This morning, Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in two hours, twenty-five seconds. On the one hand, that fell short of the sub-two-hour goal that he and his Nike support team had been shooting for – a parallel to Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile exactly 63 years back. But, on the other hand, it bests the prior world record time by more than two-and-a-half minutes, a nearly superhuman feat.

It’s hard to get a real sense of how crazy a sub-two-hour marathon is. As it’s a consecutive series of twenty-six 4:41 miles, it’s literally just harder than setting your treadmill to 13mph, then running for two hours nonstop. To demonstrate that, Wired put today this great video, which includes (along with some physiological analysis of the feat) a number of members of Wired’s running club trying to see how long they can hold that 13mph. In short, it turns out they can cruise for about a minute before things fall apart. So, just more than 99% of the race to go!

Congrats to Eliud and everyone at Nike. The two-hour barrier may not have fallen today, but it’s only a matter of time.

As I blogged about last week, progressive overload is one of the most fundamental principles in fitness: for your body to adapt positively, you need to gradually increase the stress induced by successive workouts. To get stronger, in other words, you need to lift more weight over time.

That’s where barbells come in: they allow you to add load, with more safety and efficiency, than nearly anything else. But just because barbell-based movements are where you probably want to end up doesn’t mean they’re the best place to start. Indeed, starting barbell movements before you have a requisite base of strength is a quick road to disaster. If you can’t generate the stability needed to do a barbell exercise perfectly, your body will compensate with less ideal movement patterns to accommodate the load, putting your joints and muscles at serious risk.

If you look around a commercial gym, you can see all kinds of terrible movements in action: unsafe joint mechanics, limited range of motion, and general wobbly disaster. In almost all of those cases, the root of the problem is the same: people ran before they could walk, adding load to a dysfunctional movement.

If you can’t squat perfectly without weight, adding weight is only going to make things worse.

That’s why, at Composite, we build all of our clients’ movements from the ground up. You need to show us 25 perfect, unbroken squats before we add any load at all. Then you need to build up to 25 perfect, unbroken goblet squats while holding half your bodyweight (60 pounds, say, for a 120 pound woman) before we graduate to the bar.

Similarly, if you can’t do 10 perfect, unbroken pushups – with core stability, and a range of motion from full plank lockout at the top to chest literally touching the floor at the bottom – you have no business bench pressing. We see big guys all the time who frequently bench press 225 pounds, yet who can’t pass the pushup test. And, funny enough, they’re also the same guys who show up with a history of persistent shoulder injury.

And while a lot of people spend time on accessory movements to hit their beach muscles – bicep curls, crunches until the cows come home – they’re equally ineffective for beginners. If you can’t do eight strict pull-ups, put down the E-Z Curl bar. And if you can’t farmer’s walk for 30 seconds while holding at least 1-2x your body weight, then start practicing that instead, as it’s all the core work you need.

Sure, the basics aren’t sexy. But they’re also the fastest, safest, and most effective route to results – and long-term health.

With summer weather upon us, a lot of people are breaking their flip-flops out from the closet.

My advice is: don’t.

First, if you’re not currently a member of a fraternity, it’s probably not helping your look.

But second, and more importantly, flip-flops are a biomechanical disaster.

Your feet are a beautiful system, designed over thousands of generations of evolution to withstand pounding by forces several times your bodyweight, thousands of times each day. Fundamentally, your foot is a mechanical arch (cf., the arch of your foot), leveraging physics to accept and then dissipate force with ease.

Or, at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

To illustrate, try this: lift your big toe. You’ll notice that, when you do, the arch of your foot pulls taught. The same thing happens when you keep your toe planted, but lift your heel – the way your back foot moves on each step as you walk. That pulling taught is called the Windlass Effect, and it allows you to support your weight using the strength of your fascia, tough connective tissue that surrounds your muscles. The Windlass action tightens up the fascia in your arch (the plantar fascia), as well as fascia in your calves and upper legs, like the IT band. And that fascia is super strong. In fact, you could literally hang a car from your IT band.

But if you’re wearing flip-flops, your big toe does something different: it scrunches in on every step, holding your shoe in place. That prevents the Windlass effect, so instead of pounding your strong fascia, you instead mash the tendons and soft-tissue of your feet, the cartilage and meniscus in your knees, etc., none of which were designed for that job.

So, in short, if you want to avoid plantar fasciitis, knee replacements, etc., stop wearing flip-flops. Sure, you can wear them on the beach / at the pool. But if you’re just walking around in warm weather, try something like a Vans slip-on (timelessly surfer chic), a strappy sandal, or anything else that holds on to your foot without your active effort.

