Top 5 movies that should have had a sequel (but didn’t) according to yours truly.
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Kate, Joyce and Peter all happily live together as a polyamorous throuple until Peter, plagued by a new gambling addiction spurred on by the big bet he won at the dodgeball tournament, bankrupts Globo-Gym. In a last ditch effort to save his business and relationship, he’s forced to team up with his rival, White Goodman, in a high stakes, winner-take-all beach volleyball tournament. Touche.
Pulp Fiction: Does Jules walk out of the diner, become “the sheppard” and walk the earth? Do Butch and Fabian make it to Knoxville with their winnings? What exactly do you do to someone with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch? And what the hell is in Marcellus’ briefcase? I think we all want answers.
The Shawshank Redemption: After a year of just taking out the boat and going fishing, Red and Andy decide to open up a small business on “Calle Principal” in Zihuatanejo. During the day it’s a book shop and cafe called “Brooks’ Books” and at night it turns into Mexico’s hottest nightclub “The Warden”.
Jerry MaGuire: Now that Jerry is a family man, he no longer yearns to travel the country to chase after athletes. So he and Dorothy decide to open a small event planning business in SoCal. Things go wrong when Jerry - now the head coach of Ray’s Little League team - decides that they are good enough to go to the Little League World Series and that Ray is a future first round pick. He gets exposed on social media as the ultimate “sports Dad”. No longer able to deal with the ridicule he disappears and ultimately joins the Impossible Missions Force and changes his name to “Ethan Hunt”. It’s the crossover we never knew we needed.
Good Will Hunting: Will surprisingly makes it all the way to California in that shitty car only to find that Skylar has already started dating someone else. Alone and depressed, Will falls into his old ways and joins The Crips. On a real downward trajectory, Will is saved from the degenerate-lifestyle when his old friend Chuckie shows up in California. “I had a dream, Will. The future is going to be run by something called AI. But I need someone wicked smart to help me get it going.” So, with that, and after securing funding from reformed Crip Snoop Dogg, they opened Nvidia. And with all the money they make, Chuckie gets his teeth fixed and marries Jennifer Lopez.
Ok, admittedly, these are all terrible ideas. But probably not as bad as the ones I had for Oppenheimer, Schindler’s List and Million Dollar Baby.
I’m not sure if this blog post counts as a sequel, but I think it’s pretty close.
Last week we talked about a potentially-approaching trend of low-stress workouts justified by limiting cortisol production and why that isn’t really sound advice.
This week we are going to get more broad and talk about the risks of something that already is most certainly a trend. And that is optimization.
Optimization, as I am using it, refers to often little-known or under-discussed facets of training, nutrition, lifestyle and recovery that lay outside the well-known or well established principles that sit at the cornerstone of those same modalities.
They are the details. The little things that have proven either anecdotally or through research to have some sort of physiological effect.
And those things are great. Look no further than the current Olympic games and you will see example after example of fractions of a second, a single kilo or a centimeter determining the difference between a gold medal and a multimillion dollar endorsement deal and coming in last place and going home with nothing more than a souvenir of the olympic rings tattooed on your inner biceps.
So, at that level, optimization makes perfect sense. Just having sound nutrition and a thoughtful training program are the cost of entry. You have to get the details right to be a champion.
But in all deference to my colleagues and heroes such as Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Rhonda Patrick and the like, the idea of optimization and bio-hacking has become way too prevalent and popular amongst the general population.
There’s probably nothing wrong with (and likely even some benefit to) walking up in the morning, getting 40 minutes of direct sunshine on your butthole, taking a $28 per dose probiotic and standing in a 3 degree shower.
But the problem lies when people believe that these optimization techniques can be a replacement for the basics.
To go one step further, even optimizing the basics can be more than a lot of people need. Wondering how many reps in reserve you have, increasing weight by 2kg instead of 3 and what degree of incline on a treadmill best replicates outdoor running are not unimportant, unless they come at the expense of the one true training principle: the need to train hard.
And I get it. The basics are boring and it’s more fun to tell your Aunt Miriam how drinking exactly 2oz of raw goat milk per day has changed the way you look at life. But it doesn’t make the fact that you, at the very least, need to start with the basics, is any less true.
So if all that little stuff isn’t the key to optimal health and performance, what in the name of Bryan Johnson should you be paying attention to?
For most people I’d say it’s these 5 things.
In training, make sure it’s getting harder over time. It doesn’t have to be in a linear fashion but this concept - progressive overload - is really important in order to make performance and aesthetic changes.
In nutrition, make sure you are eating the proper amounts for your goals, that you aren’t severely under-doing it on the protein and that you are eating as nutrient-dense foods as possible as often as possible.
On sleep, try to get in 7.5 hours per night and try to make your sleep times consistent. There is nothing wrong with being a night owl unless your alarm precludes you from getting enough sleep.
On stress, try to incorporate some stress reducing practices like meditation or just general relaxation. As we discussed last week, our systems thrive off of push and pull so if you are going to train hard and work your ass off you need to balance that out with time to chill.
On relationships, surround yourself with likeminded people who support your goals, elevate you, tell you the truth and aren’t afraid to say nice things to you because it makes them vulnerable.
And finally, I get it. It’s fun to obsess over some of these groundbreaking and new concepts. And it’s not that they don’t have their place.
But until you are getting the big things right you probably aren’t going to get as much out of that 7AM blue light therapy as you might have hoped.
Do you have an optimization trick that's worked really well for you? Or, more importantly, do you have an idea for a great movie sequel? Hit reply and tell me about it.