What happened last Friday at Hyrox Beijing has almost the whole internet talking.

At least 20 people (no joke, it’s why I’m writing my longer thoughts here) have asked me what I think of what happened. I’m not necessarily the Hyrox expert, nor do I know much about public relations fiascoes.

But as someone who’s raced more than most people in my circles and who aspires to wring the towel dry with my fitness in this sport, everyone wanted my take as an aspiring elite athlete and coach.

This newsletter probably won’t follow the same format as most of my typical posts, so if I jump around from topic to topic, it’s because I’m just following my stream of consciousness from the past five days.

Who is Joanna Wietrzyk?

One of the most talented athletes the sport has seen in its short eight-year history. Full stop.

With 34 races to her name and more first-place flags than many Elite Hyrox athletes can boast (in two years, at that!), she has been a favorite at the last two world championship competitions (2nd place in both 2025 and 2026). She is almost always the fittest woman on the course any time she races.

She’s also the focal point of Hyrox Beijing after continuing her race despite experiencing severe incontinence about halfway through last week’s race.

It was a biohazard that has caused Hyrox to both change the rules and issue refunds to affected racers, as was recently reported by Matt B. Davis of Hybrid Fitness Media.

If you haven’t seen her before reading the flurry of articles that have come out in the days since Beijing, it could be easy to assume this was an act of hard-headed competitiveness.

“She should have just STOPPED!”

“How could she have not known?”

“So inconsiderate of other racers!”

While there is an indefensible case for it, one has to first understand the nature of an athlete. One who is so passionate about their sport that literally nothing will stop them.

Not even…what happened last Friday.

Those who are complaining about her disregard for the course in that moment need to step back and realize that some athletes, unless they are physically incapable because of injury, actual disqualification, or (God forbid) death, will not stop competing no matter what happens.

So, as an athlete, a small part of me understands why she didn't stop. That doesn’t mean I condone it, though.

For more context, the reigning Hyrox Women’s World Champion, Alyssa McElheny, was behind her (unfortunately) for most of this race. McElheny, to her credit, finished second, less than a minute behind her.

For Wietrzyk, a fierce competitor looking to make a statement after McElheny, an Olympic-level marathoner with less than a year of Hyrox experience (yes, you read that correctly), stunned everyone in Stockholm this year and won the championship, few things made more sense than continuing in the race despite her bowels.

Hyrox is largely at an inflection point where we’re seeing career runners make the transition into the sport, and in McElheny's and Men’s Elite athlete Luke Greer’s cases, doing exceptionally well.

I feel Joanna felt an obligation to represent the true-blue Hyroxers who have diverse fitness backgrounds and not let the “runners” take over the sport in that moment. She has yet to release anything other than a selfie from the hospital last weekend, captioned “a win is a win,” which sparked some of the outrage.

But I speculate that competitive spirit likely overtook her in that moment, and it’s unfair to her, a tremendous athlete and person, to attack her character for what happened last week.

What Went Wrong

Short of praising her athletic prowess, I won’t defend what she did in finishing that race.

There is something to be said for the hundreds of competitors who had to race after her and their health and safety. But…

Why did it happen? HOW?

There are many ways that someone can lose control of their bowels, but it’s not uncommon in the endurance world. I’ll try to shed some light on what could have happened at a biological level.

• First - Endurance sports (namely running) are pretty well-documented as having the proclivity to cause gastrointestinal distress. Many runners and racers are encouraged to prevent muscle cramps by supplementing carbohydrates, electrolytes, and minerals during their races, which come in the form of synthetic gels made of maltodextrin, fructose, sodium bicarbonate, and other sugars for fast absorption. Because we’re used to carbs in solid form, these gels can upset some people's stomachs, intestines, and colons, and lead to what happened last Friday in some cases. Reddit’s r/running understands.

• Second - This is not the first time this has happened in racing. It seems to have happened a non-zero number of times during the Boston Marathon — Paula Radcliffe, the 2005 Women’s winner, suffered similar incontinence. More hilariously, TikTok influencer Davis Clarke went viral two years ago for the same problem. Important: the loss of bowel function is a sign that the body is shutting down, which isn’t unusual for a high-stress event where heart rates skyrocket, muscles are strained to their maximums, and vital organs are thrown into chaotic fits that are non-homeostatic.