You’ll look better. And you’ll make it to fall with a healthy leg up.

Last summer, I wrote a series of blog posts about smart approaches to getting some sun. Starting with why sun exposure isn’t really the devil no matter what your mom says about skin cancer, moving on to everything you should know about suntan lotion but probably don’t, covering the use of UV-tracking apps to limit sun exposure to safe amounts, and ending with a pointer to antioxidant fern extract pills that research has shown works like sunscreen from the inside. With warm weather upon us again, all four are still worth the read.

But there’s at least one summer staple that isn’t worth it: aloe vera gel.

Though research on aloe vera for sunburns is surprisingly sparse, almost all the studies (like this one) conclude that aloe is no better than a placebo at reducing the pain or duration of a burn.

And, indeed, though most clinical studies use carefully titrated medical-grade aloe creams, it turns out that most of the aloe vera gel sold at stores really is just a placebo: as of last year, researchers found that the store brands of aloe vera at Target, CVS, Wal-Mart, and elsewhere didn’t actually contain any aloe vera.

So save your $5 and refrigerator space, and stick with sunburn remedies that actually work: take a cool bath or shower, drink plenty of water, use moisturizer on the burn, and consider taking aspirin or ibuprofen to help reduce redness and pain.

See you at the beach!

Like many other coaches, trainers, and health gurus, I’ve long recommended people consider tracking their daily step counts, aiming for at least 10,000 a day. And, indeed, research well supports the benefits of getting 10,000 daily steps; hitting that number results in a nearly 50% drop in all-causes mortality as compared to a sedentary baseline.

Still, the precision of 10,000 is a bit arbitrary. It stems from a Japanese 1960’s public service advertising campaign promoting the first cheaply available electronic pedometers, when “manpo-kei,” or “measure 10,000 steps,” made for an easy, succinct, and catchy slogan. Ever since, 10,000 has stuck as the default pedometer goal.

Earlier this month, however, the International Journal of Obesity published a great observational study of Scottish postal workers, examining the relationship between walking and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of health conditions that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes). Not surprisingly, the study concluded that “compared with those without metabolic syndrome, participants with metabolic syndrome were significantly less active-fewer steps, shorter stepping duration and longer time sitting.”

But tucked in the paper is a more interesting, and more specific, observation: all of the postmen and women who had no symptoms of metabolic syndrome walked at least 15,000 steps per day.

Obviously, there’s only so much we can glean from a single study. But it does suggest that, while 10,000 may be a great initial goal, it might not be the ideal final stopping point. So if you’re tracking your steps, and already consistently hitting 10k, consider upping that goal by 1,000 more each month, until you reach the 15,000 step point. Considering the huge amount of research backing the benefits of walking in general, wedging in a little more of it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Composite’s approach to health is largely built around habits. That’s because habits, once built, are easy to maintain. They are, by definition, what you do by default.

For most people, energy, willpower, and commitment to a goal wax and wane over time. You have days when you’re psyched up and ready to go, and others when you’re barely dragging through. That’s why we tend to favor building systems – something you can plan out and implement when you’re at your best, to keep you on the rails when you’re at your worst.

One system that we’ve found extremely effective is the Refrigerator Rule: in short, you’re eventually going to eat anything you keep in your refrigerator or cabinets. So you should probably only keep on hand food that passes muster with your best, most psyched-up, goal-committed self.

When we review food journals with clients, we’ll frequently find that they ate crappy afternoon snacks a few times during the past week. At which point, we always ask the same question: did you eat that cookie / candy bar / entire stack of Pringles because you really wanted it, or because it was there? And, about 95% of the time, people tell us they ate that specific unhealthy snack because it was the easy thing to do.

Life is short, and pleasure is important. If you really want a doughnut, go out and buy one (or three) fresh, and enjoy the hell out of it.

But if you don’t want one badly enough to head to the doughnut shop for it, I’d argue you don’t really want one all that much. You’re just stuffing down the semi-stale Entenmann’s because that’s what’s in your office kitchen.

So, today, on the first day of spring, take a moment and do your health a favor: spring clean the crap – the cookies, candy, chips, crackers, etc. – out of your home and office. Perhaps even go out and pick up some pistachios and walnuts, apples and oranges, beef jerky or string cheese to replace it.

If you want to eat something less healthful at some point, again, you’re an adult; go buy it and enjoy it. But in the meantime, make fitness easy for yourself. Get rid of the tempting garbage that’s just sitting there, and don’t let your future self make bad choices by default.