This post is a little more personal. I love running. Whenever I'm stressed, which is often, my mental salve is a quick run. Until I injured myself.

I'm no stranger to injury, but this injury will not give up. Every few weeks, I would get aggressive and go on a run and aggravate it all over again. I realized I had to stop running until I healed.

Without my go-to exercise, I started to feel cooped up, even depressed. So I finally succumbed into the eternal pressure that plagues us all: ads.

Being distracted can feel like the normal state of existence. We can blame our smart phones or social media, but that doesn't solve the problem. How do you move from being distracted all the time to being more focused?

If you have some work you need to get done, you may do the thing most people do, which is to create a few hours of time to be focused. You decide you won't check your phone for a couple of hours while you finish.

In his 2016 book, Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that this is backwards. By taking short spurts to focus, we're actually taking a break from distractions. In other words, we're training ourselves to be distracted as our default state.

Going on any sort of walk is a net positive, but have you noticed that you feel particularly calm after a walk in nature? Intuitively, you can probably tell that walks in nature are qualitatively different than walks through a city. But this has also been backed by research.

A study in 2008 showed that people were better able to focus after they spent time walking in nature than if they walked through an urban environment. The same researchers found that walking in nature was beneficial to people suffering from depression.

In our last newsletter, we spoke about stretching your hip flexors to help you stand taller.

There is a great multi-purpose stretch that will tackle your hips, quads, and ankles. You can do from home, while watching TV from your couch. It is called the couch stretch.

As a modern person, you sit a lot. When you sit, there's a group of muscles in the front of your hips that gets shortened in the sitting position. These are your hip flexors. The longer you sit, the more these muscles shorten.

It's not a commonly discussed issue in fitness, but short hip flexors could be holding you down.

Playing the right relaxing music at the right time can do a lot for helping you rest, clear your head, or focus. But finding the right music to play can be a bit of work, especially if you’re looking for something soothing to play when you sleep.

Rather than find music to help you relax, you can now just let a computer generate the music for you. That’s the premise of Endel, an app that plays procedurally generated music (it’s music generated by an algorithm) to help you sleep, relax, and focus.

Crossfit, Pelaton, Goat Yoga. Every few years there's a new fitness trend that everyone seems to be in on. But just like music and fashion, sometimes it's worth sticking to the classics, and there's not a more classic exercise than a walk. We've been doing it for a few million years.

The secret about walking is that while it doesn't always feel like a workout, it's legitimate exercise. Walking 1km burns about 75% as many calories as running 1km, but the effort doesn't feel the same. Keeping your body upright while propelling yourself forward, even slowly, takes quite a bit of energy.

Health tech isn’t always in the most obvious places. It’s not always a fitness tracker or a meditation app. One of my favorite health tech gadgets is actually a light bulb.

Smart lights like Philips Hue have some great health and wellness uses. You can get elaborate smart lights that turn different color, but for a more affordable price, basic smart lights will do the important stuff. Philips Hue White can change color temperature, brightness, and can be set to a schedules.

How do you improve your health with light?

One of my favorite maxims about exercise has many applications to life. It's a saying I picked up from the Russian kettlebell king, Pavel Tsatsouline:

"To press a lot, you must press a lot."

There are a few ways to interpret this. The strength-training application is that if you want to get strong at overhead press, you need to do a lot of repetitions of overhead press.

Deadlifts are one of the most hated exercises. Go to any crowded big box gym, and you’ll see lines at the squat rack, the bench press, the pull up bar. The deadlift platform, if there even is one, will be lonely and ignored. Deadlifts are hard, they often lead to injury, and it’s hard to see how they lead to looking good in the mirror.

If you’ve never given deadlifts a chance, or if you’ve sworn them off after pulling a muscle, you may want to revisit them. Deadlifts may be the perfect exercise for our overly-slouched, stressed, and stimulated age.