, you get more with less. Dial it back.

Miguel Bertonatti: And that's the hardest thing to deal with athletes. But you got to have all the other things dialed in to really do that efficiently.

Carlos Bertonatti: But no, I mean, talk to an athlete about sleep is like, fuck sleep. I sleep when I'm dead. I want to go, go. And it's teaching them how to dial that back.

Andres Preschel: It's like changing that mindset is like, people pay me a lot of money just to do that. It's tough. It's tough. It's very tough. And your ego gets in the way, they think that they know better because they've made it, they've become that successful and they got into that point in their career because they've sacrificed everything else for that. And what I show them is like you can still maintain or even improve that level without sacrifice but by leveraging your health. And then you get more time and quality of life when you're with your family. When you're traveling, when you have your U time.

Miguel Bertonatti: Yeah, you don't work out and then you feel, there's a lot of people that work out and when they're done, they feel exhausted throughout the day. And you should actually feel energized when you come back from working out.

Andres Preschel: There's a main difference, there's a big difference between the endorphin response that is basically your body's effort to like regulate itself after stress and like actually feeling good at a baseline because you exercise often. Like I always say, like people love the cold plunge, right? Especially my high performers. Oh my God, you see the cold, should I get, should I spend 10 grand on this cold plunge? Dude, you're like, you're stressed the fuck out. Do not do coke. Like you're going to feel good in the moment in the short term because of the endorphin response as your body like dopamine hit. Yeah. Yeah. But you, you're putting your body in a catabolic state and you're increasing your baseline levels of stress.

Miguel Bertonatti: Well, actually it's funny you say that Chris Holmes, Chris Holmes, which is principal scientist show that people that are as healthy and as fit as us, cold plunging more than three times a week has diminishing return. And then you shouldn't be cold plunging on the days that you're already causing massive hormetic stress. Like if I'm lifting, and I've already broken down my body, and I didn't sleep good, and I'm freaking type A again running, cold plunging is like your cells are saying, what the hell are you doing to me? It's overdoing it, right? So you just have to know strategically, intelligently, when to cold plunge. And it's usually on the days that you're doing cardio.

Andres Preschel: So obviously there's so much to unpack here. What I want to tell the listeners is like, there's so many ways that you can approach this, so many ways that you can like.

Carlos Bertonatti: But sleep, your sleep is the best.

Andres Preschel: That's exactly what I was going to say. It's the greatest consolidation of everything. It's your first to go medicine. I'm so glad we're all on the same page. Master the art of sleeping. And then you can add these things in and you don't have to worry as much about what could or might happen. And now you can take advantage of that hormetic stress that you're deliberately adding into your life, like caloric restriction, fasting, heat, cold exposure, HIIT training. Now, all of that allows your body to generate an adaptive, a positive response.

Miguel Bertonatti: to grow and develop. We talk about, you know, supplementing and taking boosters for muscles and for energy. The ultimate supplement booster for absolutely every biological, biomechanical process for your body to bring the best you can to sleep. Yes.

Carlos Bertonatti: If you think about it. So with those guys, you know what I call it, be like, oh yeah, you're big into it. How about sleep fitness? Yeah. How about we talk about that? Yeah, that's what we call it, sleep fitness. So we kind of change the term there so they can be like, oh, there is such a thing. Yeah. we kind of coach them into like, this area is the most important area. Just like, breaking your fast is more important than the fast itself. And you know, sleeping is more important than the actual exercise, because if you don't have it, then there's no consolidation, there's no growth. So great, so VO2 Max.

Andres Preschel: Real quick, yeah, real quick on the VO2 Max thing. So with VO2max, like I said, I have a whole article on my website on how to approach HIIT training in an extremely efficient way, like how to get to the right heart rate zones that elicit increases in stroke volume and left ventricular hypertrophy, how to recover between those sets because you need to replenish creatine phosphate. So that the subsequent sets are at the same or even higher intensity. Otherwise, like most people get HIIT training wrong because they don't rest long enough. It's like a counter to like, no, I just need to go harder. Well, guess what? Now you're not getting up to that. Maybe the first interval you get your heart rate up, but then you're half-assing it. Now you're not getting high enough because you didn't recover long enough and you haven't replenished creatine to generate to be quickly get your heart rate up.

