100 Up

This year, I’ve been working on running more, mostly because I hate it, in turn because I suck at it. A few months in, I’ve already racked up more mileage than I managed in the past two full years combined.

I still suck at running, but I definitely suck less. And though I wouldn’t say I yet love doing it, I now have confidence in my ability to head out the door, start running, and keep running for miles, something I couldn’t have said before.

So I was intrigued recently to find this video, from the NY Times, on W. S. George’s “100 Up” exercise:

George was a chemist’s apprentice in England in the 1870’s, with little time for training. He developed the exercise so he could train during his lunch break. In two years, he went from a novice to one of the fastest milers of his time.

I’m only a few days into doing the exercise daily, though I suspect after even two years I’ll be well short of a competitive mile pace. Still, I can feel the exercise working, and am planning to stick with it. For other duffer runners, perhaps worth similarly giving it a shot.

Fitness

March 20, 2016

Real Food

I got a few emails in the wake of Monday’s blog post on farmers’ market shopping saying, ‘but I take lots of vitamins! Shouldn’t that make up for the reduced vitamin-load in the foods I buy at the grocery store?’

Short answer: no.

Allow me to take you a further step down the food industry / nutrition rabbit hole.

First, to kick things off, you need to know a little about micro-nutrients, or essential vitamins and minerals. There’s scientific consensus on this full official list:

First, there are water-soluble vitamins:
– Biotin (vitamin B7)
– Folic acid (folate, vitamin B9)
– Niacin (vitamin B3)
– Pantothenic acid (vitamin B5)
– Riboflavin (vitamin B2)
– Thiamin (vitamin B1)
– Vitamin B6
– Vitamin B12
– Vitamin C

Then you have the fat-soluble vitamins:
– Vitamin A
– Vitamin D
– Vitamin E
– Vitamin K

You have the major minerals:
– Calcium
– Chloride
– Magnesium
– Phosphorus
– Potassium
– Sodium
– Sulfur

And you have the trace minerals:
– Chromium
– Copper
– Fluoride
– Iodine
– Iron
– Manganese
– Molybdenum
– Selenium
– Zinc

So how did the scientific establishment come up with this list?

Basically, these are things that, if you leave them out of a rat’s diet, the rat dies. That’s how we deemed them essential.

But wait, you might be saying. Couldn’t there be other vitamins that are important, that lead to serious problems if we omit them, but don’t actually lead to death? I mean, there a lots of terrible things that can happen to you short of actually dying.

And, in fact, you’d be totally right.

For example, we know that if you don’t eat enough Lutein and Zeaxanthin, you’ll get macular degeneration and go blind. But, hey! At least you’re still alive!

As a result of their absence not killing you, even though most of us prefer to be able to see things, Lutein and Zeaxanthin aren’t officially vitamins, and don’t appear on any RDA list.

And those are just two of more than 600 carotenoids, all of which are just as likely to be biologically important, as are any number of other types of compounds found in foods. Micronutrient triage theory still a fairly new field of research, and there’s lots we don’t know.

Which is, in short, the problem with just taking vitamins instead of eating fresh foods, as well as the problem with making fake, industrial foods.

Michael Pollan has written about the idea of ‘nutritionism,’ the dominant paradigm in the food industry that sees foods as essentially reducible to the sum of their nutrient parts. By that approach, you can break foods down into their constituent nutrients, and then package them back together into something new, with no ill effects. In fact, sometimes the ‘new food’ is even better than what you started with. A protein bar is super healthy, right?

Unfortunately, it turns out we actually suck at that kind of disassembling and re-assembling, most likely because we wildly underestimate the number of things (like the aforementioned Lutein and Zeaxanthin) we lose in the process, things that are hugely important but we just don’t know about yet.

Consider a version of this problem that you probably already know about: baby formula. Breast-feeding (or pumping) is difficult and time-consuming. So, since 1867 (and “Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies”), we’ve been trying to make a commercially-available replacement. By now, formula is an $8 billion global market. Each year, companies spend unfathomable amounts of money on R&D, trying to improve just that one single food. And, even so, it still sucks. Kids raised on the most cutting-edge formula still fare less well than those breast-fed real milk.

