What I Don’t Do for Health
And Why You Might Not Need To Either
I value simplicity. I can’t stand ambiguity, obfuscation, or anything so complex that it is an impediment to action.
My approach with clients—as well as with my own life—is to strip away everything that isn’t useful. Naturally, that leads to me not doing a lot of things that people generally associate with health or physical wellbeing. This article is about those things and why I don’t do them.
Metric tracking
I’ve never been on the “track all the data” hype train, because quite frankly, I’ve not seen much use for it. I’m not a competitive athlete, and I’ve never felt the need to “optimize” any component of my health. The more of this technology that comes out, the more sure I am that I don’t need any of it.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of metrics fitness or health tech companies have told me that I needed to track or monitor:
Sleep
Recovery
HRV
VO2 Max
Blood Glucose
Covering the reasons why I don’t track each of these individually is beyond the scope of this article, but my general reasoning is the same for all of them.
There is no benefit to me in the precise quantification of each of these variables that is markedly superior to crudely or qualitatively assessing them. Almost all of these variables are used as a proxy for some physiological quality that doesn’t need that level of precision. And in the case of something like blood glucose monitoring, normal people probably don’t need to know that at all!
If you sleep poorly you generally know it, and if you don’t, knowing it will only make your day worse. You know how to determine if you need more recovery time? Your performance sucks and you feel like shit.
Performance metrics like VO2 max are also overrated. For one, they’re notoriously inaccurate.1 Second, you don’t need to know it. If your goal is to improve your cardiovascular capacity, which VO2 max measures, improve your performance with whichever activity you’re using to develop it! If you’re running, become a better runner. If you’re cycling, become a better cyclist.
That is what matters. VO2 max is just dick measuring.
Calorie tracking
I have, at semi-regular intervals throughout my professional career, tracked my caloric intake for a prolonged period. Partially for my own goals, but also to commiserate with clients. If you have no idea how many calories are in the foods you’re eating, tracking can be useful. If this is the stage you’re at, I wrote a little guide on tracking.
Through tracking, you learn about caloric content (obviously), portion sizes, sneaky calories from sauces and condiments, how to substitute lower calorie options, and how easy it is to go over your caloric allotment. If you’re paying attention, you can learn what types of foods generally provide a better nutrient and satiety to calorie ratio, which can help you make more informed choices moving forward.
But as is the case with many fitness metrics, relying on nutrition tracking indefinitely can lead to you falling victim to Goodhart’s Law.2 Focusing exclusively on calories can result in people making some unhinged dietary choices to hit their target or making foods fit that they have no business eating only to have no calories left at the end of the day.
Calorie tracking is also difficult to maintain long-term, because it’s a pain in the ass. Which is why many people abandon it or they track when it’s easy and YOLO their weekends, defeating the whole purpose.
There’s also the potential for it to lead to disordered eating. I personally don’t find this risk compelling enough to dismiss it out of hand for most people, but it is a valid concern for anyone with a history of, or higher potential for, disordered eating.
I have lost significant weight tracking and not tracking. Tracking has given me the ability to eyeball calories better than if I hadn’t done it, but it’s not something I want to do long-term. To reduce the need for tracking, I keep my meals consistent, focus on healthy whole foods, don’t drink my calories, and track my weight regularly to determine if I need to tighten the screws. I’ve also covered this in slightly greater detail if you want to understand a more qualitative approach to fat loss.
Long warm ups
I used to spend almost as much time warming up as doing my workout. I would do elaborate mobility movements, foam rolling, cardio, etc. before I even started my workout. Most of this stuff in the context of warming up is a waste of time. The warm up’s job is to prepare you for what you’re about to do, not demonstrate your rhythmic gymnastics routine.
Now, I walk into the gym and just start cranking out a light set of the first exercise of the day. That’s it. I understand this may be a luxury of having an active job, so if you sit all day and want to grease the wheels a little more, it’s perfectly fine to do some additional mobility exercises. But if you have a limited amount of time to train, don’t waste a good chunk of it with an excessive warm up.
Supplements
Other than the occasional protein bar—because it’s quick, easy, and engineered to taste like a candy bar—I do not take anything that I would consider a supplement.
No protein powders, vitamins, creatine, little to no caffeine, and certainly none of the more questionable stuff that’s out there. This isn’t some hard line I’ve drawn in the sand, but rather the general approach I take to anything. I think, barring disease or a physiological deficit, humans are perfectly fine “out of the box”. Meaning I don’t think we need extra stuff to physiologically thrive. You can get muscular, lean, and achieve great overall health without doing anything other than what we evolved to do and eat.
