THE BESTOF’S
Even were you not unfortunate enough to watch the Presidential Debate—to make a mockery of both words—this week, you’ll have heard both candidates only underlined their unsuitability in their respectively unsuitable ways: Biden being (well and truly) past it and Trump being Trump.
Making Trump sound like a master orator takes some doing, but Biden, seems to me, is unelectable both because he can barely string a sentence together, and the possibility — near certainty— that the one-time (reportedly) no-nonsense D.A. and now total nonsense V.P. Kamala Harris will end up in the driver’s seat. A beautiful—if not, obvious— karma in that DEI decision coming back to bite you in the arse and further exemplar of how it always creates the opposite of your desired utopian naivety.
Instead of doing something about they went straight to the standard playbook: not noticing— he had a cold, just a bad night, a slow start— and telling you not to notice. And Trump is a bad man.
Well if Trump is the threat to liberal democracy and world order you say he is— and there’s good reason to believe at least some of this— why the hell would you roll the dice— and now essentially concede the election— with Biden? People know what they saw. To deny it is only to destroy your own credibility.
And, as he observed in 2016, Trump could stand on 5th Avenue, shoot somebody and not lose votes. But Biden would fall asleep telling you about it. And you’d wish you were asleep if Harris told you about it.
BEST IN SHOW
With that clown show we’re just lucky everything else is going…
Oh.
A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?
And fair rebuttal:
Conceding his parade of horribles—deaths of despair, runaway debt, sclerotic government—does not undermine my objection. For starters, the Soviet Union built a wall to keep its subjects trapped inside their evil empire. Many Americans understandably believe we need a wall to keep millions of people desperate to live here out.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/no-we-are-not-living-in-late-soviet-america/
Ted Gioia is one of those increasingly rare voices that makes a lot of sense. Worryingly, because the (his) outlook is grim. Here he expands on last month.
…the darker side of these technologies demand a serious response. They are already creating social havoc on a massive level—every mental illness and psychological metric of harm is on the rise. Meanwhile the techies who cause it keep using the word acceleration—it’s their favorite term right now.
Imagine a walk down the block where each step represents 100 years of history. After 20 steps, you stroll past Jesus. “After only a few dozen steps—before you can even reach the end of the block—all of recorded history peters out, all of human civilization is behind you, and woolly mammoths exist,” he writes in The Ends of the World. To get to the birth of the Sun, you would have to keep walking for 20 miles a day, every day, for four years. That’s how old the Sun is.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/sun-activity-2024/
No magical cure, no mystery solution
How is France Dodging the Global Obesity Trend?
Participants who followed intermittent fasting with protein pacing lost more body weight and abdominal and visceral fat mass. They also had a higher fat-free mass percentage.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/intermittent-fasting-protein-pacing-weight-loss#Takeaway
And Kellogs et al at it again. A good rule of thumb is to view the health claims on any foodstuff as proof the product is not healthy.
Ironically, cereal boxes bearing low-calorie claims were found to have more calories on average than those without such a claim. The cereal doth protest too much.
https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/childrens-cereals-candy-for-breakfast/
GMB with a list of ways to add more movement, and even training, into your day. It all counts.
That doesn’t mean formal exercise isn’t important—it is! But we have so many more opportunities for informal movement throughout the day that it can have a much greater impact on our health and wellbeing.
https://gmb.io/get-more-movement/?
Consistency is the most important training variable of all. And the greatest threat to consistent training is injury.
While most injuries you can and should train around, it's still true that— pain, expense and disruption to daily life aside— even a minor injury can take a long time to come back from, and, as we get older— that may not even be on the cards.
That's why, at Leftfield, we dial the intensity down to just enough. And while injury is impossible to rule out, our key tool of avoidance is autoregulation.
Here's a GMB article detailing how it can be used to avoid (training) burnout—a, frankly, fanciful concept for most general population trainees— but it's just as applicable for keeping your training in that Goldilocks sweet-spot.
This allowed me to train hard and really push it when it felt right, and stop and just do the minimum when I needed to.
https://gmb.io/autoregulation/?
But, for psychological reasons, it’s also useful for keeping you in the game. Perhaps the greatest problem with maintaining a habit of exercise is that: we’re not very good at paying attention to invisible or gradual outputs.
Dedication to a practice makes this magnitudes more likely but it's further bolstered by our forced attention to gradual outputs, otherwise known as, autoregulation.
The trick is simple: If it’s important, make it visible. If it happens over time, create a signal that brings the future into the present.
https://seths.blog/2024/06/the-pinocchio-protocol/
And a timely offering in light of last week's post re the importance of not doing dumb shit here's Dr John Rusin on the 4 Most Damaging Types of Training and some useful SMR (Self Myofascial Release) techniques.
This year, over 70% of CrossFitters will be sidelined for over a week at a time due to injury. A majority of that 70% can be attributed to shoulder injuries. The rest of the injuries are split between programmed random acts of stupidity (also known as WODs) and spinal issues.
No surprises there, but running also made the list. Often viewed as a drag-yourself-off-couch fitness step one, running—as a single-leg, high-rep exercise— is best considered advanced.
That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't run, necessarily, but you do need to dose it— lightly, to begin, and then incrementally—as programs like Couch to 5K do, although generically.
The answer, again, is autoregulation. So long as you look, and listen you’ll always know how to cook yourself just right. And that will save you from even the dumbest program.
https://t-nation.com/t/the-4-most-damaging-types-of-training/285414
MISCELLANEOUS
Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.
MUSIC
BOOKS
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will—Robert M. Sapolsky
… full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works--the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life.
TV
Vikings S6
APP
CLIP
Have a great weekend.
- OLI