It’s the first Friday of the month—which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.

On the first Friday of every month, we publish a new Burn the Ships workout for Members only.

If Two Percent is a cult, these Burn the Ships workouts are our Kool-Aid.

Members of the Two Percent community do the workout every weekend—a bunch of us satellites, spread out across the world, all sweating and improving together as one extended network.

Burn the Ships workouts are hard, safe, and effective. They improve your strength, cardio, movement quality, and mindset—and, in turn, your life.

We’ve provided scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them. That is to say, you.

• We’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.

Burn the Ships: April 2026

Running season is here. The 130th Boston Marathon happens on the 20th. The sun is warm. The plants are budding. Birds are singing.

Go outside and run.

Humans evolved to be physically gifted at running long distances—especially in warm temperatures. It’s one of the things we do better than almost any other animal on earth. We were built for this.

The catch: we also get hurt doing it.

Running has one of the strangest injury statistics in all of sports: somewhere between 20 and 80 percent of runners get hurt each year. That range is so wide it’s almost meaningless. But the takeaway is that a lot of runners get injured.

The fix is simple. Researchers recently1 tracked a group of recreational runners over nine months.

• Half did their normal running routine.

• The other half did their normal running routine and a basic, running-focused strength workout 2 to 4 times a week. It took just 15 to 30 minutes.

The finding: The runners who also strength-trained were half as likely to get injured.

And that’s really important. When we get injured, we move less. And when we move less, our health starts to decline.

Beyond studies, it’s also useful to hear what people in the trenches think.

The famed University of Washington Track & Field coach Maurica Powell said, “I’m a big believer in lifting for injury prevention and as a performance enhancer.”

Her team’s strength training focuses on building a stable lower body and core. “With everyone, but especially women, most injuries that happen manifest down the chain with hip instability.”

This month’s Burn the Ships is built around that idea. It will make you a better and more durable runner.

Even if you don’t run, it’s worth doing.

Got knee pain? It’ll probably help you.

Prefer to ruck, cycle, swim, whatever? It still applies.

Just want to be more bulletproof in whatever you do? You’re in the right place.

Here’s our roadmap:

• First, we’ll cover the science of why one tough weekly workout is the non-negotiable sweet spot for both physical and mental health.

• Then, we’ll unpack the story behind You Better Run. You’ll learn why it’s so effective when time is limited.

• Finally, I’ll give you the complete You Better Run workout, with exact steps, full videos, scaled versions, and exercise and equipment swaps to get it done.

Thanks to our partners

• Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. Vitamin and mineral insufficiencies are also linked to sports injuries. Supplementation helps us cover our bases. And if you’re going to supplement, use Momentous. Every product is heavily tested, because Momentous has contracts with professional sports teams and the U.S. military. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily.

The case for one tough weekly workout

• Section summary: One challenging workout per week is ideal for health and fitness.

There’s magic in pushing it once a week. First, there are the brain benefits.

Scientists at King’s College London analyzed 58 studies on intense exercise and mental health. They found that harder efforts led to:

“Improvements in mental wellbeing, depression severity, and perceived stress compared to non-active controls, and small improvements in mental wellbeing compared to active controls.”

Translation: hard exercise doesn’t just beat doing nothing (duh). It often beats doing only moderate exercise.

Intense exercise also comes with physical upsides.

It has an edge over less intense exercise for increasing VO2 max—one of the strongest predictors we have for longevity and disease resistance. A rule of thumb: the higher your VO2 max, the farther you are from death, disease, and decay.

In sum: All exercise helps. But going hard—sometimes—matters.

What’s “sometimes?”

The smartest trainers I regularly speak with suggest that one tough workout a week is the sweet spot for health and performance (info on that here).

More than that, and we tend to get burned out and beat down. Less than that, and we miss out on some health and performance upsides.

Enter Burn the Ships.

This month’s workout: You Better Run

The exercises in the workout have been shown in research to reduce injury risk and make you a better, faster runner.

They fortify the most common injury sites, and improve running economy and time to exhaustion (a measure of endurance) in middle and long-distance runners. They also improve efficiency and speed.

That is all to say: They’ll help you get better at moving on two feet and make you less likely to get hurt doing it.

Equipment needed

• One heavy-ish weight. E.g., A kettlebell, dumbbell, sandbag, or barbell.

Time commitment

• This workout should take you 35 to 60 minutes.

• I’ve also included ways to shorten the workout in the Questions and Substitutions section.

What I’m listening to as I do this workout

• Its namesake song: You Better Run by Dr. C.J. Johnson.

  • That old-time religion …

How to do it

Start with the warmup (part one). Then do part two. Once you’re finished, move into part three.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Exactly how to do the You Better Run workout.

• The full breakdown of reps, rounds, and distances for your fitness level.

• Complete videos for each exercise in the workout.

• Substitutions and scaled versions of the workout so anyone can do it, no matter your equipment or fitness level.