Miguel Bertonatti: That's uh, I train a lot my vo2 max and I climb up from zone two to zone five strategically in intervals Um, and I wanted to bring up about because you talk about longevity for vo2 max Yeah, are you familiar with the health hazard ratio of what a poor vo2 max is like? so the health hazard ratio risk measures your likelihood of adverse outcomes in life, like cardiovascular disease and all causes of mortality. Vascular disease, smoking, and diabetes have a two to four times more likely to have an adverse outcome, which is basically 100 to 400%, right? Just smoking, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. A poor VO2 max has a 300%. You're four times more likely to have an adverse outcome in your life with a poor VO2 max. Look it up. Health hazard, racial risk.

Andres Preschel: I mean, look, because it's just simply like how is your body sending out blood and oxygen and that's your life force. If you have poor management of your literal life force, you're going to die sooner and you're going to suffer along the way. So anyway, HIIT training, all that, I would do it on days that you have high recovery. I had Kristen Holmes on the podcast. She took me through a study of elite populations of athletes. She showed me. You know, if you compare an athletic population that's training six times a week, just whatever, following a standard program, versus three times a week, according to the recovery scores, that population that's training half as much, training half as much time, performs better, lower risk of injury, and just feels better overall. Easy. You just saved a ton of time and effort, and you're pushed to get healthier and live longer. And you do that based on HRV, which is the next metric that I wanted to cover, right? So, there's a great analogy that I can share for HRV to help people make sense of it.

Carlos Bertonatti: Imagine if you have… Yeah, because I know you're obsessed on this subject.

Andres Preschel: I'm so obsessed that in my old car, my tag, like my license plate was HRV. I swear.

Miguel Bertonatti: Well, listen, by the time we finish this podcast, you better get my HRV from 40 to 80 or above because I roam at 40.

Andres Preschel: I'll tell you what, there's so many like variables, even genetic things.

Carlos Bertonatti: But hold on, I want you to just for, because we're going to, we're going to go into that. Um, but I want you to like explain in simple terms for the average viewer what HRV means, why it's important and how you can take some steps to really kind of change it in a positive way.

Andres Preschel: Absolutely, I'm so glad you asked. So, what HRV literally means is the small degree of variability between your heartbeats.

Miguel Bertonatti: Okay, so if you- The time in between those heartbeats.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, so like for example, you know a normal resting heart rate, and I know ours is much lower, right? It's 60 beats per minute. That assumes an average of one beat per second. But there's a small degree of variation, like there could be a heart rate interval within those 60 seconds where it's like 1.1 seconds, then it could be 0.9, 0.95, 1.05, right? And it averages out. And that small degree of variance is related to the way that you breathe. Because every time you inhale, you actually see a decrease in your heart rate variability, and a slight increase in heart rate. Every time you exhale, you have more parasympathetic activity. So if you look at the branches of the autonomic nervous system, most people tuning in will probably know, sympathetic is fight or flight response, a little bit more stress. Parasympathetic is rest, digest, and heal. It's like slowing you down. There's no danger of restore. And your breath is the way that you breathe right now. It doesn't have to be high performance. At a baseline, the way that you breathe, that's the most accessible way to influence the state of your nervous system immediately.

Miguel Bertonatti: If you look at any breath work, they're always longer on the exhales because it calms the central nervous system down.

Andres Preschel: Exactly, because you double the parasympathetic activity. You increase HRV. So anyway, that small degree of variance is related to breathing, how you breathe. So that's what heart rate variability literally means. Okay, now that we understand this, let me take you through the methodology.

Miguel Bertonatti: So, to take it a little further with HRV, it's the variation of time between heartbeats measured in milliseconds, but it's also your two-week trend compared to your three-month average. So, it gives you an average, well, at least on the Oura ring.

Carlos Bertonatti: Yeah, if you were a device.

Miguel Bertonatti: If you were the HRV of the Oro range, it just gives you your two week trend over your three month average. So when you're low, it's like, yo, this is not today. This is an accumulated effect that you need to slow the hell down.