In other words, even after we’ve focused literally a century and a half of heavily funded nutritionism efforts on a single food, we still can’t make that food as good as the original.

In which case, what are the odds that your Egg Beaters are actually healthier than a couple of fresh eggs?

That one’s not rhetorical, because we actually know the odds are zero. It turns out, if you feed rats a diet of just eggs, they live long and healthy lives. Whereas rats in the same study who were fed just Egg Beaters died after three or four weeks.

To recap: we clearly have no idea about all the important stuff food contains. So eating ‘designed’ foods is clearly a terrible idea. Instead, eat real foods. Eat a variety of them. Eat foods that can go bad, and eat them before they do. Try and get them as fresh as you can, because that’s when they have more of the stuff that we still don’t really know about but you clearly need to have a long and happy and healthy life.

Bon appetite.

March 16, 2016

How You Like Them Apples

I am, by nature, a very skeptical person. Which comes in handy in the fitness and nutrition worlds, where ardently-claimed but scientifically-bankrupt stupidity abounds.

That’s why, though I grew up in the Bay Area, even at one point attended a summer camp where we had to ‘thank the spirit of the water’ each time we flushed the toilet, I’ve long been skeptical of the whole ‘farm to table’ movement.

I’d written off a lot of the appeal as hipster nonsense – the twee fetishizing of the ’craftsmen’ ethos. Sure, buying at a farmer’s market allows you to vicariously live a small slice of the farmers’ neo-luddite life. But farmers’ market food is, well, still just food.

Turns out, I was totally wrong.

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending more time learning about the mechanics of the global food production system, and its impact on the nutrition of what we eat.

Consider an apple. You see them, year-round, in large piles at every grocery store. Appealingly glossy, perfectly ripe, available organically-raised in an endless array of varieties.

But here’s something you probably don’t think about when you see them: those apples are old. Really, really old.

In fact, on average, the apples in your grocery store, whether organic or not, were picked ten months ago. Then they were stored in extreme cold for months and months. Cold generated using a mix of gasses that are so toxic that produce workers intermittently die just from going in to the apple storage freezers with a leak in their protective gear.

And even if that gas doesn’t permeate the apple itself, the effects of time certainly do.

By the time you pick that apple off your grocery store shelf, it has less than 10% of the micro-nutrient content than it did a week after it was plucked. In other words, we spend huge amounts of money converting a vitamin-packed healthy snack into a empty-calorie sugar bomb.

So, what can you do? That’s where farmer’s markets come in. The food you’re buying there this week was, on average, picked within the last two weeks. Which, when it comes to nutritional content, is a world of difference. Plus it tastes better, too. And, in most cases, it even costs less than the stuff you can find in-store.

So, it appears, I’ve circled back to my hippy roots after all. I’ve resolved to shop for more produce (and meat and cheese and more) at my local farmer’s market this year. You can find ones near you with this handy USDA tool, and I’d encourage you to do the same.

March 14, 2016

Feeling Bulletproof

I’m a big believer in intermittent fasting, and usually don’t eat my first meal of the day until 1:00 or 2:00pm.

I do, however, drink coffee most mornings. And recently, especially if I’m feeling hungry, I’ve been test-driving ’Bulletproof Coffee.’ Dreamed up by body-hacker Dave Asprey, it’s a recipe that’s since become a ’thing’ in both the Silicon Valley and sports performance worlds. In theory, at least, it’s meant to boost metabolism and mental performance, and to make people feel full without spiking insulin.