• Third - That last point about bodies shutting down is an important one, but apparently it’s either a) not common knowledge among Hyrox organizers or b) Hyrox organizers never expected a bodily-fluid biohazard like this to occur. Many are spending their mental bandwidth online dragging Wietrzyk for continuing the race, but the onus was also on race organizers to recognize the safety hazards in play for both Joanna AND the rest of the racers. Hyrox judges and officials are mostly volunteers, the likes of whom might not have been able to make sense of the event, but anyone with some decent knowledge of health should have seen the incontinence and known it was a sign Joanna should have gotten to the hospital much sooner.

So I don’t think it's fair to attack Joanna and Joanna only for what happened. It’s not fair to attack her at all, really, as this was very much an anomaly, but hey, that’s the internet for you.

Hyrox first responded by cleaning the race course and disinfecting the equipment for the following day, but by that point, the damage was already done, and countless people were probably exposed to a plethora of germs.

One thought I had: Joanna is an ELITE athlete.

Given that this had never happened before, I wonder what the protocol could have been had Joanna stopped, told race officials, “Hey, I have to 💩,” left the course, and came back to finish.

My feeling is that race officials probably wouldn’t allow this for a multitude of reasons, but if they had, I think she’s fast enough to have emptied her bowels, returned to the course (if the bathroom was close enough), and still placed in the top 3.

Where do we go from here?

One thing I think that needs to be understood is this.

Hyrox is not going to disappear from this.

If I were someone considering doing a Hyrox, I’d be looking forward to incredibly clean racing venues from here on out, especially after the change to their protocols.

There is certainly going to be some negative backlash that will linger, but everyone I have talked to (who thinks rationally) knows that this was an anomaly, disgusting as it may have been. These things do NOT happen often.

We mustn’t let the memes and social media get to us on this.

What I haven’t particularly enjoyed from the fallout of this is the outsiders of Hyrox, who already had issues with the brand using this event as another reason to say why Hyrox is bad.

What happened is NOT reflective of all Hyrox athletes.

Many stereotypes about people who participate in the sport — that we’re culty, overly driven, egotistical, and obsessive, not all of which are completely wrong — are being perpetuated after this incident.

There is a bitterness toward Hyrox that I feel is a combination of the sport having its however-many-minutes-of-fame (and stealing the spotlight from marathon runners/track athletes) and straight up missing the bandwagon.

Some would rather hang on the edges of the sport, teasing it and all who participate in it, than feel like a “follower” and join the party late.

Those people will be louder in the comments section of most posts and articles than they’ll ever be supporting their friends at a race, which is unfortunate.

They’ll be extending the fun they’re making from this as long as they can, continuing to gaslight people who are passionate about the sport (which I’m fairly certain is making the whole world fitter, btw?) by saying they’re “making Hyrox their whole personality.”

Last time I checked, it’s very admirable and cool to care deeply about something.

But it seems like there’s a movement to bash people who like to try hard at things and invest time into new activities.

I hope that once Hyrox moves on — though I believe they will quickly — from this, there will be a change in the attitude toward Hyrox, especially if it continues to grow.

One athlete’s mistake will not define the sport, and those people who came to criticize will find some other gossip to latch onto, Hyrox or not.

If you ask me about the sport and what it does, I’ll continue to give the same answer:

It is a way for people to challenge themselves, rediscover (or simply discover) their fitness in a way that’s not numbers on a scale or pounds on a bar. In the process, most people who race at least one will find a welcoming, healthy community, not an exclusive, holier-than-thou one.

But I’ll let you make that decision for yourself!

I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not AI has a place in the world of health and fitness.

My (maybe underwhelming) conclusion is that it should be a relatively limited one. It’s not perfect at creating comprehensive workout plans — which I’ll delve into later in this piece — or at getting super specific and granular unless you tell it to.

And at that point, I’d argue whether or not you’re wasting time. Why?

Because the specificity and results you could derive from working with a human could be attained, at least for now, far more easily than prompting a chatbot to death about the exact weights, reps, sets, and cardio splits you want in your 3-day-a-week plan.