Andres Preschel: I'm so glad you brought that up because it really just, if you want to make decisions based on HRV and other biometrics, it comes down to like what your trends look like. And this is an extremely subjective experience, like an end of one clinical trial on yourself, so you can make educated decisions on your physiology and your lifestyle and the kind of stress you're gonna add in deliberately, which we know as health habits, but they can be overdone and underdone. So, a really good analogy to help people understand HRV that I often share is like, imagine if you have a yogi in a meditative state. It's like hands at the heart center, lotus pose, eyes closed, like deep, like alpha theta state of meditation, right? all of a sudden a lion appears and the yogi has to like snap out of it and run away so yogi is like sprinting away All of a sudden these zookeepers come and they get the lion and they put her in a cage. And now the yogi is asked to return to this deep meditative state. So a yogi with high HRV, with high measure of adaptability that can self-regulate effectively, as soon as that stressor is gone, they can effectively return to baseline. And also when the stress happens, they can effectively run away.

Miguel Bertonatti: So imagine- Because their nervous system is already programmed to that.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, the nervous system knows how to deal with stress and how to recover from a stress response.

Miguel Bertonatti: That is their natural state of being, right?

Andres Preschel: Yeah, it's an adaptable state.

Miguel Bertonatti: So for somebody who's always stressed, calming the central nervous system to improve HIV is harder. It takes more effort, more mindfulness.

Andres Preschel: Imagine this, and I think anyone can appreciate this. Imagine if you're in traffic and someone cuts you off and you're all pissed off and you're throwing a fit. How often do we bring that energy home? You know? Your ability to let that go and just move on with your life literally reflects your HRV and your adaptability.

Carlos Bertonatti: You know what's really funny about what you just said? There was a book, I literally, I read one page because I just didn't have time to get back to it, but it was a book about trauma. And the book starts by saying, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a, what's it called? An impala in the Serengeti, you know, a lion comes, It traps it, it gets it, but then another line comes and fights them off and the lines start fighting and all of a sudden the impala runs away and then, you know, the lines get distracted and they go away. All of a sudden the impala is not traumatized. It just goes right back to what it's doing, like if nothing happened. The thing with human beings is that we do exactly what you just said. It's very hard for us to let go of that stress and come back to that baseline.

Miguel Bertonatti: Being present and that being in the future and the past, and we can perpetuate chronic low-grade inflammation stress in our body for months at a time. And that's what will take you to disease. When you live in fight or flight, I've personally could say I've lived for a lot of years in fight or flight. Now, for the first time in a couple months, it's like, I'm really calming down. I'm working on increasing my HRV and calming my central nervous system. So it becomes, I become familiar with that state constantly. And that is my baseline.

Carlos Bertonatti: That's a really good analogy about the yogi though, I like that. It's not original, I think I heard it on a famous podcast. No, but I'm saying it's a really good analogy to understand it.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, you can see and feel the difference.

Miguel Bertonatti: And just on a note, because you can maybe touch on this and we can move on to the next biological marker. I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, that for example, for me, HRV at 40 might be healthy. Like, for some people it might be 80. I know there's a bracket, depending on the age you should be higher, especially if you're healthy, but some people are just good at 50 and they can have the same, I guess, health than a person that's at 80, right?

Andres Preschel: Don't focus on the number, focus on the trend, because it is by far the most subjective biometric. The most subjective. Extremely subjective. That's why I always say, oh my god, but dude, my brother has such a high HRV. focus on your HRV, do what's within your control, do what you can do. And by the way, going to the breathwork, which is the most successful way to influence the state of your nervous system, I always recommend, especially for my high performers, there's three opportunities you have each day to apply a small degree of breathwork that has an immediate impact on your HRV and the way you feel and your presence and peak performance. It is anytime that you're either dealing with or anticipating stress. Like right now, for example, we're in this conversation. Imagine how many people have to have difficult conversations at work or with their family or their wives or their kids. And they just want to be more prepared to have the conversation, more present. This is a secret weapon. No one knows you're doing this, that you can change your breathing. Nobody notices it. But you, objectively, are more prepared to handle, yeah, to have more oxygen going to the brain, to have higher HRV, to be more present. The way you do it is a modified 4-7-8 breath. Let's do it right now. Let's do it right now. I'll lead you guys through it. Let's do it right now. Let's go.

