Hey everybody and welcome to the video.
Today I've got something a little bit different for you.
My friend Dana and I actually decided to make a video for eachother's channels.
So a little bit of a collaboration.
He's a really awesome guy and he made a video about how to collect biometric data and use
that to improve your health and fitness and weight loss.
So make sure, check the video out, make sure to give it a like if you enjoyed, head over
to his channel too and subscribe.
I'll leave a link for it at the end of the video and down in the description box.
I also made a video for his channel talking about tips for building a brand on social
media.
So if that's something you're interested in, be sure to head over there and check it out,
I'll leave a link to that as well.
But without further adieu, I'm going to hand you off to Dana, I hope you guys enjoy the
video, I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks Josh.
Hey guys, what's going on.
My name is Dana Blouin, I'm an entrepreneur and business person, and over on my channel
I make videos about entrepreneurship and how to build a business.
But I'm also a fitness enthusiast, and today I want to talk to you guys about how to capture
some of your biometric information, use that to improve your fitness and your health, and
track your progress.
Now, I do have a bit of background in this.
So one of the companies I previously founded was a quantified self company.
What that basically did was we helped people to capture their biometric information, analyze
it for them, and help make suggestions and improvements.
But my kind of obsession with data and fitness goes almost two decades back.
It really started way back in the early 2000's I was living in California and I was at the
gym, and my friend Rick would always carry around a notebook with him and he would record
everything he did.
How many sets, how much weight, you know the basic things that a lot of guys who are very
much into powerlifting really do.
They track all of those little progressions on the different lifts they're doing.
And we got to talking about it and he was telling me that he had notebooks that went
all the way back to high school, so he could see how much he had deadlifted from high school
until then, and that's really what got me thinking.
It makes sense for weightlifting, it's a very steady progression.
You can see it.
I lifted 500kg yesterday, 501 today.
Actually, I don't know anyone who lifts 500kg of anything, but you guys get the point.
You can track your progression.
So that's really what got me thinking about, 'Well, can I track things like my weight,
my blood pressure, my cardiovascular fitness, what goes into that?'
That's really when I began to start looking at my own personal biometric information.
Keep in mind, this is years before the first iPhone launch in 2007.
So I was doing quite a bit of manual recording.
Notebooks, similar to what Rick was doing.
Being able to really look at that data long term I started to see trends.
It got me thinking, "Okay, how can this be used to improve my health?"
My data analysis started with looking at things like weight, caloric intake, daily steps,
before we had phones that had built in accelerometers I actually had a little pedometer that would
click on to my belt and would give me a little LED readout each day of my steps.
Today, with a piece of wearable tech or a phone you cut out a lot of that manual recording.
There's apps and technology out there that does pretty much everything for you.
Basic stuff that you guys can start tracking every day.
Use something like a pedometer to track your steps, see what your daily weekly activities
are and try to improve that.
This is something I've taken a page out of Josh's playbook.
I see him walking to work every day, really being more mobile and active, so I've started
to do the same thing where I'm making a concerted effort to improve how much I move and walk
around every day.
Despite the fact that I work out in the mornings, I'm trying to add more activity to that, and
I see Josh doing and that's one of the things that motivates me.
I use a pedometer app on my phone to track that movement so I can analyze it.
Other things that are really important to measure as far as biometric data for your
fitness and weight loss is obviously your weight and your caloric intake.
You can manually record your weight in something just like google health or apple health on
your phone, those are there for you.
You can manually enter that and it keeps the record for you, or you can get a scale that's
connected and will automate that collection process.
Caloric intake is a little bit more tricky.
We don't have an app yet that you can just snap a photo and get an accurate calorie count
on food, but if you know what you're eating you can record that stuff, there's a ton of
food journals out there for your phone.
You can record that data and it can be stored in one of the health apps.
You can correlate that to how much exercise your doing, how much you're burning, how your
weight is fluxuating.
Some of the other data that's good to look at if you have a wearable that monitors it
is your heart rate.
Knowing what your resting heart rate is or what your max heart rate is really helps,
and gives you a lot more insight on your activity level, your caloric intake, and how you're
going to recover, what your overall health looks like.
Same thing with blood pressure.
You can manually record your blood pressure in any of the fitness for the most part, or
there are connected blood pressure cuffs that will monitor that for you and do the recording
process automatically.
Yes this data has a lot of value up front, knowing how much you're walking every week,
knowing how much your eating.
Being able to keep an eye on those things is important in the immediate, but the real
benefit of this data comes in the long term.
Having a ten year snapshot or a 5 year snapshot of your health and all that data from your
activity to your blood pressure, your weight, what you were eating, all of that adds up
to a huge valuable piece of information that is going to help you manage and improve your
health as you go forward.
It boils down to this guys, having all of that data allows you to tailor your fitness
plan, allows you to tailor the approach you're taking to your health.
That data is knowledge, and knowledge is power.
The tools are there, everyone probably has a cell phone, a lot of you are probably watching
this video on your cell phone.
You can use that to monitor your activity, your calories, everything.
There are a lot of tools and apps and devices out there.
I'm not going to make any specific recommendations because you have to find what's best for you,
but I will say there are a ton of free tools, you don't have to pay for anything if you're
just going to use it as an app on your phone.
Pedometers, if you have an iPhone it's built into your phone.
The apple health app does it for you, you don't need to download anything extra.
There are a ton of free food journals guys.
All of these apps will allow you to track this biometric information and keep up with
that information.
There are a ton of exercise performance apps as well.
You can use those to track your running, your lifting, your fitness and get much more accurate
insights into the data.
You wan't to add a wearable to the mix you can get even more specific performance information.
Like I said, things like heart rate, temperature, add those in and they give a much more wholistic
view of what your overall health is based on the data.
At the end of the day guys, the more data you have the better decisions you can make.
The same thing with your diet.
If you know how many calories are in what you're cooking it's easy to make a good diet
plan.
The same thing with your fitness and health.
The more data you have the more you can tailor it, the more bespoke it can become.
Guys, thanks for giving me the time to come on here on Josh's channel and listen to me.
If you guys like this, and you're also interested in entrepreneurship and growing your own business,
feel free to come over and subscribe to my channel.
Check out my content over there, join that community of entrepreneurs that I have over
on my channel.
I hope to see you over there guys, Josh, back to you.
Alright, so this is going to wrap it up for the collaboration, wasn't that awesome.
Dana is such a great guy I was happy to finally make this happen.
So make sure to head over to his channel, I've got my video over there, and if you're
interested in business, entrepreneurship, Dana is an awesome guy with a lot of great
content on his channel.
Be sure to check it out as well.
After having so much fun with this, if you guys are interested I think it could be cool
to have kind of a regular basis, have guest hosts.
So let me know your thoughts on that down below.
Make sure to give the video a like it helps me out a ton, and subscribe if you want to
see more.
If you're coming from Dana's channel I put out new videos twice per week.
But until next time, I will talk to you all later.
have a good one.
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