Here’s what goes into it:

1cup Coffee. Freshly-roasted, freshly-ground coffee has higher anti-oxidant content, so buy beans regularly, and grind them yourself. (Asprey himself sells a coffee bean that supposedly has lower mold content, though the science backing the danger of mold in coffee seems weak at best.) If you’re like me, and way too lazy for that, buy a Nespresso machine instead. It makes great coffee (they’re in use by 30% of the Michelin-starred restaurants in the world!), and uses vacuum-packed capsules that keep the coffee grinds exceedingly fresh (enough so to even counter the mold/mycotoxin concern, if it turns out to hold water). I use two Fortissio Lungo capsules, each brewed as 110ml lungo pulls, which yields a delicious 8oz cup.
1tbs Butter. As Michael Pollan noted, you aren’t just what you eat; you’re also what you eat eats. Grass-fed butter turns out to be waaaay healthier than grain-fed butter, and you can buy Kerrygold all over the country (in places like Costco, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods). While grass-fed butter is loaded with nutrients, it’s the butyrate in particular, a fuel that’s particularly good at powering your brain, that gives you a mental boost.
1tbs Coconut Oil. For bonus points, you can swap the coconut oil for medium-chain triglyceride oil, which contains the portion of the coconut oil that has the most beneficial effects. I like this brand, which is extremely high-quality yet reasonably priced, and comes in a container large enough to last several months.

Here’s how you make it:

Put all three into a blender. As I’m way too cheap for a Vitamix, (especially as I mostly just blend protein shakes or bulletproof coffee), I’ve used an earlier version of this sucker for several years with excellent results.
Blend! Should only take a couple seconds. You’re set when there’s a thick froth on top, like the foam on top of a latte.
(Add Cinnamon?) This one’s an optional bonus step, which I only started recently based on some of cinnamon’s clear health benefits. Also, it tastes awesome.
Drink. Then feel excellent – both physically and mentally – for hours to come.

At least, that’s the theory. Thus far, I seem to be liking it. But I’ll be tracking performance and biomarkers going forward to see the impact longer-term.

And, either way, a very important warning: WHEN YOU FIRST START DRINKING BULLETPROOF COFFEE, START WITH ONLY A TEASPOON EACH OF BUTTER AND OIL, AND BUILD UP SLOWLY. It can be a bit of a shock to you digestive tract, and you want to give your body a week or so to get used to things as you build up to full strength.

Relatedly, a brief cautionary tale:

About a year ago, I was at a fitness event. A booth there was selling Bulletproof Coffee, and they were bringing freshly-blended cups for free to the VIP area, where I happened to be with a friend.

When we first arrived, we both grabbed a cup to try. Then we headed our separate ways. A few hours later, I ran into him again, and the cup was still in his hand.

“You’re still nursing that Bulletproof Coffee?” I asked him.

“Oh no,” he replied. “This one’s my fifth!”

We headed into some meetings together. And then, after about thirty minutes, he excused himself to use the bathroom. I didn’t see him again for the balance of the afternoon.

So, enjoy the Bulletproof. But ease your way in. With great power comes great responsibility.

March 11, 2016

Excellence is a Habit

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” -Aristotle

Fitness is complicated. (And, as I’ve said before, it’s composite.) There’s lots to get right, an almost endless array of things to consider. But as with most of life, the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule, applies. While getting to ‘perfect’ requires tweaking on all fronts, the crucial twenty percent is mostly common sense. The vast majority of us could improve just by doing simple things we already know we should be doing: moving more; exercising hard a few times a week; eating more vegetables and less processed crap.

Of course, none of that is news. So it’s not a knowledge gap that holds us back. Instead, it’s an action gap. We know we should do one thing, really mean to do it, but then do a completely different thing instead.

So how do we bridge that action gap? The usual answer: willpower. We make New Years resolutions, and plan to try harder. We get motivated, and determine to get things done. But decades of research have shown that approach just doesn’t really work. Leaning on willpower is physiologically taxing, and willpower itself is finite. It fades over the course of the day, and eventually wears out. After which we resort back to our old, poor choices. To put is succinctly, behaviors that depend solely on willpower are eventually doomed.

