5 Numbers Every Man Must Track for Long-Term Health, Strength & Energy #664

Most men think they know their bodies. They don’t.
 And the gap between what you feel and what’s actually happening under the hood is where decline begins.

If you’re training without data, you’re flying blind. In this episode Lachlan breaks down the five numbers that predict whether a man ages powerfully or ages early. These are the same metrics he used while running 58 marathons in 58 days across the US and Australia, and the same metrics his clients use to rebuild strength, clarity, and confidence.

You’ll learn why resting heart rate exposes stress, how HRV predicts emotional load, why sleep destroys more progress than poor training, and why VO2 max is the ultimate long-term health indicator.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Stop Training Blind
• 2:33 Who I Am And Why Data Matters
• 4:18 Tools, Wearables, And Building Baselines
• 6:10 Metric One: Resting Heart Rate
• 7:33 Metric Two: Heart Rate Variability
• 9:03 Metric Three: Sleep Quality
• 10:33 Metric Four: Training Load
• 12:08 Metric Five: VO2 Max
• 14:03 Strength As A Longevity Bonus
• 15:03 Turn Data Into Daily Action

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:58

If you're a man in your 30s or 40s and you're still training without data, you're basically flying blind. You wouldn't fly a plane without instruments, so stop flying your health that way. You think you know your body, but you probably have no idea what's happening under the hood. And here's the truth I've learned as my life has gotten heaps busier, fuller, and more demanding. You don't build long-term health, strength, and energy by guessing. You build it by tracking the right five numbers. The difference between men who age powerfully and the men who decline early often comes down to whether they track these numbers or not. And it's something that I've worked on over the last couple of years. So today I'm gonna walk you through exactly what those five numbers are, why they matter, and how they will completely change your energy, your strength, and your longevity. By the way, if you want to see how you score across all four areas of your life, take the core four scorecard. It's linked below. If you're here for the first time, my name's Loughlin Stewart, and I am a life coach who helps men build a strong body, a calm mind, clear purpose, and a confident life. And I do that with the process of the core four. But I'm also the guy who ran 58 marathons in 58 days across the entire US, so all 50 states and eight states and territory of as Australia. And to be honest, I'm fitter now and more capable at 34 than I was at 24 because of the five numbers that I'm about to share with you. So let's jump in. As I've gotten older and life has gotten busier with business, marriage, responsibility, taking on big challenges and pressure, I realized something important. Looking fit wasn't enough anymore. I didn't want to just be fit for a photo, although I do love that, or fit for a session. I wanted to be fit for the next 30 years. You know, capable of doing hard things, capable of carrying my life, especially as I'm about to become a dad, capable of pressure and being pain-free, energetic, and reliable. A strong father, a better husband, and a better leader. But that doesn't come from random training and blind effort. It comes from measuring what actually matters, you know, these numbers that I talk about that tell you the truth about your body. And this is what the strong body dashboard is. And before I give that to you, I have been training at an elite level for a number of years. And what I want to give you is something that everyday people can work with. So whether you are wanting to be a elite athlete or you are an elite athlete, or you're just a bloke who wants to get more out of their life, I have used this and seen it work with men across all ranges of fitness and life to improve the scores that we're about to share with you. And there are more that we could go into, but I believe these are the ones that, if you want to keep it as simple as possible, are the ones that if you to focus on these and focus on improving them, they're gonna give you the best bang for your buck. Okay. And I use a Whoop, which is here, and so if you do want to get a month free on that one, there's a link in the description below. But I've used this literally for about six years now, and they keep getting better and better. And I just want to let you know as well, the numbers that I'm using across these five lines, I've taken them from different sources from Whoop data to Aura data, from general health and coach data around what they feel they are. What I believe the most important thing that you could do from here on out is get your own data and collect it because then you can start seeing patterns, baselines, and trends. So whether you use Whoop, you might use Apple Watch, and for everyone's like, Why are you wearing two watches? Well, the only reason why I have an Apple Watch is because the Whoop doesn't have a screen. So when I'm running, which I run most days, I want to see what pace I'm running at. And so the watch interface does that. But I know some of you use the Aura rings, some of you use Garmin, doesn't matter, it still gives you data, and what we're looking for is more awareness and trends or patterns that you can then build and use improvements on. So that's a really important thing that I want to do want to share with you, even though I probably will keep referencing the whoop because that's what I use and my data's on. I want you to use what you feel comfortable or what you've already got for this. So here we go with the five parts, and these aren't in any order. So the first one is your resting heart rate, is the first number. So for men, 30 to 40, average is 60 to 70 beats a minute, good is 55 to 60, great is 50 to 55, elite is 45 to 50, for men 40 to 50, the average is 62 to 75, good is 58 to 62, great is 52 to 58, elite is 48 to 52. So if your resting heart rate jumps you know eight beats or more above your normal baseline, you can tell that your body is stressed, inflamed, under a covered, or getting sick. And I know every time I have a drink, I can wake up the next morning and obviously my heart rate has shot through the roof on my whoop data, and that for me is a good indicator. And the reason why that's important for me to know, and maybe important for you to track, or actually I believe it is important for you to track, is because if you're trying to perform better or if you're feeling sluggish when you wake up, you're not jumping out of bed with the energy and oomph on the day that you would like, then you know that hey, if you're just having a couple of knockoff drinks most nights of the week to relax and unwind, that's not allowing you to have a very restful sleep. So it's something to consider and something to think about. So the second one we want to look at is your heart rate variability. So men from 30 to 40 years old, the average can be between 45 and 70. Good is 60 to 90, great is 90 to 110, and elite is 110 to 150. Men 40 to 50, the average 35 to 60, good is 50 to 80, great is 80 to 100, and elite is 100 to 130. And to