A client was telling me an anecdote about how hair dressers/barbers can look at someone and tell how long it's been since their last haircut.

‘Can you do the same thing with someone's last workout?’

No. But I can spot my tribe. It's easy to look someone up and down and assess if they do yoga, free weights, or marathons.

I”d be able to pick out crossfitters too but they just up and tell you.

You can also pick out people who drink.

Drink water that is.

Einstein’s definition of insanity ‘was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’

I wonder how he felt about watching other people doing the same things over and again and expecting different results. Can watching it happen drive you mad?

Its hard to quit drinking when you work in a bar.

Harder to embrace positivity hanging around pessimists.

Harder to fix your nutrition if you’re working in a fast food restaurant.

Environment matters.

The Olympic motto teaches us something about goal setting.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my colleague Megan's amazing results using a Continuous Glucose monitor (CGM). She leaned out, improved athletic performance (WON her most recent race) and improved her sleep, anxiety & recovery. She went from great to greater.

Naturally I had to experiment myself.

Some people walk over 10,000 steps per day.

Let’s do some math:

• You improve your gait efficiency by 1%

• You take 10,000 steps

• You’ve just improved by 10,000%

• That’s daily

Does improving 10,000% sound attractive? Walk with me.

Everyone wants to get fitter.

No one wants to buy a new wardrobe.

There's an art to training yourself

Fitness adds years to your life; and quality to those years.

Scientists measured the VO2max of 122,000 53 year old subjects and then tracked their mortality. The participants were categorized into four groups based on their baseline VO2 max: "Low," "Below Average," "Above Average," and "High." They found:

Going from low to below average meant a 50% reduction in mortality over a decade.

Going from low to above average, meant a 60% or 70% reduction in mortality.

While you may still get hit by a bus, having a high VO2 max ensures you’ll be around for a minute.

The average reader of this blog takes 10,000 steps a day. If you're going to do something over 10,000 times do it well.

The way you walk says a lot. The trained eye can pick out dozens of things about you just by watching you take a few steps. It tells:

What's happening in parts of your brain

How your balance is

what injures you’re predisposed to

Which exercises may help you move better

How effective said exercises were

And a bad tight shirt.

3,500 calories burned = one pound of fat.

The typical workout burns about 300 (weights, yoga, cycling) to maybe 900 (running) calories.

Exercising to lose weight is like flying west (from Boston) to get to Europe. You’ll get there eventually; but it’ll take a minute.

You can’t out-train a bad diet.

Everyone has tight hamstrings.

Everyone has tight hip flexors.

Everyone’s shoulders round forward.

I took 12 weeks to learn how to mobilize these areas (and more).

I thought I knew how to stretch.

I was wrong.

Her back pain went from a 9 to a 2 after tracing the alphabet with her finger. It took :30 seconds

He couldn't lift his arm past shoulder level for years, then whacked his head with his bicep after doing a vision drill. It took :20 seconds.

He couldn’t move his neck following a medical emergency, but restored full range of motion by holding his breath and doing squats. :60 seconds.

I am not brilliant, I didn't stay at a Hiliday inn express, I study z health. It is simultaneously the most powerful and infuriating fitness tool kit available.

What exactly are you training for?

Distance runners don’t train their vertical leap. Hockey players don’t practice like pole vaulters. These are obvious extreme examples, but your training specificity will affect your results.

So what target are you aiming at? Max strength? Endurance? Let’s make sure you’re training for the correct result.

Megan Beck is the 1% of the fitness profession. Not only is she strong enough to do a muscle-up, or run 70+ miles (with obstacles), she’s smart enough to teach others how they can achieve similar feats of strength.

Recently Megan began using Continual Glucose Monitoring(CGM) “to help optimize my nutrition specifically for my Ultra Racing season” with astonishing results. When someone as fit as she makes a noticeable leap in performance we take notice, and we have questions.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz posit “executives can perform successfully even if they smoke, drink and weigh too much, or lack emotional skills or a higher purpose for working. But they cannot perform to their full potential or without a cost over time—to themselves, to their families, and to the corporations for which they work.”

Welcome to family feud. I’m your host SDA. We surveyed 100 people, the top 2 answers are on the board:

Question: What do you eat the night before the big race?

The number one answer (with 95 out of 100 answers): pasta.

Number 2: it doesn't matter.

This, right here, is offensive.

Demonstrably false.

I take it personally.

You should too.

If exercise were a drug it would be the most widely prescribed one in existence; and It’s not even close.

Now for the tricky part. How much of this drug should you take? Drugs present a risk of overdose. Same is true of exercise. The world is littered with injured bodies that ran too far, that lifted too much too soon.

That OD'd on exercise.

How do we safely increase the amount of exercise we’re doing?

Fitness is chalk full of hacks: simple things anyone can do to instantly improve their workouts.

Today we’re going to hack stretching. Without further ado here are two hacks for a better stretch.