Instead, the more effective approach is to focus on our habits. While building new habits initially takes willpower (and careful thought), too, once they’re baked in, they run on autopilot, regardless of how much or how little willpower and motivation we bring to bear. Consider learning to drive a car. In the beginning, it’s a herculean task, requiring consciously considering an almost impossibly large number of simultaneous variables. (Just ask my parents; when I was learning to drive, I couldn’t manage to spot stop signs while also wrangling the mechanics of the car, and nearly killed us several times by rolling straight through intersections. Sorry mom!) By now, however, driving has likely become a completely ingrained habit for you. One so simple it runs entirely in your unconscious mind. Perhaps you’ve gotten in your car to drive home, and then looked up a moment later to find you were there. You basically blacked out, as your conscious brain turned off, and your habit-based unconscious drove you home.

So, if habits are the answer, what do we know about them?

First, let’s dispense with a myth: that making a habit takes a month, or two weeks, or 90 days. Habits are wildly variable in the amount of time they take to permanently acquire, depending on complexity, emotional valance, and a slew of other factors. Consider also that we perform some habits many times more each day than others. Learning to floss is a once-daily choice. Whereas smoking is something that inveterate smokers do dozens of time in a single day, creating a much more deeply-furrowed behavioral rut.

Regardless, all habits are made up of three parts: a cue, the action, and a reward. The cue is something in ourselves or the environment that triggers the behavior. The action is the behavior itself. And then the reward is something, either intrinsic in the action or that reliably comes as a result, that reinforces the behavior continuing. All sustained habits have all three parts.

When people want to create (or change) a habit, they usually put all their focus on the action: I’ve decided to start going to the gym. But, in fact, the action itself is the least important of the three steps. To successfully create a habit, you need to focus most of your attention on the other two steps.

Let’s look at working out. How could you create a successful cue for that behavior?

Perhaps you can create a time-based cue, or a sequential dependency. “I work out at 6:00am in the morning.” “I work out as soon as I get up.” In my experience, those are both excellent cues. While it’s far more pleasant to work out in the evening, for most of us, it’s too easy to push off evening workouts today, and then tomorrow, and then forever. While I hate working out in the morning, it’s my usual approach, as I know that doing it then is the only way it reliably gets done.

You can also create an environmental cue for your morning work out. The night before, take your sneakers and your workout clothing, and lay them on the floor next to your bed. The next morning, you’ll literally have to step over them to get out of bed. Laying them out the night before also leverages a great trick from behavioral economics: we’re more likely to agree to do hard things in the future than we are to agree to do them right now. Evening you thinks, ‘I should go to the gym tomorrow!’ Morning you thinks, ‘I should go back to sleep.’ Putting your clothes out the night before, then, is a way to let your smarter evening self boss morning you into making better choices.

You can also maximize compliance by making your action small. If you want to start jogging in the morning, don’t shoot for a habitual 30-minute run. Just make the habit putting on your sneakers, walking out the door, and jogging a minimum of ten steps. Like with procrastinating work, the hardest part of most actions is starting them. Once you’re out the door and taking your ten steps, momentum usually carries people forward. But even on days that it doesn’t, by getting out the door and doing those ten steps, you’ll have still further strengthened your new habit. That makes getting out the door easier on future days, so you’re more likely to do so, and more likely to leverage momentum on some of those future passes.

Once you’re done, then you need to reward yourself. Sure, exercise kicks out endorphins, an intrinsic reward, and leads to self-reinforcing physical changes, a good extrinsic one. But in the beginning, when you’re first getting into shape, you mostly just feel like sweaty crap after you work out. So here’s a reward to consider: eat a piece of chocolate. I know, I know; that seems completely counter to the point of working out in the first place. But research backs up the idea. In one study, people who rewarded themselves with a piece of chocolate post-workout were 97% more likely to still be working out thirty days later. More interestingly, 80% of those people were still working out, even thought they’d already stopped eating the piece of reward chocolate. Eventually, the workouts became their own intrinsic reward, or had yielded enough external results to motivate people to keep going. But the chocolate, that clear early reward, was crucial in getting the habit booted up in the first place.

When it comes to building habits, it’s also far easier to piggyback on an existing one than it is to build a new one from scratch.

When people decide to go on a diet, they’ll often try to create a completely new meal plan from scratch, or follow something cribbed from the back of a diet book. Over even two weeks, the compliance with that kind of drastic habit change is abysmal.