Read more

On Monday, we explored the research behind the psychological “toughening” effect. Read it here.

In short: Psychologists used to think that more stress and adversity led to more mental health problems. Then a researcher named Mark Seery dug deeper.

He found that people who face some adversity—but not an overwhelming amount—are more robust, more resilient, and better equipped to handle new challenges than people who’ve been perfectly sheltered.

Today’s post gets tactical. We’ll explore six practices research shows build greater mental toughness.

You’ll learn:

• 6 potent ways to build mental resilience into your daily life.

• Why I ignored Joe Rogan’s advice—and what I did instead (research-backed advice on taking criticism).

• My good friend Dr. Trevor Kashey’s “Frame of the Veteran,” a powerful mindset shift to instantly neutralize the anxiety of anything new and stressful.

• The research-backed, two-step method for dealing with massive problems you have absolutely no power to change.

Let’s roll ...

Thanks to our partners

• Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. Here’s why I like them: Every single product is heavily tested for purity because Momentous has contracts with professional sports teams and the U.S. military. They also sell what works rather than offering a million fringe options that don’t offer benefits. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily.

Read more

When my strange job puts me in challenging environments and situations—like the Arctic for 30+ days reporting The Comfort Crisis, or Iraq to investigate the drug trade for Scarcity Brain—I notice something interesting: I’m pretty chill afterwards. Stuff that used to stress me out doesn’t. I’m more grateful. I’m happier.

The effect is intense at first, like an afterglow. It eventually fades, but the lessons last in smaller ways forever.

I also see the opposite all the time. In my neighborhood, people who have everything they need but are rarely challenged lose their minds over mild inconveniences, like the trash being picked up late or a weed in another neighbor’s yard.

And so, doing the journalist thing, I’ve studied this phenomenon and talked to experts.

Psychology, for most of its history, was kind of like my neighbors. It assumed that more stress and adversity led to a greater risk of mental health problems. It was a depressing, linear relationship.

But this didn’t jive with the lived experience of millions of people who’d gone through hard things and, in retrospect, thought they’d grown.

And then a psychologist from the University of Buffalo went rogue. He began surveying Americans about their mental and physical health and the challenges they’d faced in life. He even set up lab experiments to test the idea in a controlled setting.

What he found is critical today—because we live in a world where fewer people face legitimate threats and challenges than ever before. And yet mental health issues are worse than they’ve ever been.

Today you’ll learn:

• Why the long-held psychological belief that “all stress is bad” is backwards.

• How a University of Buffalo researcher proved that a “perfect” sheltered life actually leads to worse physical and mental health.

• The sweet spot of adversity we require to build a resilient, steel-trap mind, and why it works.

Quick housekeeping

• In case you missed it:

  • On Wednesday, we looked at the 6 Rules of a Great Workout. Basically: how to build a great strength workout no matter your age, fitness level, or equipment.

  • Friday’s post was our monthly Q&A, where I answered 13 questions about exercising past age 75, whether we should eat less salt, the downsides of fitness trackers, training for big events when work gets busy, and more.

• Shoutout to our partners:

  • Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. Here’s why I like them: Every single product is heavily tested for purity because Momentous has contracts with professional sports teams and the U.S. military. They also sell what works rather than offering a million fringe options that don’t offer benefits. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily.

The toughening theory

Mark Seery is a psychologist at the University of Buffalo who was always fascinated by the cliche, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Little quips like that seem to have a nugget of truth to them. But the thinking in psychology disagreed.

“The literature suggested that there was this clear, straightforward relationship where when a bad, stressful thing happens to you, it’s always bad, and you’re always dealing with adversity and negative consequences,” Seery told me. “And those events have some lingering damage. So this puts you at a greater risk of psychological and even physical health problems down the road. And it was just a very depressing picture.”

Then one day, Seery discovered research on a budding concept called “toughening.”

“It’s this theoretical idea that being completely overwhelmed by negative, stressful things wasn’t good,” he said. “But it also theorized that being totally sheltered shouldn’t be optimal, either. There should be some amount of stress that gives you optimum psychological and physical wellbeing.”

Psychologists at Stanford had already found this in animals. Monkeys who were occasionally separated from their families as babies grew up to be more resilient and capable in the real world compared to their siblings who spent their youth clinging to mom. They were the leaders, the doers.

Seery wondered if the same thing happened with humans.

He surveyed 2,500 Americans—from all ages, genders, races, and economic backgrounds—about the big stressors and challenges they’d faced in life. Like whether they’d faced illness or financial difficulty, death of a loved one, violence, floods, earthquakes, etc.

He also asked them about their health and wellbeing. Are you depressed or anxious? Are you sick or in pain? How often do you have to go to the doctor, and how many prescription pills do you take? Are you happy?

What Seery found1 imploded the existing literature—and confirmed his notion.