In trying to keep up with the latest and greatest in the world of AI, I started demoing ChatGPT Health, which is now available to U.S. ChatGPT users, both free and paid.

Paid users, as you might expect, will enjoy a bit more processing power and more comprehensive answers, and I won’t be subscribing anytime soon (unless a few free subscribers consider upgrading their HPH subscriptions to help fund my research project!), but I don’t think there’s much more to the paid version than the free.

Anyway, let’s have at it. I’ll give you the rundown in case you care to toy around if you haven’t already.

My ChatGPT Health Review

ChatGPT Health pairs nicely with Apple Health, so all iPhone users can almost immediately enjoy a dashboard of a few metrics that sync with OpenAI’s platform.

Steps, kcals burned, flights climbed, synced workouts from certain wearable devices, and some sleep metrics all populate in Chat’s initial readout, but it’s nothing you don’t already have on your phone.

The prompts it offers work as good starting points for people who are confused about their health, but here’s where that becomes an issue.

With all the data we have available to us now, is anyone really that confused about their health?

The “take action today” prompt is the silliest to me, because I’d like to believe most people who need to improve some aspect of their health already know what it is without asking Chat.

Still, I asked it that question anyway just to see what it would spit out:

Again, nothing I didn’t already know.

Would I disagree with this recommendation? Not really.

But with the NYC Marathon looming, I actually am thinking about incorporating harder training very soon. I think that’s where these Health AIs will eventually hit a wall.

Lots of Type A people are also very Type A about their health. That means they’ll want to push even on days when Chat, their doctor, and even their loved ones will tell them not to.

Redundancies aside, it’s a step in the right direction for health knowledge, because it might allow a pretty well-thought-out second opinion for blood work faster than booking a second doctor’s appointment at an office that’ll take who-knows-how-long to book you in.

But here is a more fleshed-out list of the pros and cons I think you should consider before completely outsourcing your health thinking to the platform (Please, don’t actually do that).

Pros of ChatGPT Health

• Pairs with a fairly large (but not complete) list of health systems to link lab results — I was able to connect Mount Sinai health data from past physicals to the platform, which gave it some preliminary data to work with. The more data from your lab results it has to work with, the better I anticipate its recommendations will be. However, this hinges on something that is a HUGE con for me, which I’ll bring up later.

• Does well to ease nerves about lab results being out of range — Whereas the pre-AI Google flow was usually Search Query > “What does (insert lab reading here) mean?” > WebMD or Cleveland Clinic article about how you might die of some ailment; ChatGPT Health actually does well to offer actionable suggestions about how you can manage the blood test results that are out of range. It can be scary to see something not clicking, especially if you’re as neurotic as I am, and one can spiral if they feel healthy, but the labs say otherwise. I actually got some pretty nice feedback when I expressed some concern about kidney readings:

With this data, I could reasonably go back to my doctor and order more specific labs if I wanted to check on my kidneys. But I’ve known for a while that my kidneys are okay. This was more of a test to see how well it did at quelling anxiety.

• It offers good structure - something most people lack - in creating a weekly plan — When I asked it to structure an exercise plan for me, I enjoyed the way it distributed my weekly workload, even if it wasn’t quite enough total work for my liking. There were timeframes I was recommended to train every day that were fairly reasonable, even when I hadn’t given it a realistic understanding of my daily schedule. This could very easily be a con if someone worked 50-60 hours a week and wanted to be as active as me, though that’s not many people.

Cons of ChatGPT Health

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Last week I talked about how Wearable Technology has a few gaps to address in how it assesses our health.

After doing more research, I realized the rabbit hole goes deeper.

Much deeper.

Not only is there a race to get data from your watch, wrist, ring, or band to doctors faster — there’s also a question from doctors about whether more data is good for us from a psychological perspective.

Dr. Rachael Bedard sat down with David Wallace-Wells to analyze this question in a podcast-style interview.

At the beginning of the conversation, the question from Peter Attia’s podcast was asked:

“How far are we from technology and machine learning that can tell us, twenty years down the road, whether or not we might have a neurological disease, and potentially reverse it?”