As I mentioned above, I try to eat a balanced diet of lean meats, fruits, vegetables, and healthy(ish) grains, get good sleep, manage stress to the best of my ability, lift weights four times a week, and run three times a week. Anything beyond that for what I’m after isn’t really necessary.
But let’s get something straight. I am not one of those “my body is a temple” guys. I will eat a cookie and other desserts when I dine out, will eat foods at home that are a little more caloric than they need to be, and drink alcohol socially. But I think that’s what actually allows me to nail the 90% of the time I’m being a good boy. As cliché as it is to say, I do think the magic is in moderation.
Ultimately, I default to not taking a thing and need a compelling reason to justify its inclusion.
See a professional every time I get injured or experience pain
This may come as a surprise to some, but you do not need intervention from a third party every time something hurts or you get injured. I won’t go into the details of the complex interplay of factors that affect pain, but it is important for you to understand that the large majority of aches, pains, and niggles will go away on their own.
I frequently deploy this quote from Voltaire that also applies to pain and injury:
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
So many people believe we need to “do” stuff to make our injuries heal faster and our pain go away. When in reality, pain is a normal part of the human experience. It’s a signal, like hunger, that a part of our body may need attention.3
There are obviously circumstances where seeing a professional is warranted: acute traumatic injuries, injuries or pain that are getting progressively worse, loss of function, radiating pain, etc. But catastrophizing run of the mill pain and making a beeline for a physical therapist, chiropractor, or orthopedic doctor every time something hurts is not only unnecessary and expensive, it’s rarely going to “fix” your problem any faster than simply doing what movement you can until your body heals.
I rarely get injured anymore because I’m a much smarter trainee than I used to be, but when I do, I do the following things:
I don’t panic.
Catastrophizing only makes things worse. Look at this as a temporary setback and a normal byproduct of regular training that will reduce in frequency as you gain more experience.
I keep my routine as close to normal as possible.
I may modify the load, volume, range of motion, or switch exercises. But I will change as little as possible to get out of the “pissed off” zone, so my detour from normal training is short-lived.
I MOVE.
If there is any one thing that facilitates healing, it’s general movement. Get up, walk around, try to go about your day as best you can. It’s a form of healthy distraction which also cements the idea that an injury doesn’t mean you’re broken. Again, it’s a temporary setback. That’s all.
Pain can be extraordinarily complex, and I don’t want you to think the advice in this section is meant to be dismissive. On the contrary, I’m advocating for you to understand how complex pain can be and to prevent you from searching endlessly for a physical root cause.
It’s tempting to want a healthcare professional to run diagnostics on you and then give you a quick, simple answer with a clearcut strategy for how to fix your problem. But it’s rarely that simple. Pain doesn’t always have a physical cause and a physical abnormality isn’t always accompanied by pain.
If you experience pain or injury that isn’t an emergency, try the bulleted points in my approach above. Not only does almost every issue resolve on its own, but every time you recover from pain or injury, your self-efficacy increases. And you stop believing that you’re broken and need fixing.
Summary
This post isn’t to demonstrate how great and pure I am—although it’s totally true, ask anyone. It’s to highlight that the things we think we need aren’t as necessary as most people think.
We have had the capacity to improve health, eat better, build muscle, increase cardiovascular fitness without all this extra stuff. Can some of the things I’ve mentioned here be genuinely useful? Absolutely. Are their drawbacks to becoming reliant on them and overcomplicating the hell out of your initiative to improve your health? You bet.
The take home is to seriously examine what complication you add to your health and fitness routine and make sure it’s genuinely useful.
VO2max measurements that you get from a wearable are always estimates. The real way to measure VO2 max is extremely unpleasant. You perform an aerobic activity of increasing intensity to complete exhaustion while wearing a mask over your mouth that measures how much oxygen you consume and how much carbon dioxide you produce. Also, there is a little tube that collects your spit. No one looks cute doing this. I’ve done it once, and I’m okay never doing it again.
James Clear’s succinct quote covers it best: “When a metric becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good metric.” In other words, if you focus on the calorie number only, it stops being about making better nutrition choices and becomes a weird, “what random shit can I fit into my calorie budget?”
Although even this isn’t always the case. We can also have referred pain where what’s injured isn’t even where it hurts.