Don Moxley shares his journey from being a collegiate athlete to becoming a sports scientist and working in the cannabis industry. He emphasizes the importance of movement, strength, energy production, and resilience in both athletic performance and longevity.
Don also explains the importance of heart rate variability (HRV) and its relationship to overall health and mortality. He highlights the value of wearing a heart rate monitor and understanding different heart rate zones for optimal training. He shares his experience with HRV and how it can be used to assess cardiovascular health and resilience. Ways to improve HRV include lowering inflammation, improving cardiovascular fitness, optimizing sleep, and managing trauma and stress to improve HRV.
To learn more about how wearables can be used to track HRV and improve performance, be sure to check out our Best Fitness Watches for Women Article, we include other wearables like rings and bands too!
We also touched on autophagy and the role of spermidine in longevity.
The best way to reach Don is on LinkedIn. He is also on X(Twitter) and Instagram.
Spermadine Life and ModeMethod are products he mentioned.
Takeaways
Movement, strength, energy production, and resilience are key factors in athletic performance and longevity.Heart rate variability (HRV) is highly related to mortality and overall health. It’s a key indicator of health and performance.Wearing a heart rate monitor and understanding heart rate zones can optimize training and improve performance.Micronutrients play a crucial role in longevity and should be considered alongside macronutrients.Exercise enhances the endocannabinoid system and brain function, leading to a longer and healthier life. Lowering inflammation, improving cardiovascular fitness, optimizing sleep, and managing trauma and stress can improve HRV.Autophagy is essential for cellular health and longevity.Spermidine is a compound that promotes autophagy and can be obtained from certain foods.Industrialized food may be deficient in essential micronutrients, highlighting the importance of a balanced diet and supplementation.
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.43)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Don Moxley and we just had a lovely little pre -interview chat all about our things in common. Don went to The Ohio State University, was a collegiate athlete and is currently traveling around in RV, which if anybody that’s listened to this podcast before or read my blog will go back to the little thing that I call the Vegabond adventure. We did that for a little bit in a suburban, not an RV. But so lots in common, but…
What I’m really excited about is Don knows so many things about health and wellness and sports performance. And he’s got some awesome things to share with us today. But before we go into all that, Don, if you could just share a little bit, I shared briefly about your background, but if you could go into some detail and, you know, how did you get into this work? What makes you passionate about health and wellness and what you’re doing today?
Don Moxley (00:50.472)
That’s a, it’s a great question. And it’s, and, and literally you can’t separate the journey from the destination. It’s so, I grew up, share, I grew up in Eastern Ohio. We grew up in the strip pits over in Belmont County and I had every intention. I was a decent high school wrestler. I was, you know, I qualified for the state tournament twice, but never want to match there. But when I went to Ohio state with every intention of going home and feeding beef, Cabo for the rest of my life. But.
Cheryl McColgan (00:56.558)
I’m sorry.
Don Moxley (01:19.08)
I got to Ohio State, I was good enough to walk on the wrestling team, but it was a struggle. I was injured all the time. And I was one of those wrestlers that used to cut a lot of weight. I cut from 220 to 177 and hence the injury problems. But when I finally, you know, I was injured my sophomore year, I’m thinking, okay, what do I have to do to finally get going? And I had this kind of unique interaction with several people.
Cheryl McColgan (01:32.302)
wow.
Don Moxley (01:47.848)
in my life that basically said, you’ve got to get stronger. and now remember Ohio state hired their first strength coach in 1977. This is 1982. So this is right there. And the strength coach worked with football. They didn’t really know what wrestling was at the time. And, so I started exploring what does it take to get stronger? And, and then I found myself, Cheryl sitting in one of my animal science classes, animal science, nutrition, six 61 non -ruminant nutrition.
which is not a cow or a goat, but a pig. So it has a stomach like a human. And I’m thinking, well, if this is what we should be doing and farm animals, maybe this is what I should be doing for myself as an athlete. This is before we had sports nutrition as part of the athletic department. And I just, I fell in love with it. I fell in love with human physiology. I wound up changing my life around. And from the standpoint, I went from a guy who couldn’t get on the mat.
because I was injured all the time to where my last year I captained the team and, and wrestled really well and won a big 10 title and, and was, was way more successful than I should have been. so that kind of started it. I finished up grad school shortly thereafter. I did my grad work and exercise. Fizz, started working as, you know, an early personal trainer, a friend of mine.
was working with the Chicago Bulls and this is the Jordan Bulls back in the day and they called me because Brad Sellers who was the seven foot center on the foot on the basketball team back then and Dennis Hobson who was the NCAA player of the year from it from Ohio State back then went to play for the Bulls and Al Vermeel who now lives close to you there in Cincinnati calls and says hey I need someone to train my guys and so this was my first introduction to this kind of work.