At first listen, this sounds promising.

Why wouldn’t someone want to know if they have the potential to contract a disease or metabolic disorder far in advance?

The science behind it might surprise you. Dr. Bedard cited a “cautionary tale” in South Korea, where they implemented universal screening for thyroid cancer in Korean citizens.

What scientists found in these screenings was a 15x increase in cancer findings, but despite these findings, it had no impact on the mortality rate of South Koreans.

In other words, small, clinically insignificant cancers that were found were not “killing” the population any faster. These cancers did not need treatment, and one might argue they didn’t even need a diagnosis.

Newsletter Summary:

• How too much data could hurt us, and when to tune out

• What data actually matters and how to quantify it

• A lesson in avoiding overthinking

Keeping a “Watch”ful eye on your health

There is certainly a benefit to knowing some things about your health because of the widespread knowledge we have now about health.

• A lower resting heart rate — a measurement most smartwatches and wearables will give you today — is almost always a sign of good cardiovascular health

• More movement and calories burned throughout the day will likely speed up your metabolism and keep you lean

• A more regulated body temperature means your immune system is functioning as it should, and your body is not actively fighting any sort of illness

But what about the other metrics modern tech provides? Sleep scores and sleep choronotypes are not commonly understood metrics because they don’t explain how someone can feel great one day on six hours of sleep, but terrible from seven the next (see the highly agreed-upon meme below).

Many people who don’t train or track it daily can’t reasonably deduce what their HRV calculations (or fluctuations in them) mean, so being told they’re “under recovered” could lead them to falsely believe they’re not living a productively healthy life.

The truth is that our subjective feelings on a given day about how we feel might actually matter more than what the data tells us.

A few days of elevated resting heart rate is not going to kill us. Going for that long run on five and a half hours of sleep might feel absolutely euphoric.

That 7pm strength training session might feel amazing, even if your watch says you’re “stressed” and “sleep may be affected” afterwards.

I’m not saying you can’t take rest days.

There are meaningful signals — prolonged soreness/fatigue, trouble focusing, ravenous appetite — that you can deduce from to decide when it’s time to ease back.

But that’s what we as an aspiringly health-inclined society need to get back to: listening to our bodies instead of the scores these little machines give us.

And I would wager that more and more, the inclination to want to train despite being feeling a bit “off” is the one we should listen to, not the blanket advice from optimization tools.

While I hesitate to use scientific studies to prove my point, mainly because I know opposing studies that point to evidence in the other direction likely exist, there’s one study I don’t think we should overlook.

A large cohort study of almost 300,000 participants looked at the effects of sleep, physical activity, and mortality back in 2022.

In it, researchers found that short sleep was not necessarily correlated with higher mortality (sorry, Oura Ring, you’re not guilt tripping me today!).

It was, however, associated with higher mortality in the least active participants group.

In other words, the study might suggest that choosing to take an off day because you’re tired might not necessarily pay off in the long run for you.

In the physically active participants, exercise actually seemed to reduce the mortality associations with bad sleep.

This group’s mortality findings were essentially indifferent from the well-slept, active group.

Now, we can’t exactly use this as a license to skip sleep hours, either. Recovery should still be a priority at the forefront of our health journey, just not one we need to obsess over like the current culture has taught us to.

But creating conditions where exercise is habitual and becomes ingrained in your routine should ultimately trump feelings of fatigue (and even current wearable recommendations to ease up), because it very well could help you live longer.

The data that DOES matter

I want to clarify that I don’t think all data is misleading or not useful.

There are a few big rocks I think should take precedent above the storm of other numbers that are being thrown at us now with all this new technology.

We have an obligation to at least keep quarterly tabs on some of these data points not just for our own health, but for the people around us, especially us with families who rely on us.

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Your Watch, Wristband, Wearable, or whatever it is that tracks your fitness and biometrics might seem like it is a worthwhile investment.

For about 90% of users who track and care about the data and insights it tracks, it probably is.

Fitness and its progress are a numbers game. You simply cannot make reasonable gains in any field by just winging it for too long.

Sure, newbies can make significant progress when trying out something new and tracking almost nothing, but if you want to lock in on a particular facet of fitness, tracking is imperative.

