The Science of Knowing When NOT to Train Hard (HRV) with Dr. Mike T. Nelson
RP Strength Podcast
Dr. Mike Israetel, Nick Shaw
4.7 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Want to get even more jacked? Grab the RP Hypertrophy App for your training, and maximize your gym efforts with the RP Diet Coach App to nail your nutrition.
Dr. Mike T. Nelson's Links:
- Website: https://miketnelson.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmiketnelson/
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - What brings Dr. Mike back?
01:20 Dr. Mike's background and how he landed in HRV research
05:45 What HRV is in plain language
09:06 How training stress changes HRV acutely and across recovery
16:00 Deload timing: proactive blocks vs reactive adjustments
26:55 Athlete vs lifestyle stress: using HRV to decide when to push or pull back
39:30 Aerobic base, breathing rate, and resilience
43:45 Supplements and what actually matters
49:00 Device accuracy, nightly measurements, and low resting HR caveats
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, everyone to the RP Strength podcast. I am Nick Shaw and joined today by Dr. Mike. |
| 0:11.1 | Wait a second. You can't see, but I can. Not the normal Dr. Mike for the second time. |
| 0:18.8 | And like I said, if you listen to the first episode, highly encourage you to go back and listen to that one. I originally wanted to talk to Dr. Mike for the second time. And like I said, if you listen to the first episode, highly |
| 0:20.9 | encourage you to go back and listen to that one. I originally wanted to talk to Dr. Mike T. Nelson, |
| 0:26.3 | who have known for a long time just through the fitness industry, maybe only briefly met once |
| 0:30.8 | for a few seconds at a conference. I wanted to chat with you a lot about one of your big sort of areas of expertise and focus and study has been around heart rate variability. And that was originally why I reached out to have you on the podcast. And then we did a full hour plus probably episode on the last one where we didn't even talk about it. And I was like, you know what? We got to get you on for round two. So Dr. Mike T. Nelson, |
| 0:54.4 | welcome back, round two. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate it. |
| 0:59.8 | And I have more hair than the other Dr. Mike. So that's how you can tell us apart. |
| 1:02.7 | You do. Yeah, you do. Yeah, you guys both live up in the Northern States. That is true, yes. |
| 1:10.4 | And then so let's just real briefly, your background where you got your PhD, Michigan |
| 1:17.6 | Tech, is that correct? |
| 1:20.1 | Close. |
| 1:20.8 | Yeah, it's confusing because my undergrad was a Bachelor of Arts and Natural Science from |
| 1:25.4 | St. Scholastica and Duluth, Minnesota. |
| 1:28.3 | And then you are correct. I did go to Michigan Tech for postgraduate graduate work in mechanical engineering. And I |
| 1:35.1 | could not find, I originally was doing biomechanics, but I couldn't find any research in that area. |
| 1:39.6 | But I ended up looking at heat transfer. And I worked on a basic system where the large |
| 1:45.6 | microwave transmitter zaps a bunch of monkeys to see if there's any deep tissue heating, which |
| 1:51.8 | at the time was so classified they couldn't tell me it was classified until I published my paper |
| 1:59.0 | and I'm like, hey, wait a minute. |
| 2:00.9 | There's like three people here from Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. |
| 2:04.6 | How did they end up on this project? |
... |
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