HRV vs. VO2 max vs. ECG: Which wearable metric ACTUALLY matters? | Prof. Malcolm Findlay

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. The use of wearable devices that promise to transform our health is booming. But do they work? These watches and rings provide measurements and feedback to help you understand your health and take steps to improve it. Measurements include sleep quality, step count, and others. But the metric getting a lot of attention right now is heart rate variability or HRV. And it's no wonder. HRV is said to be a good indicator of your stress levels, of your heart health, and your overall well-being. But is it really all that useful to track HRV? Is there anything else that we'd be better off tracking instead? And how accurate are these wearable devices anyway? Joining us with answers is professor Malcolm Finley, a board certified cardiologist and electrophysiologist and an honorary professor of cardiovascular medicine and devices. A leader in the field of measuring heart health, he's well positioned to give us the truth. You'll leave today's episode understanding whether a wearable device could help you, how to get the most out of it if you have one, and what are the best things to track to improve your health. Malcolm, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Now we have a tradition here at ZOE where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners. And you can answer with a yes or a no, or if you have to, a one sentence answer. Okay. Can HRV tell you something about the health of your heart? Yes. Can wearable health tech help you look after your heart? I think so. Could focusing on the wrong numbers put your heart at risk? I think if you focus on the wrong numbers, you can do the wrong things and get the wrong idea. So I guess yes. Can two people with the same heart rate have completely different HRVs? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. If you wanna live longer, is HRV the number to focus on? If you wanna live longer, there are lots of things to focus on, and HRV is just one of the many things that you might use to guide you. But, actually, I think there are more sensible things you could use to guide you on focusing on HIV. And what's the most common myth that you hear about heart health? Okay. So the most common myth is that one thing, for example, concentrating on doing exercise can negate concentrating on some really important medical issues such as high cholesterol. And so just looking after yourself in a general way doesn't negate the need for some proper medical intervention. Well, I'm excited to get into all of that, Malcolm. And actually, for today's show, I thought I woke up this morning. I thought I'm gonna actually wear two different types of watch, both of …