Compared to the people who’d been sheltered their entire lives, “the people who’d faced some adversity reported better psychological wellbeing over the several years of the study,” Seery told me. “They had higher life satisfaction and fewer psychological and physical symptoms. They were less likely to use prescription painkillers. They used healthcare services less. They were less likely to report their employment status as disabled.”

By facing some challenges but not an overwhelming amount, these people developed an internal strength that left them more robust and resilient. They were better able to deal with new stresses they hadn’t faced before, said Seery.

From survey to lab

Seery wanted to know if he’d see similar results in a controlled environment. He brought people into the lab and asked them how many trying events they’d had in their lives.

Then he had them stick their hand in a bucket of ice water and leave it there for as long as they could.

“The same relationship comes out,” said Seery. “People report that the pain feels less intense if they have a history of some lifetime adversity. Not a high level, but, critically, not zero. Their mind is also less likely to go to a bad place during the experience—they have fewer negative thoughts during and after the experience.”

He’s since done this with all kinds of stress-inducing tasks. He’s put people through exams, had them give speeches in front of a big group, etc. The findings are consistent.

“People who’ve gone through some adversity show a more positive response,” Seery told me. “They’re more likely to feel like stressful events are an exciting opportunity rather than feeling a sense of overwhelming dread.”

The sweet spot of stress

One of Seery’s key findings is that there’s a sweet spot. He wrote:

“People with a history of some lifetime adversity reported better mental health and wellbeing outcomes than not only people with a high history of adversity but also than people with no history of adversity.”

Think of stress and challenge as a U-shaped curve that looks like this:

Seery told me to think about this like building fitness.

Your body needs the physical stress of running or lifting weights to build endurance or strength. If you never stress your body, you won’t build fitness, and you’ll be more at risk of physical and mental health issues.

At the same time, if you exercise too hard, too often, with little rest, you’ll get injured, and your physical and mental health will suffer for it.

Why it works

Here’s what Seery’s research—and subsequent research—thinks is happening.

1. We learn to cope

When you spend time in the storm, you learn certain facts about storms that help you weather the next one. And the next one. And so on.

The research2 suggests that navigating challenges teaches us coping skills and how to stay on course and not freak out when life goes sideways. We gain a greater sense of control and mastery over our future.

We’re more likely to reappraise future difficulties as manageable challenges rather than catastrophic or overwhelming threats.

2. We learn that our catastrophic beliefs are nonsense

Think of a time you faced a challenge that you thought was going to turn out terribly.

If it went better than expected—and if you’re still alive and reading this, it probably did—that might have taught you something.

Research3 shows that individuals who have faced some adversity are significantly less likely to engage in what they call “situational catastrophizing.” It’s when we fixate on a stressor and believe it will completely overwhelm us.

Because the catastrophe didn’t materialize, our beliefs were violated. In turn, we’re likely to remember that during our next challenge and not spin out into an anxious, sky-is-falling mess.

3. It changes our neurochemistry (maybe)

I’m always skeptical of “neurologizing,” which is reducing complex phenomena to simple explanations about the brain and its chemicals.

But it’s still worth noting: Some research hypothesizes that stress changes our neurochemistry in ways that help us.

When you face a manageable challenge, your brain releases chemicals that spur action. Each time you cope successfully, you reinforce problem-solving pathways—building mental strength the way practice builds muscle memory.

This is one reason why moderate stress is actually beneficial. Studies in animals who were given a medium dose of stress chemicals early in life later outperformed both low-stress and high-stress animals in problem-solving tasks.

This is also why researchers think that uncontrollable, overwhelming stress works the opposite way. The flood of heavy stress hormones may hurt key brain structures, a process closely linked to depression.

4. It’s like mental hygiene

The “hygiene hypothesis4” suggests that exposure to germs early in life helps the immune system develop. If we don’t get exposure, we’re more likely to develop allergies and other issues because our immune systems haven’t been “trained.” In turn, it begins to overreact to seemingly benign stuff (like peanuts).

Some researchers think stress may work the same way. If you have no adversity, you get no inoculation and become hypersensitive to it later on. New stress leads to a sort of overcorrection—and that increases your risk of mental health issues like depression.

Have fun, don’t die, find the upside of problems,

-Michael

P.S., on Wednesday, we’ll explore how to use the toughening theory in daily life.

It’s time for our Q&A.

We had some excellent questions submitted in the Two Percent chat.

I’ll answer the following:

• I think I’m addicted to my Garmin metrics. What are some analog-only ways to track my fitness, sleep, etc?

• I’m 77 years old. How would you adapt my workout for aging well?

• I eat more than the 2,300mg of sodium a day recommendation. Should I be worried? What should I do?

• What are your thoughts on under-the-desk treadmills for those of us tied to a desk for hours at a time?

• What are your thoughts on high-incline treadmills (the ones that go up to a 40% incline) for people who live in flat parts of the world?

• What footwear do you recommend for rucking? I’ve been using my Vivo shoes (barefoot/minimalist shoes), and I’m not sure if that’s the right approach.