Miguel Bertonatti: The other podcast, we were OMing, so don't worry about it.

Andres Preschel: I love it. So if you're listening to this episode, do this with us. Let's go. Put everything down. Put everything down.

Carlos Bertonatti: If you're driving, please do not. If you're driving, pull over. Stop the car, pull over.

Miguel Bertonatti: Record this and get home and do it. If you're just watching Instagram through your feet, stop, get off, and listen.

Carlos Bertonatti: And if you really got balls and you're in the gym, stop and do it.

Andres Preschel: And you can do it between sets to shorten that time frame between like a hit interval. So look, from what I know and understand, this is like the single most efficient way to regulate your nervous system through applied breath work. Okay? So it's very simple. We're going to start doing a four second inhale. Slow and subtle. You're going to hold for seven seconds. and you're gonna exhale for eight seconds. You can exhale through your nose or through your mouth, but all the inhales through the nose. Keep practicing that 4-7-8 as I take you through the other physiological cues for more parasympathetic activity. But right off the bat, I want you guys to notice something. Keep doing the 4-7-8. Both of you guys made a huge mistake. You're using your upper chest and shoulders to breathe. So you're breathing vertically. I want you to relax upper chest and shoulders and breathe horizontally. Use your belly. Feel your belly spinning, contracting, because automatically what it's going to do is two things. Number one, you're going to use more of the vagus nerve, which is tucked up right beneath your stomach. near the diaphragm and when you engage that vagus nerve, you get more parasympathetic activity. On top of that, as you draw air to the lower lung, in the lower lung you have greater surface area and a higher concentration of alveoli where oxygen exchange occurs. So every breath you take is suddenly more efficient. So in order to get the same amount of oxygen and VO2, you can afford a lower Well, breathing rate equals more parasympathetic activity. So anyway, we're breathing horizontally, four seconds in, seven second hold, eight seconds out. Another thing I want you guys to notice is when you breathe with your nose, are you breathing up the nostril? or you're breathing into your face. That makes a difference too because it's a further way to guarantee that you're breathing horizontally, not vertically. So try to breathe into the back of your head and feel your breath accumulating in your throat, almost like you're gonna fog up a glass. In yoga, it's called an ujjayi or lion's breath. Feel that breath in the back of your throat. And you want this to be so subtle that if you had a candle in front of your face, you wouldn't blow it out. So it's a very relaxed, very slow breath. Interestingly, in that seven second hold, something called accumulation of CO2 happens. So in that little bit of a breath hold, and I know it might seem counterintuitive for the listeners or even for you guys, like I feel like I have this urge to breathe and like I kind of want to breathe more quickly. Most people don't know how to hold their breath. Yeah, because you're accumulating CO2, but that has an important physiological effect, believe it or not. That increase in CO2 has a cardio-inhibitory effect that actually slows down the heart rate. And over time as we teach our body to accumulate more CO2 and we build up our CO2 tolerance, our baseline levels of stress go down and we increase things like lactate threshold and BO2 max. So just like when you go to the gym and you stress out your muscle mass and you feel that pain in your muscle but you know it's going to give you that adaptive response, when you hold your breath and do these longer exhales and you get that urge to breathe, you're training the physiology that gives you a positive adaptive response to increase your threshold for stress. So 4, 7, 8, into your face with your nose using the diaphragm, horizontal breathing, very, very subtle. And I like to do this anytime I'm dealing with or anticipating stress. I like to do this before I have anything to eat because objectively we eat better in a parasympathetic state. You get more blood flow to the digestive tract, better motility in the gut. And you create a more present moment where you can better judge how much food you should eat. And you reduce emotional decision-making around food. You're more logical. That worked. Yeah. You're more present, right? You feel good? That worked. Yeah, you have higher energy.

Carlos Bertonatti: And you know what? I had never done the breathing back. It made a big difference. Yeah, I'm glad. I feel high is what I feel. Look at your dad's face.

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Carlos Bertonatti: Make sure to go to the MHI Recommends section on our website to learn more about True Diagnostic testing and get your exclusive discount code. Or simply give us a call so we can point you in the right direction. For now, stay healthy and God bless.