Recognizing this, companies have swooped in to control the tracking narrative.

From Whoop to Oura, to Garmin, Apple, and Samsung alike, these fitness tech behemoths are on a mission not only to help improve your personal health but to improve the care connection you can have to the medical system, as recently reported by The New York Times.

Each of these companies has a noble mission that, at face value, is empowering to their users: to encourage better health habits by giving actionable data in a user-friendly, streak-provoking way.

But… the data is imperfect, in a way.

Most of the metrics have flaws that make some of the readings non-absolute, to say the least.

Consider the Apple Watch, which uses “rings” to determine a wearer’s movement progress throughout the day.

The calorie-tracking ring (which has been disputed by many users as overestimating total calorie burn) uses only photoplethysmography, a light-flicker technology tracking blood volume changes in wrist veins, and heart rate as its north stars for calorie expense guesstimation.

This misguided understanding of calorie output can stall weight loss goals for some, leaving them to wonder why they’ve plateaued when, in reality, their watch isn’t accurately gauging their calorie burn.

And that’s not the only flaw in Apple’s design — some sedentary users have even reported logging miles of steps despite being seated throughout the day, simply because Apple’s tech measures the slightest arm movements as a “step.”

Where other trackers make up for accuracy in steps, heart rate and calories, they might lack in providing accurate, real-time feedback about performance.

Garmin, for example, is regarded as the gold standard for endurance athletes like runners, cyclists, and the like because of its many settings catered toward dynamic athletic performance.

But many users talk about how, after a subjectively impressive workout, Garmin’s feedback is that their workout was “unproductive,” or that performance “decreased,” and no significant gains in fitness were made.

What the Wearable Industry Still Has Yet To Address

I stumbled across this post from Jordan Feigenbaum yesterday, which addresses the exact problem I’m talking about:

The type of user that wearable device brands attract — performance-driven, high-achieving, maybe even slightly neurotic people — might have heightened anxiety from their wearable device feedback that could do more harm than good.

Feigenbaum mentioned a research paper that asked 10 of the 14 large wearable makers what in their proprietary algorithms determined certain “scores” like Sleep, Training Readiness, and Activity Balances.

Beyond deducing these scores from baseline measurements of resting heart rate (RHR), HRV, sleep depth, and daily activity, they wouldn’t reveal the exact calculations.

This might trouble some people in the health and wellness/medical fields who understand that human biometrics are incredibly dynamic, and what is “good” and “bad” will vary extensively from person to person.

It’s probably not a good idea to let the outcome of your day be determined by a device that might imperfectly read your body’s signals, especially if you subjectively feel fine.

For competitive achievers (like myself) who want to make the most of their body’s output, it’s possible to leave progress on the table by opting not to train on a day when their sleep score is off by a few points.

More studies need to be done on the impact of training through fatigue and tiredness, but here are a couple of examples of why it might not matter as much as the wearables say:

Steve Prefontaine reportedly only slept for ONE HOUR the night before ripping an 8-minute and 28-second two-mile race.

Prefontaine had more than one such instance of sleepless nights before heroic performances and may be an outlier in human capability, but one hour is diabolical.

US Olympic Shotputter Chase Ealey is no stranger to bad nights of sleep:

I’m also at the point where I know how to prepare for a bad sleep. I’ve had a bad sleep before a training session, told my coach I didn’t sleep well before showing up, and felt super anxious. But sometimes, practicing after a bad night of sleep is the reassurance I need. It shows me that I’m capable of showing up when things don’t go as I’d like. As someone who otherwise prefers 10 hours of sleep, it’s good to know that I can respond to the uncontrollable.”

You could say I’m making a false equivalency by citing world-class athletes in these examples.

But the other side of the argument is this:

Have all world-class athletes enjoyed perfect sleep, no alcohol or drugs, or completely stress-free days in their rise to world-class level? Absolutely not.

Even those who are most acutely aware of those stressors are likely able to stave off the anxiety that comes with stress as it relates to performance impact.