• How do you divide your time between writing books and posting on Substack?

• Any practical advice for hiking/trail running in rattlesnake country? (P.S. I had way too much fun answering this question).

• Stones or Beatles?

• What’s the Two Percent approach to creativity (whether writing, art, taking an acting class, etc.)?

• Besides the Grateful Dead, what jam bands are you into?

• I’m a busy college student balancing a mathematically intensive workload with endurance training, with a long-term goal of completing a full Ironman. It’s tough. How should someone think about optimizing across these competing demands?

• What are your nutrition strategies for long outings when you know you need to eat/drink more but aren’t hungry/thirsty, and nothing is appetizing?

Let’s roll …

Thanks to our partners

• Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. They’re heavily tested and trusted by pro sports teams, the U.S. military—and Two Percent. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily.

• Function Health offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

I’m a tech-addicted ultrarunner, hiker, and triathlete. Lately (for months), my Garmin’s metrics have been bothering me, and I’m overly fixated on them. I’m going to take a holiday from my sports watches and just run and lift and hike for a while without heart rate, maps, and recovery scores. What’s your analog-only, or at least mostly low-tech, approach for assessing training adaptation, sleep quality, and recovery? -Alex

Addiction, huh? In that case …

Step one: We admitted we were powerless over our fitness tracker metrics and that our lives had become unmanageable.

Fitness trackers are a tool. Whether they help you or hurt you depends on how you use them.

For people new to fitness, they can enhance awareness. Some people have a vague sense they’re sedentary but don’t act until they see “4,000 steps” staring at them at the end of the day. That’s useful.

That said, every metric on your fitness tracker is some degree of wrong. Read more about that here. And once you’ve gotten the basics, getting too attached to the data can backfire. Our goals shift from all the wonderful things living healthy can do for us to a neurotic numbers game.

Which brings me to something I noticed in your question: You began your question by telling me that tracking was hurting you, and then asked me for new ways to track.

Why not track nothing for one month? Live your active life as normal. Do your workouts. Eat well. Go to bed at a reasonable time. Pay attention to how you feel. Make fitness fun again.

When the month is up, strap the watch back on. Did your times collapse? Did your fitness fall off a cliff because a device wasn’t telling you your activity score was an 80 instead of a 90?

If nothing has changed, it might suggest you’ve learned everything you need to learn from your tracker and can ride on your own now.

The ultimate goal is to know yourself. When I recently appeared on Rich Roll, he said something that stuck with me:

If you’re outsourcing everything to [fitness trackers], you’re missing an opportunity [to learn]. I just remember in my early swimming days, before heart rate monitors and Garmins, exactly what my heart rate was because I’d made a kind of mental mind-body connection. I could tell you without looking at a pace clock what my split was or what my time was, because you just, I just knew myself that well.

I think these tools are just fancy versions of stopwatches and putting your finger on your neck to figure out your heart rate. They can help you develop a connection with yourself. But if you’re not making that connection, then you become reliant upon them.

P.S.: Here’s that episode:

I’m 77-year-old and do kettlebell presses, cleans, and chair squats Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I do deadlifts and walking Tuesday and Thursday. What would you change or add? -Harvey Eilbaum

First things first: this is wonderful. Most people your age are driving around a golf course in a motorized cart and calling it a workout. You’re doing legit strength and cardio work.

But since you asked, here’s what I might consider adding:

Read more

Last Wednesday, we covered The Most Comprehensive Analysis of Strength Training Ever Assembled.

The review was a big deal in the strength science world. Since 2009, researchers have published more than 30,000 studies on resistance training. But no one had ever sat down to put all this new research into a comprehensive and useful whole.

Then a team did. Their work blew up some old ideas while giving us new ones that paint a refreshing picture of what actually works—and how to fit strength training into a busy life, whatever your goal.

After that post, a handful of readers asked me how to actually use these new recommendations.

Like, “OK, now that I know all that, how do I build a workout?”

Ask, and you shall receive. But—an admission. When I first sat down to write this post, I was planning to give you two sample workouts.

Then doubt crept in: What if a person doesn’t have this equipment? What if the gym is crowded? What if you can’t physically do one of the exercises, for whatever reason?

That stupid adage popped into my head: Catch a fish for a person, and they’ll eat for a day. Teach a person to fish and …

Today’s post is the strength training equivalent of teaching us to fish.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• The six things every strength training workout needs. (Think of it as a template for a great workout).

• Videos so you do everything correctly.

• How to put a workout together, no matter what equipment you have, where you are, or your fitness level.

• How to think about sets and reps for your workouts.

Thanks to our partners

• Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. They’re heavily tested and trusted by pro sports teams, the U.S. military—and Two Percent. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily.

• Function Health offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

Read more

I just finished a stretch of travel, where I found myself bound to an airline seat for hours. Then I’d land, sit in a rental car and drive to the hotel, sleep, and do it all again the next day.

I sat more than I have in months.