About the same time I started working as a professor, I started teaching the exercise sciences there in Columbus at Columbus State Community College. And then that started a nearly a 30 year run as both a professor working in small schools, teaching primarily, doing a little bit of research. But at the same time, I always kept a foot working with a stable of athletes.
Don Moxley (04:09.416)
I also worked in the industry. So if you’re into fitness and you don’t own a heart rate monitor yet, you’re kidding yourself, go get one now. But I had a chance to work for Polar Electro, the company that makes the best version of that, which was just an eye opening experience. Because Cheryl, back then we were teaching people to measure their heart rate with two fingers on the carotid, which when you start to use tech, it’s a joke. It’s just an absolute joke.
Cheryl McColgan (04:32.078)
Yeah.
Don Moxley (04:38.6)
And so fell in love with, you know, started using tech to measure performance and do pro, you know, work like that. So big change came in 2015. I get a call from the, the now wrestling coach at Ohio state, Tom Ryan. He says he’s got an athlete that he’s struggling with. And, and Cheryl, I’m one of these guys in my house. We lived in a little town outside of Columbus called Granville. And in my house, I had a human performance lab.
I don’t know why everybody doesn’t have one. I had one. and Tom had been over the year before and I’d helped him achieve some goals. He was trying to work on. And he says he’s got an athlete that he’s struggling with and brings this kid over. And this is on a, this is nine o ‘clock in the morning on a Sunday morning. And he had wrestled a dual meet at six o ‘clock at night on a Friday night. So had nothing really in between those two times. He comes in, we wire him up. I started to do the testing.
It becomes immediately, to me, I immediately see this guy’s heart rate variability measurement is horrible. It’s essentially when he walks in on a Sunday morning, he has an HRV, which is a stress measurement response that’s equivalent to someone being in a room when a lion walks through the door. It’s a fully sympathetic response. And so we started talking about what’s going on. And I, then I,
did some testing and I said to the coach, I said, listen, what’s your problem with this athlete is that he’s maladapting to your training. He’s not adapting, he’s maladapting. And I said, you have to stop training him like you think you should train him and start training him in a manner that he’s prepared for. And so stepped in, the team had a lot of things happening with it right then.
This kid wound up turning himself around in the last month of the season. We helped him achieve all American status. Ohio state won a national title that year because we had three other, four other tremendous wrestlers on that team. and so all of a sudden I’m at Ohio state. Tom says, I want you on staff. So I go working on back with the wrestling team as a sports scientist. in 2017, we measured three and a half million data points.
Don Moxley (07:02.504)
on a wrestling team, we measured everything. And I ran correlations and I was looking at what makes a difference because so much of strength and conditioning and performance and nutrition and the adjunct fields, I say are dogmatic. They’re more religious than they are science, okay? And science means,
We measure the impact of everything we do. Is it positive? Is it negative? And again, with that athlete I was telling you about, Kenny, he was maladapting. And until we put a measurement in place that we could correlate workloads, recovery, things like that against, you’re just gonna run this kid in the ditch. So this is what we did with the team. We had a great run. I left Ohio State in 18 largely because, and this is the, this is what can be the funny part of the story.
While I’m at OSU, I have coaches calling me from around the country. Hey, what do you know about THC, cannabis and HRV? I said, I don’t know anything about it. I said, my guys are NCAA athletes. It’s against the rules. When I had a really good friend that I worked with at a wearables company out now in New Mexico who had gone to work in cannabis in Oregon. And he’s sending me notes saying, what do you, do you see this? And.
I’m looking at some of the research, I’m like, okay, this is really interesting. Well, he calls me one day, he says, you want to work in cannabis? I said, yep, I need to understand this. I need to know what’s going on. And he makes me an offer. It’s the proverbial offer. You can’t refuse. It tripled my pay from what I was making at Ohio State. So that was easy, but it meant I had to move to Florida. I moved down to South Florida. I lived in Palm Beach, Florida.
And I tell people I was selling weed in South Beach. But I was the director of applied science for a cannabis brand, a medical cannabis brand down there. And the amount of learning that took place was epic. It was absolutely epic. And when you finally pierce the veil of cannabis and what’s out there, the amount of knowledge and the amount of information is ridiculous. There’s so much there.
Don Moxley (09:26.792)
It’s a legit field. And I tell people, you know, Cheryl, listen, I taught the exercise sciences for 35 years. The number one benefit of exercise, the number one thing we should teach, the chapter one of exercise 101 should be the enhancement of what’s called the endocannabinoid system. It’s part of your nervous system that’s named after cannabis. You produce a molecule that’s called anandamide.
called the Zen molecule, that this literally it is, it’s what we go for. And we also produce a thing called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which catalyzes learning. Kids who exercise are smarter than kids who don’t. And so, today when someone asks you about health and wellness and all these things and you say, well, you need to exercise.