Miguel Bertonatti: It's funny, this actually reminds me of, you know who Jim Poole is? No. The guy that did the Newcom disc. So the Newcom disc works with the 6 acupressure point of the meridian system, and it's on your left. It's actually on both, I don't know why he says it's only on the left, I looked it up. Anyways, it's a disc that was used with the technology of Tesla and some other scientists like him. that basically recalibrates your nervous system so you can go from beta brainwaves, which is what we're on, we're probably low beta brainwave right now, down into theta brainwave, like within 5 to 10 minutes.

Andres Preschel: And it probably trains your nervous system too.

Miguel Bertonatti: And so, this reminds me, and I was talking to Carlos about this. Well, you've got this, yeah. I love Yeah, for the Vegas Nerve. I was actually wearing our podcast. You see, you can do anything here, bro. This is a Beyond Biohacking podcast. My point is, after working out, I teach our clients a lot. You want to bring your body from that fight or flight back to that grazing moment. And one of the best ways is I put on the NuCom, which naturally, magnetically biohacks your system to go into that theta brainwaves. with breath patterns, but the four, seven, hold, eight, second exhale, I'm gonna start applying it. My point is, if you want better recovery, better HRV, you just freaking cause massive hormetic stress, you're in that fight or flight, where I tell people, if you grab a pen and you're shaking, that's your central nervous system very stressed out, you wanna calm it down. That's a really good litmus test. So you can actually get restorative much faster, right? Because you're not gonna restore it in that, freaking fight or flight effect. And cortisone and I train middle of the day. Like we, that's, that's just like our people go to lunch.

Carlos Bertonatti: We go to the gym and then I, I literally, I looked at my yearly report on the aura. My average time to work out was two o'clock, two o'clock, 2 PM.

Miguel Bertonatti: Yeah. Mine is 1 32 PM.

Andres Preschel: So the natural dip in cortisol and you just, yeah.

Carlos Bertonatti: And I just feel, you know who, you know, who taught me that was a Minkoff. Linkov was like, hey, the best time to work out is, it's not in the morning, it's when you're already warm. Higher core body temp. Yeah, when you're already warm and you're going and you're awake and all this stuff. And for me, it just, it naturally fell at that time because, you know, I guess that's when everybody goes to lunch and it's like the day calms down. I'm like, oh, great, I can escape for 30 minutes.

Miguel Bertonatti: Well, I mean, that's really relying on the circadian rhythm of the muscle skeletal gene clocks that we have. I don't know if you know those, but we have actually skeletal muscle gene clocks that regulate when is the best time to work out. Metabolically speaking, because we're most vascular, we're most warmed up, our hormones are peaking and it's debatable. There's different There's different thoughts, school thoughts on it, but different studies between 1 and 7 p.m. is the time.

Andres Preschel: Yeah, it depends on the population. Some people just need to get out there and they need to find something they can adhere to, but some people want to have this level of precision to maximize their workout.

Miguel Bertonatti: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Last point on that, the reason why I like also restoring, it could be just breathing, how you did without this Newcombe thing. More than anything, because it's 1 p.m., we finish training, and then we have back-to-back-to-back meetings. And a lot of times I'm on these meetings, and when I'm done, I'm like, ah, man, I could've said that. All these things that I forget is because when you're in that fight or flight, you're not in a resilient, creative, thoughtful, present moment, right? So when you calm that central nervous system down, I get back on that meeting, and I'm as creative as it gets, right?

Carlos Bertonatti: And before you say that, I'll tell you this. For all you guys that think that this is hocus pocus stuff, this stuff works. This stuff works.

Miguel Bertonatti: There's data. Let me see you without a shirt. Let me see you without a shirt. I'll take off my shirt and I'll show you what I look like. Let me see if you look at what you look like.

Andres Preschel: This works. This works. But look, you know, it's well established in psychology that peak performance happens at a moderate level of stress and through this kind of interoception, applied breathwork, knowing your physiology, all this good stuff, you can quite literally turn that stress out in your favor on the spot. Yeah, you're in control now. You're in control. That's what I'm saying.

Carlos Bertonatti: It's going back to that trauma thing that I told you about. You can go back, boom, something stressful happens, something traumatic happens, you got in a fight, you got in an argument, boom, you can reshift that without having to carry all that load and all the garbage that comes with it. So you said, I'm sorry, VO2, HRV. No, so it's VO2 max, HRV.