All of my sitting came on the heels of a recent report finding that the average American now spends about nine to ten hours a day in a chair. The phrase “sitting is the new smoking” made the rounds.

After all, a handful of years ago, the Canadian government funded a giant systematic review of the research1. It found:

High levels of sedentary behavior are unfavorably associated with cognitive function, depression, function and disability, physical activity levels, and physical health-related quality of life in adults.

But a theory from an evolutionary biologist at USC shows the issue is a lot more complicated than that.

The problem may not be that we sit. Rather, it’s how we sit.

The upshot: A few tweaks to how we sit can do us a lot of good. It can likely reduce our risk of diseases that kill us, make us stronger and more functional as we age, and even prevent and relieve back pain.

Today, you’ll learn:

• Why the world’s most physically active people rest 10 hours a day.

• The differences between how we sit and how they sit (and why our comfort is killing us).

• The exact, science-backed changes you can make to your daily routine to reverse the damage of modern chairs.

Housekeeping:

• In case you missed it:

  • On Wednesday, we covered The Most Comprehensive Analysis of Strength Training Ever Assembled and what it can tell us about strength, muscle, and aging well.

  • Friday’s monthly Expedition post (your favorite in the survey) explored 23 topics that’ll make you healthier, wealthier, and wiser this month.

• Thanks to our partners:

  • Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. They’re heavily tested and trusted by pro sports teams, the U.S. military—and Two Percent. I use Momentous’ Plant Protein Powder, Multivitamin, and Creatine daily.

  • Function Health offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

The hunter-gatherer rest paradox

Scientists study hunter-gatherer tribes because they provide a model of how we lived for nearly all of human history. They can help us understand how we’re adapted to live and why we get sick today.

Hunter-gatherers don’t seem to get many of the diseases that kill us: obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. They get about 14 times more physical activity than the average American (they need to move a lot to survive by hunting and foraging).

So it seems reasonable to assume that these people rarely sit around. And that would imply that sitting is a modern mismatch that hurts us.

In his fieldwork with Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, however, USC evolutionary anthropologist David Raichlen noticed something surprising.

Yes, the Hadza move around a lot. But they also do a lot of nothing—lounging around for long stretches of the day.

He decided to study this observation:

• He strapped scientific-grade activity trackers to tribe members to measure the time they spent moving versus resting.

• He also placed small EMG devices on their bodies to measure the tribes’ muscle activity as they rested.

• He documented how they rest by taking field notes and photographs.

The results: The tribe members spent an average of 9.8 hours a day at rest2.

That’s roughly the same as people in the US, Netherlands, and Australia. I.e., the same as the people scientists keep screaming at to stop sitting so much.

Yet the Hadza hardly get the diseases we do.

The difference: we rest comfortably—the Hadza don’t

When we sit, we do so on plush couches or ergonomic office chairs with various levers to dial in the comfort.

Meanwhile, Raichlen found, that when the Hadza rest, they sit on the ground, lie down, kneel, or even squat.

Here’s how much time the tribe members spent in various rest positions:

The power of not melting into a cushion

Chairs are comfortable precisely because they eliminate the effort that our muscles would normally put forth in rest positions.

But the rest positions of the Hadza—kneeling, squatting, and ground sitting—aren’t free. They lightly engage all the muscles in our lower body and trunk. Here’s the data:

Consider resting in a squat position—you still have to activate your lower body and trunk to keep yourself up. This leads to muscle activity in our calves and quads that’s equal to about 20–40% of the levels recorded during walking. Kneeling produced similar effects.

Even sitting on the ground requires us to lightly activate our legs and core to keep our torso propped.

The way we sit also seems to factor into our relatively high rates of back pain.

Back pain is rare among the Hadza. Raichlen told me, “Squatting or sitting without their backs resting (on a chair back), unsurprisingly, increased their lower back muscle activation significantly.”

Modern chairs remove the light work our back muscles used to do while resting, weakening our backs over time. Then, when we chair-weakened people bend over to lift something or move into a new position, our bodies are more fragile.

This is one reason, according to back health expert Dr. Stuart McGill, that people who go to the gym actually experience more back pain than those who don’t. The problem stems from sitting all day, then hammering at the gym with a relatively weak back.

Scientists at Harvard estimate that the way we now live causes 83 percent of back pain (which is the most common and debilitating pain).

The inactivity mismatch hypothesis

Raichlen calls the resulting theory the “inactivity mismatch hypothesis.” He wrote:

This hypothesis posits that our physiology evolved within the context of a high duration of sustained muscle activity throughout all parts of the waking day, both through physical activity and through resting postures that maintain low levels of muscle activity. Prolonged periods of muscular inactivity during chair sitting, a common element of daily life in industrialized populations, are best viewed as a key mismatch with our evolutionary past.

In other words, we evolved to be mildly active and engage our muscles even at rest.

But our modern comforts have removed that light effort we used to get hours each day.