Unfortunately, we’ve brainwashed people to think exercise is about losing weight, which is the worst goal in the world. Worst. The benefit of exercise is that you produce anandamide, you produce BDNF, you do the things that you need to live a long life. You do the things that prevent you from ending your life too early, I should say. So that’s an important part. So.
have my little stint down in Florida, just do an amazing amount of learning about cannabis. And one of the guys I worked with down there calls me one day and says, you know, what are you doing? And I said, well, I’m looking for a project. And he said, what do you know about autophagy? And I said, well, I have a passing understanding of it. I said, I don’t have a deep understanding. He said, have you ever heard of a thing called spermadine? I’m like, nope, that’s a new one to me. He sends me this Ted talk from Austria.
that’s all in German. So I’ve got to, I’ve got to translate the whole talk. and I learned about this molecule called spermadine and, and I was like, okay, this is really interesting. And I said, what do you want me to do? And he says, I want you to do the same thing for me that you did in Florida. I want you to teach people about these things. So, three years ago, I went to work for a company called spermadine longevity labs. We have a product called spermadine life.
Don Moxley (11:43.816)
And the research shows that spermidine is critical in the autophagy process. And for your tribe that’s listening, you can’t address longevity, either health span or lifespan, without addressing autophagy. You cannot separate the two. And we now have research that shows that spermidine, this unique molecule, is critical in the autophagy pathway.
it methylates some of the key genes that drive autophagy in the cell. So there’s the short introduction, if you were looking for one. You know, started off as an athlete. I always keep a stable of people that I work with. I’ve become expert in this area of heart rate variability, understanding stress, understanding how it impacts you.
Cheryl McColgan (12:19.53)
I
Don Moxley (12:38.024)
but at the same time we now, and we’ve actually developed a product that if you go to a, a website called mode method .com, you’ll see a product there called HRV plus it’s a cannabis and fish oil product that I developed that we sell through our company. And we also have the spermidines and things. Again, we talk about that more as we go.
Cheryl McColgan (12:58.062)
Okay, first of all, Dawn, I am obsessed with your background. This is like right up my geeky little brain alley, everything that was in your background. College athlete as well, almost went into athletic training, ended up with psychology degree, so I focus more on the kind of brain part of the sports performance. But my goodness. So.
Don Moxley (13:13.672)
Good for you.
Cheryl McColgan (13:20.494)
I just don’t even know where to start. But since we’re gonna focus mostly on heart rate variability, I already feel like I need to talk to you again sometimes so we can go into some of the sports performance stuff, because there’s just not enough time for all this wonderful knowledge. But you mentioned, I think one thing that could be useful for some people listening, and then we’ll pop on to the HRV subject more deeply, but you mentioned way back that you were injured a lot.
Don Moxley (13:27.208)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (13:45.806)
in high school when you’re an athlete. And I think a lot of us, you know, the now middle aged getting over 50 kind of thing, you know, our bodies certainly experience injuries more easily. And I think it might just be useful to know what you learned during that time that helped you become more resilient because you went from being kind of injured, you said in your sophomore year and always being hurt to, you know, winning and having a really successful senior season. So what was it that you did during that time? Was it nutrition? Was it the way that you train? What, what,
Don Moxley (13:56.36)
Mm -hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (14:15.726)
or was, you know, what combination of factors? I’d love to hear all about that.
Don Moxley (14:18.888)
It was all the above. And you can’t, and as an athlete, you can’t not look at everything, but the two major elements were one, I stopped cutting weight. So, and again, you know, my young, I’m at six foot one, I would start my first two seasons around 240, 250 pounds, 230, 250 pounds. And I would either cut to 177 or 190.
I was the smallest person in my family. My younger brother who was five years younger, six, nine, you know, a biscuit over 340, you know, and a two -time state champ wrestling champion. I mean, a really talented wrestler too. Went on to play football at Ohio State. I had no business cutting weight like that. Huge mistake. Number one. Number two is since I was cutting all that weight and this is back, remember we’re starting this in the late seventies, early eighties.
The whole concept of strength and conditioning has not really bought into the general, you know, may you of the general public. And it was emerging. So we started learning about lifting. We started learning about that stuff. So number one, stop cutting weight. Number two, pay attention to the food that goes in your head. Where is it coming from? What’s going on? You know, college kids, you know, they’ve got a hot furnace and they can burn about anything that goes into it.
When you reach 40, 50, 60 years old, it’s not quite the same. You’re not burning quite as hot. So you got to pay. But the other thing that has really come to really inform my position lately is the role of micronutrients. Cheryl, so much of our nutritional information is based on the macros, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and water. And that’s
Cheryl McColgan (15:50.286)
Yeah.
Don Moxley (16:13.608)
Listen, that’s fine. I don’t want to minimize that at all. But when you start talking about longevity, we’re talking about micronutrients and we can spend more time talking about things like spermidine and NAD and nitric oxide....