However, research from a long-term Harvard study on diet showed that most people actually eat in highly patterned ways. On average, we each tend to eat the same twelve or so meals, over and over again. And we can build on that fact to create a new set of habits that’s likely to actually stick.

Here’s how:

First, draft up a list of your twelve repeated meals. Literally, sit down and write out a list on a piece of paper. (You may have ten or fifteen rather than precisely twelve; the principle applies regardless.) Perhaps you buy a turkey sandwich from that place around the corner some days for lunch, while on other days you order General Tso’s from the same Chinese place on Seamless.

Then, one meal at a time, pull up the menu for the place from which you order, or a recipe related to something you already cook, and try to sketch out a new habitual meal that’s slightly healthier. You can do this iteratively, improving your choices over time, so you don’t have to go crazy right away. For your Chinese order, for example, you might replace your fried General Tso’s with chicken with snow peas, swap the included egg roll appetizer for a cup of won ton soup instead. Sure, you can do better still; but it’s a huge step in the right direction, effortlessly reducing 400 calories in a single meal.

Do that for all twelve of your standard meals, and then carry on your life pattern per usual, simply ordering or cooking the incrementally better alternatives each time instead. The effects compound quickly, and, having tried this with a slew of people, long-term compliance is through the roof.

To recap: habits are super important, and better health depends on making better habits. So give your habits real thought. Consider how to improve the ones you lean on now, and how to build new beneficial ones in ways that are likely to really stick. Getting guidance from people who know about health and habits can help hugely. As can getting support from peers and coaches along the way. But once those new habits are created, they’ll run on auto-pilot. They’re highly durable, and over the long haul will add up do substantial, sustainable results.

March 9, 2016

Out of the Blue

Five years back, I wrote about F.lux, a free piece of software that reduces the blue light emitted from your computer screen at night. I still use F.lux today, and I’m even more convinced now of its importance.

Your brain perceives blue-spectrum screen light as daylight. Just ten minutes of looking at your phone screen has the same impact as walking for an hour in bright daytime sun. Viewing that fake ‘daylight’ at night leads your body to mis-adjust your circadian rhythms, which in turn leads to large and lasting negative health impacts.

By now, most of us are more likely to spend the evening staring at smartphone screens than computers. But while apps like Twilight have followed F.lux’s lead on Android, there hasn’t been a similar solution for iPhones and iPads.

Fortunately, Apple has taken the matter into their own hands. Their next system update contains a feature called Night Shift, that cuts the screens’ blue-spectrum light at night. The final release of that update is still a month off. But it’s stable enough that Apple has just released a public beta.

It is, indeed, a beta. I haven’t had any problems with it myself, though your mileage may vary. If you choose to install it, back up your iPhone first. That way, you can roll back if the install turns out to be a disaster.

But, as I said, it’s worked without a hitch for me thus far. And the new Night Shift feature makes it more than worth the chance, especially if you’re an evening iPhone reader.

You can download the public beta for free, directly from Apple. (After you do, you’ll still need to turn on Night Shift in Settings.) And then you can get an excellent, light-unimpeded night of sleep.

March 5, 2016

Broscience

broscience

A few weeks ago, I took a look at science, and at how it should form the basis of fitness and health decision-making.

But in the fitness world, there’s ‘real science,’ and then there’s ‘bro science,’ which Urban Dictionary defines as “the predominant brand of reasoning in bodybuilding circles, where the anecdotal reports of jacked dudes are considered more credible than scientific research.”

Oh, bros. Thinking they know stuff!

But it turns out, they actually do know some stuff.

Sometimes, they even know stuff that’s not just correct, but actually ahead of the curve. Stuff that simply hasn’t yet been picked up and researched by (non-bro) scientists.

Consider a piece of bodybuilding wisdom that’s long been poo-pooed by the kinesiological establishment: that different movements hit different parts of the same muscle. For example, bodybuilders have long claimed that the regular bench press predominantly hits the outer pec, while flyes and close-grip bench presses are needed to pump the inner pec.