What I’m Building In the Hopes That Wearable Devices Can Improve

Since we are not far from a world where wearables help determine our most crucial health outcomes — like whether we need something as serious asopen-heart surgery or something as simple as routine blood work — I think it’s important that every facet of the wearable experience is tightened up before we start letting it book our doctor’s visits before us.

And that includes the performance side of things.

I’ll be damned if I let a small device on my finger tell me I’m exercising “too hard” or that a workout didn’t help me gain any fitness (and you should be, too).

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The Game Changers documentary, which features notable figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, and ex-NFL player Brian Orakpo came out 8 years ago now.

Still, the question remains about how much of the documentary is based in truth and how much of the studies have been cherry-picked to support vegan…

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Somewhere in your health and wellness routine, you probably have a gap that needs filling.

It could be adding more movement. It could be sleeping better. It could be as simple as relaxing more.

For many, nutrient deficiencies stem from our current diet and require better, more strategic eating, even if it means sacrificing taste for those nutrients.

Enter supplements.

As most of you who’ve been subscribed for some time know, I’ve written about supplements more than once:

• Here’s a basic list of the simplest, most high-yield ones

• Here are a few that fall into the “peptide” category that I’m still skeptical about for the general population

• A bit of a gut check (no pun intended) for verifying ingredients in supplements

My stance on supplements throughout most of my newsletter has remained the same — take them only if your blood work shows deficiencies or your doctor has given the recommendation or thumbs up, or if you’ve done enough research and self-testing to justify the recurring costs of them.

The industry of supplements, though, has grown massively since all of those posts.

Supplements are no longer just for making up nutrients missing from food.

Nootropics are gaining popularity in the age of low focus (just quit the doomscrolling, guys).

Fertility supplement lines seek to bolster reproductive health in an age where birth rates are declining, and people are nervous about having children (and where a simpler solution might be just ditching the polyester clothing).

People are even taking supplements to aid in sleep, which again, I find a bit excessive. (Have a nighttime routine, turn off the phone notifications, cool your room down, drink some chamomile tea).

Whatever the need is, there seems to be a supplement for it.

I’m here to challenge you whether or not you need all of them if you’re taking a bunch so that you’re not spending money unnecessarily.

And if you’ve stayed away from Big Supp up until this point, this may comfort you.

Are you taking too many supplements?

One thing that we can still be certain about regardless of where your supplement routine is — Americans are not that healthy.

It’s interesting that while we’re still one of the most obese and unhealthy developed countries, supplement use in the U.S. has gone up over the last quarter century by a non-trivial amount in men and women, with a large portion of those users being older adults.

The JAMA study cited above tracking 100k participants says that only 1 in 4 supplement users started because they were advised to by a physician.

Which means 75% of supplement protocols are most likely word-of-mouth, hearsay, and marketing-driven.

This should come as no surprise. If you’ve browsed a CVS, Duane Reade/Walgreens, or other pharmacy, the aisles have grown. The influencer marketing around supplements borders on toxic. And the $250 billion industry seeks only to make them easier to consume by turning them into gummies, chews, and textures that are easier to blend into our day.

But do we need to be adding all these pills and potions to our routine?

The most recent research says maybe NOT.

I’m going to guess it’s been a little while since any readers have had their blood drawn, and even longer since any of you got flagged for nutrient deficiencies.

So, without telling you “go to your doctor,” here are a few quick ways to check yourself before you wreck yourself (and your wallet) with supplements.

There might be a simple way: just eating better food, if you’re willing to expand your palate.

The CDC tracks a list of biomarkers it deems necessary for “healthy growth and development,” and measure in a yearly nutrition report that is tracked in blood and urine samples instead of self-reported dietary intake.

In their 2026 report, they accounted for the spike in supplement use we’ve seen since 2000 and noted a few key points we should be aware of.

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There’s a meme going around that says, “Men used to go to war.”

The crux of the joke is that the even the most arduous of demands were not even a second thought a few decades ago.

Now, there is a culture of hyper-fixating on small, inconsequential things that some might argue are softening us — and I don’t think it applies only to men, either.

Optimization Culture, which focuses on maximizing everything about your day, from the morning routine to the very last flickers of your eyelids before you go to sleep, has gotten out of control.