Raichlen noted in the paper that when our muscles fully relax, they stop producing the enzyme lipoprotein lipase, which helps clear fat from the bloodstream. This can lead triglycerides to accumulate, insulin sensitivity to drop, and blood flow to slow. Inflammation can creep up.

He wrote that sitting in postures that don’t require muscle activity leads to, “detrimental effects on lipid and glucose metabolism, blood flow and endothelial health, and regulation of inflammation.”

3 ways to rest better

The answer isn’t to get rid of your chairs and sofa forever.

But we might see some benefits if we didn’t make every moment of rest optimized for comfort. Here are a few ways to get there:

1. Sit without the backrest

Even your regular office chair becomes more effortful if you don’t use the backrest. Your trunk muscles have to work to keep your torso propped straight.

Of course, you can’t slump over when you do this. Biomechanist Jenn Sherer explains that slumping over with your back forming a C can lead to spinal disk bulges and pain.

A strange yet easy tip to sit better: picture yourself with a tail. You want to sit with your pelvis positioned in a way that your tail could wag as you sit, with your back straight.

To illustrate this position, Sherer uses the image below of a weaver in Rajasthan, India. I.e., try to sit like this guy.

Sitting without a backrest seems like a minor tweak, but a Two Percent reader once messaged me to say, “I’ve had back pain for a long time. I always read for about half an hour at night, and I started reading sitting upright with my back straight. My back pain has gone away, and I haven’t changed anything else.”

Simple tweaks can be powerful.

2. Sit on the floor for ten minutes as you watch Netflix or read

Ten minutes sitting on the floor at night is totally doable. Put in the time, then retreat to the couch.

Sit cross-legged, with your legs extended, whatever. Try to keep your back relatively straight. Ground-level sitting activates more muscles than a chair, and getting up and down from the floor is itself a useful movement.

The Hadza transition from ground to standing about fifty times a day. Rising from the floor runs your joints through a full range of motion and builds the kind of functional strength that predicts how long you’ll live.

One study of adults aged 51 to 80 found that those who needed more support to get up from the floor were roughly five times more likely to die in the next six years3.

3. Break it up sitting

The Hadza’s average sedentary bout was about fifteen minutes before they shifted posture, stood, or moved.

I, on the other hand, spent two hours in the same half-dead position on the couch watching The Sopranos over the weekend. I don’t think I’m unique—we’re less likely to shift around in comfortable chairs and couches.

A standing break every twenty to thirty minutes is a good way to interrupt sitting and get your body moving again.

At work, standing desks can also help. The research shows that standing desks (despite manufacturer claims) don’t lead us to burn significantly more calories than sitting.

But to me, the benefit is that our muscles work slightly more, and we’re more likely to move around. We pace more. We change positions far more frequently. That keeps our muscles from going totally offline.

Have fun, don’t die, rest well.

-Michael

The Expedition is our monthly journey into thoughts, opinions, ideas, observations, studies, facts, figures, etc.

Good ones, insightful ones, interesting ones, weird ones, and ones you can use to live better and longer.

It’s a roundup of all the worthwhile stuff I’ve discovered in the last month. The Expedition is a bit of an island of misfit toys. But, hey, the greatest journeys are winding.

Check out our partners:

• David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency and was also cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

In this month’s Expedition, you’ll learn:

• Numbers on:

  • Protein madness.

  • How many things a great doctor thinks will actually help you live longer.

  • The real number of people on Earth.

  • Why internet relationship advice needs boundaries.

  • The power of dogs for cancer survival.

  • A big advance in animal welfare.

  • A troubling reason two-thirds of young adults aren’t dating at all.

  • The greatest endurance feat ever.

  • March Madness.

  • The most Girl Scout cookies ever sold by one Girl Scout (and a ranking of Girl Scout cookies).

  • White noise and sleep.

  • New data on how fasting impacts weight loss.

  • How sugar affected the obesity crisis.

  • A no-excuses way to get in exercise when you have zero equipment and zero time.

• New heart rate and lifespan science.

• The science of why AI confidently makes shit up, and why “just build smarter models” won’t fix it.

• The cheapest grocery stores in America: a power ranking.

• The optical illusion that broke my brain.

• Apple’s crusade against Two Percenters.

• Important new data for parents who want to raise resilient kids.

• Wild data on microbiome tests.

• An important parting quote.

Let’s roll …

By the numbers

4

Grams of protein per serving a salad kit I recently bought advertised on its packaging.

We have apparently reached the point in the protein craze where we’re slapping protein counts on lettuce mixes. For context, bread has more protein.

Source.

5 to 10

Things that will actually make you live longer. The wise Tweeted this:

Up to 1 Billion

More people on the globe than we thought.

Scientists believed that 8.2 billion people live on this rock spinning in the cosmic abyss. But a new report found there are probably far more of us.

Researchers in Finland used new survey methods and think we’ve vastly undercounted the number of people who live in rural areas. There may be up to a billion more people on Earth.