For years, physiologists explained that’s just not how muscles work. When you work out your pectoral muscle, you work out the whole thing. Your pec shape is largely genetic, and though you can make the muscle bigger, you’re only making it a bigger version of that genetically-determined shape.

More recently, however, research has shown that you actually can build different parts of the muscle preferentially. (Here’s a good review paper.) Muscles are made up of a number of different kinds of tissues, and even individual muscle cells have multiple nuclei across their lengths.

As the review puts it, “an individual muscle cannot be simplistically described as a compilation of muscle fibers that span from origin to insertion.” The review concludes, “electromyographic data indicate that there is selective recruitment of different regions of a muscle that can be altered, depending on the type of exercise performed. Longitudinal resistance-training studies also demonstrate that individual muscles as well as groups of synergist muscles adapt in a regional-specific manner.”

In other words, the bros were right.

So do we listen to the scientists, or do we listen to the meatheads?

My answer: you need to listen to both. At Composite, we scour the current published research to develop a base of practice. But we also follow trends from the in-the-trenches strength and conditioning community, to find new ideas that might be worth testing, too. From there, we take science in our own hands.

In the tech world, constant rigorous experimentation is nearly ubiquitous. If you’re running a Facebook ad, for example, you’d start with a handful of versions of an ad, and A/B test their click-through rates against each other, iteratively selecting the best performers, then testing them against similar variants based on those best performers to see if you can continue to incrementally tweak results.

The same thing works with fitness, too. By taking new ideas, whether from science science or bro-science, and structuring them into periodized cycles of implementation, we can test them head-to-head against our current best practices, within randomly-assigned portions of our client base. Because our workouts are heavily quantified, and because we track results-focused biomarkers, we can then empirically see what actually works.

From there, we can take the most successful approaches, make them our new best practices, and continue to evolve forward by testing additional new ideas.

Sure, all that testing takes a lot of work. As does keeping up with a slew of science journals, and with new on-the-ground innovations in the strength and training world. But we think the improved results yielded more than make up for the effort. As Bruce Lee put it: “Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.” That’s what Composite is all about.

February 24, 2016

There is a Right Answer

As the old saying goes, opinions are like assholes: everyone has them, and most of them stink. That’s particularly true in the fitness world, where ideas about the most effective ways to work out, eat and live healthfully abound.

Let’s say you want to head to the gym. Should you be spending your hour on CrossFit, yoga, pilates, bodybuilding, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, high-rep toning, steady-state cardio, high-intensity interval training, kettlebells, barre, Zumba, power-walking or something entirely different? For each, you can find a commited cadre of acolytes, pushing their approach as god’s obvious gift to the world.

And, indeed, there are upsides to nearly anything. But just because lots of things are ‘good’ doesn’t mean that others aren’t ‘better’ or ‘best’.

To figure out your ideal choice, however, you’ll need to determine your goal. To paraphrase Alice and the Cheshire Cat, if you don’t know where you want to go, it doesn’t much matter which road you take. But as soon as you do have an outcome in mind – reduced bodyfat, a better 5k time – some paths turn out to be far shorter than others.

So how do you choose that best path?

In fact, there’s a method for determining best answers in the real world. It’s called science. Here’s how it works: you come up with an idea for something you think might be effective. And then you test it out.

Or, in greater detail:

1. You ask a question.
2. You do background research, to come up with potential answers.
3. You construct a hypothesis about an approach that you think might work.
4. Then you test your hypothesis by doing an experiment.
5. You analyze the data from your experiment, and draw a conclusion.
6. And, finally, you communicate your results.

Of course, the vast majority of experiments turn out to prove that a hypothesis isn’t correct. But that’s okay. As Edison said, he never failed, he just first discovered 2000 ways not to make a lightbulb. Still, if people come up with and test enough hypotheses, eventually the truth begins to out. That’s how we now understand the basics of everything from particle physics to kidney function. And, in exercise, nutrition, stress-management, sleep, and a slew of other fitness-relevant areas, smart research has been bearing out innovative hypotheses for decades or more.