Andres Preschel: We killed those. The last thing I want to say on HRV, the best opportunity, dealing with stress, anticipating stress before you eat and in bed to sleep. Do a few rounds. That's the best. And then also- Before I eat and- And in bed as you're getting ready to go to sleep. You know what?

Carlos Bertonatti: That's really interesting about the eating because sometimes I find myself where I have, you know, I fast a lot and stuff like that. I can fast for days, but sometimes when like my hunger kicks in or I'll just start eating, I'll get into this momentum. Where I'll get out of control. So it's like, you know what, I'm going to start, I'm going to start incorporating it before I eat. Cause I do it in sleep.

Miguel Bertonatti: There's an article that I saw that says take five deep breaths before you actually have lunch or any meal to just calm yourself down. This is a step beyond the five breaths. This is like, yeah. So again, seven in. How long do you do it for?

Andres Preschel: Four in. Seven hold, eight exhale. How many rounds should I do that? That's a great question. So the lower your baseline levels are of stress and the better you get at this, the less you need to do. Some people might need to do 20 rounds. Yeah. I do, dude, I do this one time. Well, I take it, I'm a free diver. I take it to the extreme. When I'm in bed, I do like a four seconds in, I do like a one minute hold and like a one minute exhale. It's something ridiculous. And I will talk off record about this.

Carlos Bertonatti: I love that actually, because I felt like I could go, I could, I could excel for a long time. Okay. So VO2 max, HRV, fat free mass index.

Andres Preschel: That's just like basically maximize how much lean muscle you have on your figure. It's the organ of longevity. It has the highest resting metabolic rate of any tissue in the body. So we know that if you make the effort to gain muscle as you age, you're going to have more calories that you burn at rest. So all of a sudden, like you can stay lean. People lose muscle as they age naturally, so eating the same food that you ate when you were 20, the same exact meals, all of a sudden you eat that when you're 40, and you're gonna gain fat.

Miguel Bertonatti: And then it's also like, basically it's like a different… And so what do you recommend for people, because for you to know what your body mass index is, or how much muscle content you hold versus visceral… Do a DEXA scan.

Andres Preschel: A DEXA scan. And the body health… You get exposed to radiation, so I recommend a DEXA once or twice a year in between, and body works well.

Miguel Bertonatti: Okay. Yeah.

Carlos Bertonatti: So this might be kind of like a redundant question, but, um, so. You know, I think that we've gone to a point in our industry where like, we're pouncing on mitochondria health. Right. And it's, and it's a super important subject. I mean, we just, we just had Sandra Kaufman here on the, in the show earlier. And, you know, she was very honest and like, Hey, we don't exactly know some of these things, you know? So, but you know, one of the biggest challenges in biohacking is knowing how to tailor a strategy to your individual biology. Right. And so Yeah, into your lifestyle. And you know, I, I'm, I'm a, I'm a big believer that a big part of the problem is that we have too many damn options, especially when it comes to food. Right. So, you know, with so many different tools and so many different protocols out there, what advice do you have for someone who's just starting out in biohacking and feels overwhelmed by all these options?

Andres Preschel: I think at a baseline and even the more advanced biohackers, every single person should try to add back in what the modern world leaves out. So we should do what we have been designed to do over millennia. People will often say like, oh yeah, let's look back at human evolution. Dude, evolution didn't start with you and evolution. Evolution started when we were a speck of algae in the ocean. What's like the one thing that's been around every single day since that time and even before that time? The sun. Get your if you get your timing the timing of light, right?

Carlos Bertonatti: Mm-hmm You're gonna set the foundation for your kid in rhythm to support you in ways that you would never in bed I can I'm a big believer in like your sleep starts the moment you wake up and you look into the exactly That's the no it resets the super cosmetic nucleus, which is what Sandra Kaufman touches in it It cascades to all the other clock. Yeah when the blue light interacts with the retina activates the SCA I tell people all the time like you want to start the best biohacking in the world.

Andres Preschel: Looking into the sun. Dr. John Lawrence's.