At first, the goal was admirable — to improve “healthmaxxing,” or maximizing your health’s potential — but the niches formed around each piece of optimizing have become too much to handle.

Quitting alcohol was a great start. Recent alcohol industry numbers show sales and general interest in drinking and nightlife are way down, which I think led many to believe that a movement could form from advocating for subtracting vices.

Some optimizers pushed for cancelling subscriptions, quitting smoking, scrolling and other bad habits to help improve stress levels, sleep, and relationships.

I think the practice of subtracting was where the trend should’ve halted. Taking things away allows for clarity and better understanding.

But whoever pioneered these trends ushered in a wave of new salespeople to take the hull.

A common understanding of human psychology reminds us that those who have bad habits (or are addicted to something) often don’t eliminate the habits or addictions altogether — they replace them with something else.

Whether or not the replacement is a healthy one is what I’m focusing on this evening.

Where Optimizing Went Wrong

What came into the fold of health optimization after the abstinence movement — a personal favorite highlight was “Raw Dogging Flights” — was a host of substitute activities that achieved the inverse of optimization.

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The New York Knicks just won their first title in 53 years.

Hey guys, it’s Fran. It’s been way too long, and I’ve had this one in drafts for two weeks.

Last night was the kick-in-the-ass reminder that I have almost 400 subscribers who read this newsletter and could benefit from an article that reminds us to fight against th…

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Multitasking seems to be all the rage these days.

Having Claude CoWork write your schedule for you to start the day while you’re having your coffee, in the shower, all while scrolling through your social feed in the morning.

Okay, maybe it’s not that extreme. Or is it?

The productivity obsession naturally leads most …

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You may remember that about a month ago, my wife and I left our apartment after finding out we had a pretty bad case of MARCoNS due to some mold exposure.

Since then, we’ve been on a pretty strict detoxification protocol, and I went over it (along with general detox ideas) with Olivia on this episode of the High Performance Health Podcast

Expect to learn about:

- What protocols are best for detoxifying your body

- The frequency of daily poops, Olivia thinks, is the gold standard

- What supplements are best for detoxifying your body

- What bodily processes/organs are responsible for detox

- How often should anyone be detoxing

I really enjoyed this one, and it helped color in my experience, and I hope it helps you rethink the way you’re constantly refreshing your body.

Link to the Amazon Body Roller here.

Link to the Shake Plate I mentioned here!

Enjoy!

Saying that “abs are built in the kitchen” is about 75% true.

A proper diet is going to ensure that bellies stay lean, but the abs need to be trained, too.

This newsletter was published in partnership with Form50 Fitness, a reformer strength and conditioning studio in New York City and Florida.

A big prerequisite for a …

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I’ve had a chance to reflect on some of the most important things that have moved the needle forward for me physically over the past two years.

Unfortunately, the answers aren’t all that sexy.

And that’s the point.

Two years is both a long time and a short time depending on how you look at it. And the headline of this new…

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“Nothing’s wrong, you’re perfectly healthy.”

That’s what many doctors told my wife over the past year after we went from specialist to specialist to try and figure out why she wasn’t feeling herself.

The last month has been a hectic one — it’s no excuses for not having written something for you all. I strive to write…

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Since my 30th birthday,

Everyone’s always asked me a question on my birthday that they never asked me in the first 29 years of my life:

How does it feel?

To which I always respond, “not much different.”

It’s a peculiar question, one that always makes me feel like the answer that someone was rhetorically expecting was, “old…

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What has always frustrated me about working in fitness are the stark differences between thought processes

Between how medical doctors (and even physical therapists!) understand the realm of exercise.

I’m sharing opinions and anecdotes of my experience in eight years as a trainer in today’s newsletter, so I w…

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I have to admit,

When I’d heard Lindsey Vonn tore her ACL on January 30th and saw videos of her strength training like nothing had happened, I felt polarized.

Maybe at first, the athlete and we felt some level of hope that injury specialists had finally turned the corner on ACL science.

Videos of NBA players returning to…

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If you’ve trained hard for anything at all,

You know that sensation of burning that enters your muscles when they’re under stress for a prolonged amount of time.