Of course, following and understanding a large body of research is difficult and time-consuming. And, at first glance, a lot of research seems to conflict with other research, especially when you’re not versed in the nuances of the questions being studied. So most people go an easier route: they simply look at what’s popular, getting good press, or being done by people around them, and use that as a reasonable heuristic instead.

That’s how you get a slew of people doing cleanses and juice-fasts, for example, which are both totally en vogue these days. And, unfortunately, both totally worthless. (In case you’d care to nerd out, here’s a thorough debunking.)

So just doing what everyone else does isn’t a reliable route. In fact, doing what everyone else does is, instead, a pretty reliable way to get the same results that everyone else gets. And in a country that’s plagued with overweight and obesity, where only 8% of us each year achieve our New Years health resolutions, going with the wisdom of the crowd doesn’t seem a terribly smart approach.

Instead, we think you should do in fitness the same thing you do in most other facets of health: follow the advice of highly educated and extensively trained specialists, who you trust to study, follow and understand the relevant science on your behalf. If you’re diagnosed with leukemia, you look for the very best oncologist you can find, under the assumption that they know far more about treating cancer than you do, and certainly more than some guy who volunteered as an EMT in college.

So why would you expect that reading Men’s Health, or hiring someone who played on their college football team, would be a reasonable way to find the best fitness solutions for your life?

We think the gold standard in fitness is the same as anywhere else: find highly-educated, extensively-trained specialists who nerd out on the science for you, follow their advice, and get real results.

That’s what we’re trying to do at Composite: we want to be your outboard fitness brain. Science has best answers for you, best practices that will help you achieve your health and welness goals. We find them, and help you implement them in ways that work in your life. It’s not easy, but it is simple: it’s science.

Fitness

January 25, 2016

Fitness is Composite

As the old joke goes, the First Rule of CrossFit is: “always talk about CrossFit.” It’s a famously exercise-obsessed crowd. But from ten years of growing the largest CrossFit gym in the world, I can tell you even that group of die-hards makes it to the gym, on average, about 2.8 times a week.

Which means their other 165.2 weekly hours are spent doing something else. Put another way, what people do in the gym is less than 2% of their total time pie.

Of course, training hard has lasting effects that spill over into the rest of an athlete’s life. Beyond the psychological impacts, there’s the more concrete EPOC, or excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, an afterburn of increased oxygen intake following intense exercise that raises calorie-burning metabolism for hours to come. But, by and large, exercise, even hard and relatively frequent exercise, is just one small part of the bigger picture.

Indeed, in those other 160-some hours, we eat, we sleep, we socialize, we feel stress, we sit and stand, we move or we don’t. All of which contributes to or detracts from our health and wellness. Historically, gyms have been rather narrow in their focus: they dictate what happens when you’re in them. But, to achieve a sustainable high level of fitness, you need to think about what happens outside of them, too.

Which is all to say, fitness is composite. It’s an array of elements that work together to add up to the complete whole. And, in the future, the most succesful gyms will need to help their members succeed in that holistic way – maximizing their success, improving their choices, not just when people are working out, but all 168 hours of the week.

January 19, 2016

Composite

For the past week and a half, I’ve been scrawling diagrams, lists and mind-maps on stacks of blank card stock with a Sharpie, littering my desk and walls with the results. It’s a scene straight out of A Beautiful Mind. But, as a result, I feel like the outlines of Composite, my next project, are finally coming together.

It’s a feeling I’m used to, a sense that I’m standing on the edge of a boat, looking down into the deep, where I can see the outlines of something big below, just need to wait for it to slowly make its way to the surface.

In the case of this new fitness project, there are three ideas that have been bouncing around my head for a while, which I think form the core:

Fitness is Composite.

There is a Right Answer.

Excellence is a Habit.

And, relatedly, three legs of how that plays out in implementation:

Get a Coach.

Leverage Technology.

Build Community.

I’m still expanding and refining, still charting out the roadmap going forward. But I think I’m closing in on preliminary launch. And, as part of that, I’ll be circling back to unpack both of those trios of ideas, which I realize currently only make sense (and even then, only sort of) inside my own convoluted brain. Stay tuned.

January 13, 2016

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