Carlos Bertonatti: If you want to do the best biohacking in the world that's easy, cheap, and I mean free, and you can do it every day, every morning, step out, the moment you wake up, put your feet on, I don't care if it's grass, rock, or you know, dirt, look into the sun.

Miguel Bertonatti: No, but it has to be grass or some sand, water, it can't be cement or like a street.

Andres Preschel: Some form of soil. And if you wake up before the sun, you get a sun lamp, full spectrum sun lamp. A lot of my clients wake up early, they get that.

Miguel Bertonatti: Now you're too hardcore, I'm not doing it.

Andres Preschel: I'm on my way to the sun.

Miguel Bertonatti: I wake up at six in the morning and I sit on my juvene and when the sun comes out I go. You can just turn on the lights.

Carlos Bertonatti: Look into the sun and just be there for five minutes present. You know what? This breathwork is amazing for those five minutes.

Miguel Bertonatti: I think that the biggest takeaway is that breathwork that nobody really pays attention to but there is so much scientific data that is so credible. And in fact, I'm going to take you up on it. I'm going to tell you what my HRV is. I'm going to tell you in two months and I'm going to start doing it breakfast, whenever I eat and before I sleep.

Andres Preschel: That's turned out to be the highest ROI strategy of anything I've ever recommended. And I did not expect that to be the case.

Carlos Bertonatti: Well, I'll tell you this, look, I don't want to get all juju, but there's a reason why in the Bible it says God created men by giving them the breath of life. And he blew into his nostrils. So there is power in the breath for sure, man.

Andres Preschel: Anyway, what can everyone do? What should everybody do? The light management. In the evening when the sun goes down, we obviously should experience sunset. We don't. We turn on the lights. Mimicking sunset. Using lights that are typically more red, amber colored, low. you know, blue light influence, be mindful of your phone. And then you're going to look like this.

Carlos Bertonatti: This changed my life. The blue blockers changed my life. And you know what the funny thing is? It's a one time investment. You buy it one time. You're not going to spend, you know, refills on melatonin and all this bullshit. Just wear these damn glasses. They will change you.

Andres Preschel: I'm going to tell you guys something. There's something that I know about these glasses that I don't think anybody else knows or maybe no one else has really talked about. And I'm going to tell you that once people catch on to this, everybody's going to start talking about it. Okay.

Carlos Bertonatti: Come on.

Andres Preschel: and just the psychology of this. Okay. I'll be surprised. The glasses, your amber colored, blue blocking glasses will become a conditioned stimulus. What does that mean? You know the experiment with, I think it was Skinner or Pavlov? The conditioning.

Carlos Bertonatti: With the dogs.

Andres Preschel: The dogs. So the dogs are in cages. They ring a bell before the dogs get fed. As the dogs smell the food, they start to salivate. Eventually, over time, as they replicate the study, just ringing the bell causes the dogs to salivate. The bell becomes a conditioned stimulus. As you make the habit of wearing these glasses before bed- You get sleepier. You get sleepier because you associate putting them on with sleep. And it gets better over time. I tell my clients, I'm like, now I put these on and within five minutes, my head's bobbing up and down because I've committed to that. You know what I mean?

Miguel Bertonatti: And if you want to go a step further where you wear the orange lens and then you put on the red lens about an hour to two hours before bed.

Andres Preschel: I don't need to do that. I'm fine with it because you're more calm. My dad, when I first started getting into blue eye blocking glasses through optics, my dad, who's an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon, He sent me a systematic review about how blue blocking glasses don't work. And I was very, I was like, let me, let me break this down. Here's the thing.

Carlos Bertonatti: Here's the thing.

Andres Preschel: He wasn't specific in the literature because it was looking at regular blue blocking frames that don't work. If you look up amber colored blue blocking glasses, there's another systematic review of over 16 randomized control trials with over 500 participants that supports amber colored blue blocking glasses for sleep apnea.

Carlos Bertonatti: Amber is what color?

Andres Preschel: Like that color, like orange.

Carlos Bertonatti: The evening glasses. Yeah. Amazing, man.

Andres Preschel: Well, we're mimicking sunset. So that fresh air, engaging your panoramic field of vision every once in a while throughout the day, eating whole foods, eating the rainbow, high spectrum of nutrient density, moving your body, socializing, right? Basically, man, what we've been designed to do as human beings that we don't get enough of today.

