Strength training leads to musculoskeletal fitness and can increase muscle mass and strength and improve body composition and bone health. All of which make your activities easier and more efficient.

Simply put – when we get strong, we can live better, and live longer!

A 2021 Harvard Health article adds to the mountain of scientific literature linking exercise and cognitive function and improved memory and thinking skills. Exercise boosts your memory and thinking skills by acting on both the body and on the brain.

Doing even just a little bit of physical activity will have huge benefits for your physical and mental health. And the activity does not have to rank up your heart rate or lactic acid to have benefits.

Light physical activity can have some powerful benefits. Here are a few examples and ideas to support that concept.

In this era of unrelenting distraction, attention is one factor we can control that has a significant impact on our lives. Here are 3 steps you can take to help you control our attention so you can focus deeply and concentrate better.

Nutrition plays a key role in helping your body and brain to heal, repair, recover and regenerate via the inflammatory process. To help with that process, here are some ideas to help you spark your recovery and regeneration through food.

Flow is when we are energized, motivated, focused, happy, and able to perform at our best.

 It is an incredible experience. It is also difficult to replicate consistently - fortunately swimming with sharks is a rare occurence. Here are a few practices that can help you enter your flow state on demand.

What I’ve observed is that elite performers can achieve a state of being where they can access their full potential especially when they are under pressure, tension and stress.

Simply put, they can find calm in the chaos.

There is a key to helping us to shift from surviving to thriving. This is where we still experience stress, but we have practices in our days that help us to recover, recharge and positively adapt so that stress leads to growth rather than burnout.

One way to turn the key and unlock adaptation and growth is to use the foods that we eat to help us to heal and repair our bodies and brains. We can think of nutrition as healing.

Optimizing our mental health is a challenge. I don’t think we should all be happy all the time, and experiencing life to the fullest can involve being happy, sad, excited, anxious or any one of many different moods and states.

The problem is when we experience chronic stress, anxiety or depression for extended periods of time without relief. 

Therefore, in today’s post I’m sharing ideas on how to use exercise and physical activities to improve your mental health.

Today, we explore how proper nutrition can optimize health and energy. Mitochondria are essential for producing the energy that powers every cell in your body, playing a crucial role in overall health, vitality, and performance. By understanding the key nutrients that fuel these vital organelles, you can make informed dietary choices that enhance your wellbeing and supercharge your performance.

Do you remember the first time you really found a song or artist you LOVE?

Does it sound odd to suggest that there are advantages to stress? Isn’t it just damaging and to be avoided at all costs? Not quite. Interestingly, stress is a lot like food. Not having any at all is bad for us, and too much can make us sick. We need to control our stress levels, as much as we can, and help our bodies and minds to recover between moments of stress in our lives.

If you’re reading this then you are interested in performing at a high level in what you care about the most.

Peak performance is characterized by performing at a very high level while feeling effortless, energized, and calm, with minimal distractions or and deep focus.

My objective with this Protocol that I am sharing today is to help you craft your routine and ritual that you can use before big events so that you can consistently perform to your peak potential in tasks that are meaningful to you.

EPIC podcast for you… This week I’d like to change things up a bit, and instead of an article I am sharing a podcast interview that I posted this week with my dear friend and colleague Dr. James Rouse.

Peak performance is most extensively studied in athletes and has repeatedly been defined as feeling effortless, automatic, and calm, with minimal to no distractions or conscious thoughts during the performance.