be honest, I think what the best mine would have ever been was like 112, maybe. So I know I've pulled these numbers from multiple different places and put some averages together, but and as I said, when you get your own data, you can find your own baselines. But anyone who has like a 150, I'm like, wow, that is elite. To be honest, what my average sits around now is about 70, and I still consider myself elite. So we're always gonna get our own baselines, and that's why I'm such a big believer in getting your own data around this stuff, even from blood work without complicating it. But it's good to know your own data. So if you have a sharp drop below your baseline, right? This usually means once again stress, fatigue, alcohol, poor sleep, or you've got a huge emotional load on. And this is a place where a strong body meets a calm mind, right? Your sleep is the third number, and what we're looking at is sleep quality. So I look for a minimum of seven hours, and optimal is seven and a half to eight and a half. High performance is like eight and a half to nine. So most men try to outperform poor sleep. You can't, you will always lose that battle. I promise you. Yes, there is the occasional superstar who somehow thrives off five to six hours of sleep. Before I moved to America, I was doing this and I was getting through, but it wasn't until I actually allowed myself to have more sleep I realized how much I was underperforming, how unfocused I was, and how unproductive. Sleep is literally the backbone to your strong body score, right? Your training load or strain is the fourth number that we want to check. So weekly training volumes of around 150 minutes minimum, right? 180 to 240 is good. 300 to 450 is athletic. It's you know, I'm sitting around that number around six hours a week. 450 to 600 is really high performance. What you want to look at there is like strength training for me, I do two to three sessions minimum, and then four to five would be optimal, but cardio you can hit two to three sessions in zone two, meaning you can talk and occasionally throw in that high intensity. What I usually follow if I'm not training towards you know, some world record thing or a marathon or a specific event, is I go back to this format, and this is what I prescribe to most people who just can commit to five days a week, is we'll do one high intensity session to really blow the cobwebs out and hit that anaerobic. We then get two strength sessions and two zone two, so longer aerobic sessions, anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes where you can talk the whole time. That's what I sort of look at. And from a stretching and mobility standpoint, I'll generally sprinkle that in just before and after the session. So if you do follow the programming to a T, you know that works really well as well. And this prevents two of the biggest mistakes for people overtraining yourself into injury or under training yourself into softness, right? It's how do we find this optimal load? So your VO2 max is the fifth number of your long-term health score. And this is my main focus at the moment. I'm trying to get mine up to sort of 63. So men age 30 to 39, the average is 37 to 41. Good is 42 to 45, excellent is 46 to 52, and superior 52 plus. Men 40 to 49, average is 34 to 38, good is 39 to 43, excellent is 44 to 48, and superior 48 plus. So aim for good to excellent in your age category. This predicts your ability to age powerfully, stay athletic, and live a long and capable life. As I said, I'm trying to get mine up to 63 at the moment. Recording this, I'm sitting at about 59 to 60. I actually dropped a point. Pissed off about that. So once you get your own data, you'll have your scores as your baselines, and all we want to look at is how do we improve your baselines? How do we improve your data? Because that's requiring you to grow, which means from a strong body perspective, we're helping you become stronger in your body and improving these metrics. So now a bonus metric that every longevity expert agrees on strength training, right? Strength is one of the most reliable predictors of long-term health and independence. We're looking at grip strength and various other things. So, simple benchmarks, as I said, would be what I went through before, but you can look at pull-ups or 90-second farmers carries, which is going to help with your grip strength. Just an overall good full body program is what I would work on. So here's how to put all of this into practice. We want to track these numbers daily or weekly. Use Whoop, Garmin, Apple Watch, Aura, whatever you have, or whatever you want to get access to. Build a seven-day baseline. So, what that means is once I, you know, you get a month's worth of data and we have those averages, you might say, for me, my HIV is sitting at 59. Next week I want to try and, or next month, I'm trying to get it to 60. My seven-day baseline for my averages for my heart rate is currently 41 beats a minute. I want to get that down to 40. If I'm looking at sleep, I might be at six hours and 58 minutes over the last seven days on average. I want to get that up to seven and make sure that my RAM and deep score is going up with that as well. And so there's some things that you can do from the baseline. And don't change anything. You're going to start understanding things. Just observe, right? The men that I work with one-to-one, I give them a whoop as start of their programming. And we start with four weeks of data for their baseline, and then we can make personalized changes along the way that are going to improve those metrics. One strength mark, benchmark as well. So if you get a review weekly, what did you do better? What slipped, and what needs adjusting. When you track these numbers, your energy stabilizes, your strength grows, and your confidence rises, your stress drops, and your mindset, well, this bad boy sharpens, you start aging powerfully instead of prematurely. And this is why strong body quadrant, right? Quadrant number one is one of the core four. So when your strong body improves, your calm mind improves, your clear purpose sharpens, and your confident life expands because you finally have the energy to live it. Track these five numbers for 30 days, then DM me and tell me what changed for you. I'm super keen to hear what works for you. And if you want to see exactly where you sit across these quadrants, make sure you take the scorecard in the link in the bio and it's going to give you direct feedback and even some actionable steps that you can take to start making some improvements now. And make sure, you know, for those of you who are asking about my coaching, I'm launching the Life Performance Accelerator in 2026, which is a full system approach to building the man that you know you can be using this core for. And if you want to be the first to know about it, keep an eye out, the details are coming. If you take the scorecard, you'll end up on my email list. Remember, your body is the vehicle that carries your entire life. If you want a strong life, start by building a strong body. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the subscribe button, share it, and enjoy more of these videos. We'll see you in the next video.