Carlos Bertonatti: work huge on ancestral life.

Miguel Bertonatti: And if you can do some cold plunging, infrared soundness, and add some advanced modalities. But pay attention to the HRV. You have to first start with the basics, the lowest hanging fruit, the nutrients.

Andres Preschel: The expensive biohacking is just here to replicate what we get in nature, and maybe in a more efficient way, or in a way that's more convenient for you if you live in a city and you can't enjoy what nature has to offer. That's, plain and simply, that's what it does.

Carlos Bertonatti: Well, andres, you know, I gotta say man the for for such a young man like yourself to you know Listen, you know because this is the first time that I actually heard your personal story Yeah, um and to have gone through what you've gone through and prepare yourself the way that you have and educated you The way that you have and how polished you are Uh, I I got nothing but pride and respect for you, man.

Andres Preschel: You've been an extremely I sent you that I said to you that before I was first He said like the same thing

Carlos Bertonatti: Listen and you're cut from the same cloth man, so I take extra pride in that and you know, you've been a fact What are we about to go eat?

Miguel Bertonatti: I mean she to your chief marketing officer like we need to make some

Carlos Bertonatti: So you've been an extremely dynamic guest. So thank you so much for coming down. And I think, I think that you have an amazing, amazing gift to offer to the world. And I can't wait for you to, to see how you grow and continue to collaborate, you know, and just tell our viewers like where they can find you. I mean, you know, you can, you can solicit Andres's services, whether you're a high performer or you're dealing with stress or you want to help your physiology. Yeah.

Miguel Bertonatti: It can be anybody. Maybe also close out with the emerging technologies that maybe you're excited about. What do you see five to 10 years from here?

Andres Preschel: And then you can close out with all your credentials and where people can find you and how your services work real quick. I mean, I think the obvious answer is the integration of AI with wearable device data. But here's the thing, bro. For people like us, it's more important now than ever to realize what only human beings can do to help people change the quality of their health. It's like the human connection, the empathy, taking accountability as a leader for someone's well-being. Yeah, I can't do that. You can never replicate that with AI. I think it's more important now than ever before for us to have social wellness, to bring together like-minded communities, to be in person like this, doing a podcast. Hanging out. That's why we love the in-person. I see where it's going, doesn't necessarily mean I'm excited about it. I think it's cool, but I think this is the coolest thing ever right here. Let's do more of this. Where could people find you and how does your service work?

Carlos Bertonatti: find you and ask you questions.

Andres Preschel: If you can find me, you'll understand how my services work. I'll put it like that. Yeah, exactly. Where do they go? What's your Instagram?

Carlos Bertonatti: You have a couple of sites. So where do they go?

Andres Preschel: You can go to either my personal website, Andres Preschel, A-N-D-R-E-S-P-R-E-S-C-H-E-L.com, or knowyourphysio.org, K-N-O-W-Y-O-U-R-P-H-Y-S-I-O.org. My Instagram is my name, Andres Preschel, and everywhere else you can find me at Andres Preschel.

Carlos Bertonatti: Yeah, man. And remember, interoception.

Andres Preschel: The last thing I want to say is, obviously, I help people understand what they need to do, how to prioritize it, all that. But a massive value add is building a relationship with someone to actually understand what they want to accomplish and why, and then holding them accountable to make the decisions. It looks like you hold them accountable. And the behavior change to see that through. And that's where my entire blend of specific knowledge, personal experience, and working with the best athletes in the world, I mean, world champion athletes in US Open tennis, Le Mans racing champions, World Series of Poker champions, Fortune 900 CEOs, but also very ambitious students and young professionals. That's where I get to help them in a deeply meaningful way. It's not just the knowledge and the precision, but the accountability and the relationship that we build in the process. Amazing, man.

Carlos Bertonatti: Well, you know, for all of you listening, we hope you gained a tremendous amount of insight as we have from Andres. He is our homie and approved biohacker, fellow warrior of the light. So if you want to learn more from him, go to his website or just simply call us and we'll point you in the right direction. Until then, we hope you stay healthy and God bless.