Source.

50

Percent of all current relationship advice on Reddit is to “end relationship (break up/divorce/cut contact).” In 2010, that figure was only 30 percent.

From 2010 to 2025, researchers found, “Communicate” dropped from 22% to 14%. “Compromise” collapsed from 7% to 3%. “Give Space” fell from 25% to 13%.

I.e., Every category that requires the uncomfortable work of patience, communication, and accommodation lost ground every single year. We may need boundaries on boundaries.

Something making this worse: Reddit is currently the top source for LLMs. So if a person asks ChatGPT for relationship advice, they’re more likely to be told to end the relationship.

64

Percent lower relative risk of death in cancer patients who spent time with dogs.

The reasons are likely complex, but the researcher theorized that they include “increased physical activity, psychosocial support, and microbiome modulation.” Dog owners may also have a greater sense of purpose, a reason to get out every day, and more human interaction.

Of course, the findings could also be because the sickest people give up their dogs. But, either way, dogs are good. You can’t argue with that.

Source.

50

Percent of eggs are now cage-free. In 2012, that figure was 10%. This, Kenny Torrella, who covers factory farming for Vox, wrote, “shows just how much the (tiny) animal advocacy movement can punch above its weight.”

Source.

66

Percent of young adults are not dating regularly. The biggest reason: lacking confidence and not knowing how to approach possible dates.

Sociologist Brad Wilcox told the Washington Post: “If trends continue, 1-in-3 young adults will not get married. The implications are staggering: a generation of permanent bachelors—& bachelorettes—untethered from the bonds that have given life its deepest meaning.”

Source.

8,425

Miles a bar-tailed godwit flew from without stopping. That’s 13,560 kilometers for you readers who are not in the United States, the UK, Liberia, or Myanmar.

The bird, known as B6 and tagged with a tiny solar-powered satellite tracker, began its flight in Alaska and ended it in Tasmania. The journey took 11 days.

“This trip represents the longest documented non-stop flight by any animal,” said the USGS, which was part of the team of scientists tracking these birds.

Source.

1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808

That’s the odds of having a perfect March Madness bracket if you guess or flip a coin.

Your odds improve to an estimated 1 in 120.2 billion if you know something about college basketball and try to make educated picks.

Source.

100,000

Boxes of Girl Scout cookies sold by Pim Neill, a six-year-old girl from Pennsylvania.

Each Girl Scout now gets their own website for customers to place orders. Pim’s sales took off when she posted a video to TikTok saying, “Hi, my name is Pim. Do you want to buy some Girl Scout cookies?”

Also, an inarguable ranking of Girl Scout cookies:

1. Thin Mints

2. The cookie formerly known as Samoas

3. Everything else

Source.

67

Percent that wakeups decreased when an ICU added white noise to patient rooms.

Wakeups dropped from an average of 48.4 an hour to 15.7 an hour.

This is why I fall asleep to The Sopranos most nights. Nothing induced REM sleep like Paulie Walnuts saying, “Whattya hear, whattya say?”

Source.

0

Difference in the reduction in body weight, body fat, or metabolic risk factors among people who fasted compared to those who reduced their calories but didn’t fast.

Takeaway: Eating fewer calories than you burn drives weight loss and its beneficial impacts. Fasting can be helpful if it helps a person eat less than they burn, but it’s not any more beneficial than other methods that help people eat less.

Source.

15

Percent decrease in sugar consumption among Americans from 2000 to 2015. During the same period, obesity grew by about 15 percent.

This suggests sugar did not cause the obesity crisis.

2 to 3

Hours that often spends riding his Zwift Ride bike trainer. He Tweeted:

People always ask me how I spend 2–3 hours sitting on an indoor bike trainer.
Have you ever sat on your couch and watched a 2+ hour movie?
Ok. So do that. And add a bike.

Lifespan and the human heart rate

Read more

Since 2009, researchers have published more than 30,000 studies on strength training.

A lot has happened over those 17 years. We have better research methods and a clearer picture of what works. New ideas emerged. Old dogmas were disproven.

But no one had actually sat down to pull all this new research into a comprehensive and useful whole.

Recently, a team of the brightest minds in exercise science finally did. They synthesized 137 systematic reviews and data from more than 30,000 participants. It was one of the most comprehensive analyses of strength training ever.

It was part of an effort by the world’s largest sports medicine organization to update its official guidance on how people should actually lift weights.

And, in many ways, it blew up many of ideas that guided the field for nearly two decades.

Luckily for us, it paints a refreshing picture of what actually works—and how to fit strength training into a busy life, whatever your goal.

Today you’ll learn:

• What the researchers found about training to build and maintain strength (how you should exercise) at any age.

• What methods of strength training work best.

• How not to lift as you age.

• What the science says about:

  • Training to failure.

  • Periodization (varying loads, volumes, and training variables through workout phases).

  • Using machines versus free weights.

