Today is my birthday, so I want to take an excuse to be a little philosophical about a skill I learned in adulthood: physical agency.

Much of our culture implies that we don’t have control over the outcomes of our lives. Identities and physical traits are treated as immutable. Even in fiction, heroes are often pre-destined to their grand achievements, regardless of the efforts they make.

I was a skinny-fat nerdy kid growing up, and I thought I was simply destined to be out of shape forever. It wasn’t until I was 18 that I grew frustrated with not feeling good about myself, and decided I wanted to change.

My favorite VR app on the Oculus Quest 2 is not a game or chat room, but a meditation app called TRIPP.

TRIPP offers guided meditations, but unlike the standard Calm/Headspace audio apps, TRIPP transports you to otherworldly settings. The surreal images of giant polygonal forests or cosmic spaces help you to fully bring your attention into the meditation. TRIPP works so well, there are now several studies that verify TRIPP has a measurable positive impact on mental wellness.

Many of us are looking for friends to help us stay accountable to our fitness goals. But maybe we should be looking at our furry friends instead of our fleshy human ones.

A study found that people with dogs walk 22 minutes more per day than people who don’t have dogs, or in their words “Owning a dog indicated a large, potentially health improving, average effect…”

The hardest part of going hard on workouts is the period of soreness afterward.

I decided to invest in reducing soreness and tested the trendiest tech available, including rollers, massage guns, electric stimulation, and compression boots.

While all of those tools are helpful, the one I’ve found to cut my recovery time the most is compression boots.

What do you think you would have to do to be in the top 25% most active adults? Run a 5k every day? A triathlon once a month? Crossfit at 4am?

It’s much simpler than that.

To be in the top quarter of most active adults, you need to walk 21 minutes per day and do strength exercises twice a week.

These are the CDC’s Physical Activity Guidelines for adults, and only 23% of adults meet these guides.

Squats are great for loosening your hips, knees, and ankles. This quick and easy morning warmup can help reduce stiffness and get your legs feeling limber for the day ahead.

The warmup is 3 sets of 3 squats in 3 staggered positions. Once you try it, it’s really easy to memorize, and your joints will feel great.

When first I started yoga, I was incredibly inflexible and couldn’t do many of the poses. I was sharing my frustrations with a friend, and told her I was bad at yoga.

“You can’t be bad at yoga.”

I thought she misunderstood: I couldn’t touch my toes or clasp my hands behind my back. I was bad at yoga.

“If you can’t do a pose, just move in the general direction. You’ll get closer eventually. That’s what yoga is.”

Like 1/3 of adults, I struggle to fall asleep. My story might sound familiar: you lie down and your mind starts racing through the day’s unsolved challenges or tomorrow’s tasks.

One surprisingly helpful aid is bedtime stories. Bedtime stories give your brain something to focus on that isn’t your anxious thoughts about work, responsibilities, or relationships. You pay attention to a slow plot, a soothing voice, or detailed scenery. Eventually, you relax and fall asleep.

I interview people on their exercise habits to inform Pantheon’s design. One frequent comment I hear is that people don’t move as much as they want because they need time for rest days.

Many people mistakenly believe that they should do absolutely no exercise on rest days. Doing nothing can cause problems. They get no workouts done that day and they lose momentum on their training routine.

Breathing through your nose is important for your health. Nose-breathing can improve the amount of oxygen in your body, which helps improve your athletic performance. It can calm you down, improve your oral health, prevent snoring, and more.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite easy for everyone. I struggle with nose-breathing because of chronic allergies, and my face doesn’t have a good structure (although my mom would disagree).

In January 2021, I set out to run 365 miles in a year. From a “real” runner’s perspective, this isn’t a lot of distance, but it was an ambitious goal for me.

It led to some injuries and I had to restart in June. But on May 2022, I finally hit my goal. Here’s how I did it and some lessons I learned along the way.

The shoulder is the joint with the broadest range of motion in your body. It takes 8 muscles to move and stabilize the shoulder. Although the shoulder is complicated, there’s a simple way to improve your shoulder’s range of motion and reduce shoulder pain.

Dead hangs.

To do a deadhang, grab a pull-up bar (or other stable, horizontal bar) and simply hang from it. Hanging from a bar puts your arms into an overhead position while your weight pulls the shoulder muscles and joint, stretching everything out.

One of the best part of getting home from a long day of work is taking off your shoes. Your toes stretch, circulation comes back to your foot, and there’s a glorious moment of relief. Most shoes are not made to accommodate your feet, so your feet spend all day accommodating to your shoes.

If you want shoes made for the natural shape of your feet, you don’t have to resort to ugly toe shoes. Over the last few years, brands like Vivobarefoot and Xero have emerged with barefoot shoes that look mostly like regular shoes.

If you want to run fast, it’s not as simple as running more. While any exercise if great for improving your health, improving your speed takes more thoughtful work. If you lace up your shoes and spend some time running, you’ll see improvements, but slow jogging (or “slogging”) is a slow way to get faster.

One effective method for getting faster is the fartlek. Fartlek is a Swedish phrase that translates to “speed play,” and for runners, it’s a fun way to improve your speed.

Every morning at 6am, one guy wakes up to livestream video games. Every morning at 6am, one guy wakes up to do an intense spin session on his stationary bike. That guy is Mo (@ridewithMo on Twitter and TikTok).

Mo is an exergamer: he plays video games while exercising. After losing over 20 pounds this way, Mo started streaming his bike rides on Twitch to inspire other gamers to get fit. (Or maybe he's inspiring fitness buffs to get into gaming?) Mo has built his Sweaty Mob into a few thousand followers, and the number is growing.

Exposure to blue light at night can make it harder for you to fall asleep and reduce the quality of your sleep. It can be difficult to eliminate blue-light exposure entirely, especially if you're stuck doing late work or want to enjoy a movie or gaming session at night.

Instead of trying to cut out blue light, you can filter it using amber tinted glasses. Amber tinted glasses block blue frequencies of light that mess with your sleep.

Philosophy is for everyone, but reading philosophy is not. But what if you got philosophy delivered to you with cool music?

Akira the Don, produces a line of music called Meaningwave. Meaningwave mixes philosophical lectures and writing over hip hop beats, making for a memorable listening experience.

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.

Mindfulness as a practice for better health has exploded. But what does it mean to be “mindful?” I used to think mindfulness is something you do for 10 minutes a day, sitting in the lotus pose on a small pillow. Mindfulness, however, is not an activity, but a skill.

Mindfulness is the skill to be present of yourself, your feelings, your thoughts, your actions, and your surroundings. Meditations on Calm or Headspace are not “mindfulness” on their own - they’re workouts to develop the mindfulness muscle.

Massages are something most of us get as an indulgence. But if you work hard on your fitness, you should be investing into your recovery as part of that work. Not only are stiff muscles unpleasant, adhesions within your muscle tissue, fascia, and skin, can lead to injuries.

That doesn't mean you need to visit your local spa or drop hundreds of dollars on massage equipment. Instead you can get one of the most versatile, effective, and affordable tools: the humble lacrosse ball.

You may have felt it before. The days get shorter, the weather gets colder, and your energy fades with the fall. The winter blues. What you might not know is this cycle of energy is physiological. It’s called Seasonal Affective Disorder. While the causes of SAD are varied, one that is widely recognized is light. Light has a large impact on our mood, energy, and sleep.