Know Your Physio Case Study: Felix D.

“There’s a good, there’s a mindset shift when you are more active.”

Felix is a founder and an entrepreneur, which means his default setting is high output and constant stress. He was already active and already tracking his numbers across two wearables, a Whoop and an Oura, yet his recovery markers had settled into a plateau. His heart rate variability, the beat-to-beat signal that reflects how well the nervous system absorbs stress, was sitting in the low 20s. His resting heart rate hovered near the top of his range. A deviated septum made nasal breathing harder, which quietly worked against the calm, parasympathetic state that deep recovery depends on. The raw effort was there. The system underneath it had not yet been trained.

What changed was not a harder program or a stricter diet. It was data-driven health coaching: ten recurring calls with Andrés Preschel over roughly three months, each one spent reviewing Felix’s wearable data together and turning an invisible nervous system into numbers they could actually move. Zone 2 cardio, interval work, breath training, protein and sleep timing, all of it dosed to exactly what his recovery could absorb that week. Over those three months Felix did not simply feel better. He posted record-high readings on the exact markers that had been stuck.

Day 1: Baseline Assessment

A driven founder whose recovery markers had plateaued in the low 20s.

For a long time, more effort was the only lever Felix had. He could train hard, but without a coach reading the data alongside him he could not tell which inputs were paying off and which were quietly costing him recovery. The turn came when the work stopped being about pushing harder and started being about reading the signal. Every week, Andrés sat with the wearable numbers and showed Felix where his body was actually heading. When the HRV trend finally broke higher, Felix saw it on the screen himself:

“HRV is also bouncing up.”

The Recovery Breakthrough

From a low-20s baseline to record-high readings of 30 and 31

Heart rate variability is one of the most honest signals of whole-body resilience, and it is also one of the hardest to move once it has plateaued. Felix started from a baseline of 23 and a trend that lived in the low-to-mid 20s. Through the coaching, that trend climbed. A month into a focused block his readings had moved into the high 20s, and then he logged a 30, the highest the coaching had ever tracked for him. It was not a one-off lucky night either. By June his readings had strung together into a run of 31, 30, 31, 31, a new ceiling that held across consecutive days.

What mattered was not the size of the baseline shift, which was deliberate and steady, but the appearance of record days at all. A nervous system that had been flat was now producing its best numbers on record, the marker of a body that had genuinely learned to recover rather than one simply having a good day.

Cardiovascular & Respiratory Markers

Two of the most honest signals of a calm, well-recovered body both fell to the lowest levels the coaching ever tracked.

The cardiovascular and respiratory data told the same story from a different angle. Resting heart rate, a clean readout of baseline cardiac stress, fell across a four-day streak from 61 down to 56, which Andrés flagged as the lowest he had ever tracked working with Felix. A resting heart rate that low is the hallmark of a calm, efficient heart that no longer has to work as hard at rest.

His sleep respiratory rate moved in the same direction. Once sitting in the mid 16s, it dropped to record lows, as low as 15.3 on the Whoop and 13.8 on the Oura. Breathing that slows overnight is a sensitive sign that the body is deeply relaxed during sleep, and seeing it confirmed on two independent devices made the change impossible to dismiss as noise. Two of the most trustworthy recovery signals available had both fallen to the lowest readings the coaching had on record.

“Um, super important. I feel the benefits from it.”

Recovery & Sleep

When the nervous system settles, sleep is the first place it shows

Sleep was where every other gain compounded. As Felix’s nervous system settled, his nights deepened with it. He reached a 90 percent average sleep score across the month and posted a single-night peak of 99 percent, one of the best he had ever recorded, while his sleep respiratory rate fell to its lowest levels on either device. Much of this came from unglamorous, repeatable habits rather than anything extreme. Training was moved earlier so it sharpened his focus for the workday instead of taxing his evenings. Protein was timed around his sessions and casein was added before bed to feed overnight repair. Breath work addressed the nasal-breathing limitation head-on. None of it was dramatic. All of it was consistent, and consistency was the entire point.

Foundations of Success

A data-led system built around a busy founder's real schedule.

Dual-Wearable Data

Whoop and Oura tracked side by side every week. HRV, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, and recovery turned an invisible nervous system into numbers Felix and Andrés could read and move together.

Breath And Aerobic Base

Zone 2 cardio and interval work to build the engine, paired with Buteyko-style breath tables and static holds to train a calmer nervous system, especially valuable given a deviated septum that made nasal breathing harder.

Nutrition And Sleep Timing

Protein dosed to support training, casein before bed to feed overnight recovery, and a sleep routine refined week over week until 90 percent monthly sleep scores became normal rather than rare.

Weekly Accountability

Ten recurring coaching calls over roughly three months, each one reviewing the latest data and dosing the next week's training to exactly what Felix's recovery could absorb, so a founder's stress never outran his repair.

Felix’s story is not a six-week sprint. It is a system he can keep running, a weekly feedback loop where the data coaches him as much as the coach does, and where each habit either earns a better number or reveals its cost. He is still building, pushing his recovery higher from an already strong base and refining the inputs that move it. But the throughline is simple. The plan was never the hard part. Seeing it work, week after week, in his own numbers from two separate wearables, is what made it stick.

That is the promise of data driven health coaching: you stop guessing, and you start running a system built around your own physiology. Book a call with the Know Your Physio team to see what your data says about you.