Maybe it’s that group fitness class that’s solely focused on two or three muscles for the entire 45 to 60 minutes.

It could happen on your long runs, when your…

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Good Morning!

If you’re reading from the Northeast U.S. (or anywhere above the equator) right now, you’ve probably had a piping hot cup of coffee and are bundled up on this holiday.

Make no mistake, I hate the cold.

I’m a February baby, but there’s nothing about this climate that makes me happy (unless I’m snowboarding).

But lately I’ve forced myself to continue exploring my passion for running this winter, despite the average daily temperature being 20° or colder lately,

Why?

Well for as much as I sh*t on ice baths (reminder: they do next to nothing for performance, but improve your tolerance to torture) cold-weather running is my personal preferred method of cold exposure for the season.

Over the last year, I’ve developed a sense of grit and obsession about my running, and I learned last spring that there are some benefits for running outside that undoubtedly helped me with my performance in last year’s NYC marathon.

Newsletter Summary

• The case for cold weather running and it’s benefits

• One quote about tolerance to start the week

The case for cold weather running

On a 15° January afternoon, I laced up my Nikes, grabbed my heattec gear with the built-in balaclava, and threw a beanie and two pairs of wool socks on for a 10K around my neighborhood.

Before I started my smartwatch, my pre-run heart rate was around 90 bpm.

I was excited.

Even with cold gusts from wind tunnels around Queens belting me in the face like a roller coaster ride, I was up for the challenge.

And a challenge is what it was.

The right playlist, a creative route circling Astoria Park and the East River waterfront, and a few close calls with some drivers speeding through yellow lights brought my internal temperature right where it needed to be for this run to actually be…fun.

The first argument I’ll make for cold runs is that they can be invigorating.

It’s similar to the rush of adrenaline that an ice bath brings, but unlike ice baths, there’s a certain body heat that comes with running outdoors that honestly makes the cold feelings dissipate quickly.

This is purely anecdotal, and I can’t guarantee it for everybody. Especially if you’re not already a runner.

As the folks at Idaho Spine and Sport physical therapy point out, it’s not always fun or enjoyable.

But it does come with unique benefits that will bode well for springtime and summertime running:

• Improved heart health, which is a byproduct of blood vessels working harder to pump blood to chillier areas of the body during cold runs

• Better sweat management, where (with repetition and proper winter hydration) the body is conditioned to sweat less and retain more water during cold runs, which is great preparation for hotter temperatures where sweat is more frequent

• Ample Novelty for the brain; something new and challenging strengthens our anterior mid-cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that deals with difficult things, and makes future difficult things easier

The spring runs that will (eventually) be here soon will be so much easier because I got out in December, January and February.

Not just psychologically, but physiologically too.

If there’s one thing that this newsletter will constantly challenge you to do, it’ll be to do hard stuff.

But what can’t be underscored is how often hard stuff benefits your body at a microscopic level, too.

If you’re a runner and have started to develop a weekly habit of getting the legs moving, this might not sound as attractive.

But that’s okay.

I’ve got an another try at the NYC marathon in November, and it’ll be cold again for that when it comes.

So getting the reps in now — loooong before I need to be ready to run that 26.2 miles across five boroughs — will pay dividends down the road (literally).

One Quote About Tolerance To Start March

“What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.

— Voltaire

Love this quote right here.

We have to learn to endure things.

That’s what makes us, us.

If you’ve been here a while, you can do 300 something newsletters.

That’s impressive.

I’d highly encourage you to suggest this newsletter to somebody who could benefit from learning a thing or two.

Subscribe now

Thanks in advance! See you later this week.

I recently spoke with a client of mine who — not to brag, but — PR’d their age group in a 10K. They’re a long-time runner, and they told me something I won’t forget:

“It’s impressive what you’ve done over the last year and a half alone!”

They’re right.

I haven’t shifted this newsletter content to reflect it much, but runnin…

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“Once you hit (random age), it’s all downhill from there.”

If I never heard this phrase again, I’d be so happy.

This utterance comes from people who have an archaic mindset about what it means to age. Sure, every now and again it’s said jokingly.

But some people seriously mean it. Those who let their fitness capabilities…

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