September 2022

This long overdue newsletter brought to you by 2 months of Substack bugs…and a migration to beehiiv.  I had a great newsletter ready for you in early July but Substack had other ideas.  Now I'm waaay behind on getting all my thoughts and new learnings out.  So I'll be churning through a backlog for a while.  

On with the show...

Research ethics - do incentives matter?  This paper lays out criteria for judging whether research incentives are appropriate.  Research recruitment is part of my day job, and depending on the population needed for a study it can be a real challenge, so I spend a lot of time thinking about incentives.  Since I work on the health and performance side of the curve, as opposed to disease care, I'm increasingly interested in how to make the study itself the incentive.  

 Information Disfluency - or why you might like a pen & paper approach to learning, as I do. It turns out that if you need to make a bit more effort to engage with information, you learn and understand it better.

Diet and mental health: We all know Americans have increasingly poor diets and expanding waistlines, and deteriorating mental health as well.  Recent studies on depression and insulin resistance highlight one way they may be related.  On a somewhat related note, evidence mounts that there are relationships between sugar and Alzheimer's, undoubtedly one of the worst possible ways to spend the last 5-10 years of your life.   

Plantar fasciitis - I’ve been battling this for about 4 months since I overdid it on a trail run and spent an afternoon walking in shoes with poor support (love Stan Smith’s but they probably aren't the best for foot support). The Toe Pro came highly recommended by an EXOS colleague, so I’ve been spending some time using it. This video explains it in more detail. This nighttime foot brace has also helped a lot. This one was a lot less effective, I don’t recommend it.  I'm back to trail running although still managing the pain and trying to stretch and strengthen my feet a lot.  I'll continue to share more of this as I work through the backlog of content.  

 McKinsey shares some good data on remote work. Unsurprisingly, most (87%) who have the option take advantage of working from home at least some of the time. I’ve always found that all things being equal, 2 days in an office and 3 days a week from home are optimal for me. I think for many companies the right model will be work from home as the default, with very focused on site time together a few times a year, but not at an office that the company maintains 12 months a year. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman is clearly no fan of the hybrid model (a few days a week in the office) and he raises some legitimate concerns with the cost implications for all involved.

With fall & winter approaching I'm going to switch from landscape shots to some of my favorite home gym tools & tips.  This is a recent one.  I LOVE landmine work (this link has one of my favorites) but as the weight goes up, gripping the end of the barbell is limiting.  8" of resistance band wrapped around the end works great to help the grip.