  • The ideal number of reps and sets to make progress in less time.

• The minimum effective dose of weekly workouts, including the specific rep range and weight load that you need to see improvement.

Thanks to our partners

• David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

Read more

One of my favorite applications of the Two Percent mindset comes from a reader who emailed me a few years ago.

She worked at a desk, taking phone calls all day. Her daily step count was around 3,000.

When she read about the Two Percent mindset—finding simple ways to embrace a bit of discomfort for long-term gain—she had a realization: I do have to take these work calls. I do not have to take them while sitting.

She started taking calls while walking—and got her step count past 10,000 a day. Research suggests that move alone could cut her risk of dying prematurely in half. And even without that benefit, she said, walking felt less soul-sucking than staring at her home office walls.

I thought about this because two events since November have made it harder for me to do strength workouts and long trail runs:

1. Needing to finish my new book, which I submitted to my publisher on Friday.

2. A new addition to the family: Duke, a German Shorthair puppy who requires a constant eye and many walks. (He recently pulled my 32” computer monitor off my desk, which is a story for another time.)

I’ve been taking far more walks lately and am averaging about 14,000 steps a day in 2026. Here’s what’s happened:

• Weight: Down 3 pounds.

• Strength: About the same.

• Endurance: Largely unchanged, maybe better.

• Headspace: Surprisingly intact, despite a book deadline and caring for a bat-shit hunting dog.

Today’s post is about the power of walking.

You’ll learn:

• Why walking matters if you’re a human.

• The daily minimum step count that saves you time and captures most health benefits.

• The daily step count for maximizing the health benefits of walking.

• Why a daily, dedicated walk probably beats scattered steps.

• Why the speed of your steps may matter more than your total distance.

• Why walking is good for people who have a brain and think with it. (That is to say, you).

Quick Housekeeping

• In case you missed it:

  • On Wednesday, we covered 4 ways to be hopeful and why being hopeful is so important (especially when the world feels like it’s falling apart).

  • In Friday’s Gear Not Stuff, we covered the best purchase I’ve made in the last year (it helped me finish my new book).

• Thanks to our partners:

  • David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

  • Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

Let’s roll …

Why walking matters

Our earliest chimpanzee ancestors started walking upright about six million years ago. Earth was experiencing a global cooling period, and the chimps on the edge of the jungle faced shrinking fruit supplies.

Those who survived tended to have bodily quirks that enabled them to travel farther to find food. Over generations, natural selection favored bodies capable of covering long distances—with features like arched feet, angled knees, narrow waists, and long spines.

These animals, over millions of years, became a new species altogether: humans.

The famed paleoanthropologist Mary Leaky put it this way:

One cannot overemphasize the role of [walking] in [human] development. It stands as perhaps the salient point that differentiates the forebears of man from other primates. This unique ability freed the hands for myriad possibilities—carrying, tool-making, intricate manipulation. From this single development, in fact, stems all modern technology … this new freedom of forelimbs posed a challenge. The brain expanded to meet it. And mankind was formed.

Walking makes us human. Among the 2.17 million species on earth, few can travel long distances on two legs like us.

And for most of history, we used this uniquely human feature constantly. Anthropologists call early humans “societies of perpetual movement.” Estimates suggest our ancestors took 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day. That was the baseline for most of history.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened. We got cars, escalators, desk jobs—and systematically engineered walking out of daily life.

Some anthropologists argue that we’re still adapted to those high levels of walking. It may not be that movement makes us healthier. It’s that without it, our bodies go haywire. Think of it like a nutrient. If we don’t get enough, sickness tends to set in.

Which brings us to step counts …

Ideal daily step counts

Our ancestors weren’t logging 20,000 steps a day for the same reasons we do, like to avoid heart disease and diabetes decades later. They walked to avoid starvation today.

The good news: researchers don’t think we need to match our ancestors to get most of the benefits.

When scientists look at step counts and health—and many studies do this—they typically find that between 7,000 and 10,000 dramatically reduces the risk of dying early.

One analysis1 of 31 studies tracked the walking habits of 300,000 people and found that 7,000 steps a day captured most of the risk-reducing benefits.

Another study2 of about 5,000 people over age 40 found the following:

Two things to note about that graph:

1. The biggest benefits show up when you’re over 653.

2. When you’re young, your risk of dying is low, whether you take 2,000 steps a day or 16,000 steps a day.

But I see this as a case for building a walking habit now, so you don’t die too soon later.

It’s easier to take 10,000 steps a day at 70 years old if you’ve been taking 10,000 steps a day since you were 40. And some diseases that kill us at 75 likely begin to develop slowly if we’re inactive when we’re 40.

Both studies also found that getting 12,000 a day is likely where we lower our risk the most. We see it in the graph above, and the study of 300,000 found that those who got 12k steps a day were 55% less likely to die, while those who got 7k were 47% less likely to die.

Walking is both a marker of good health and a cause of it. It’s hard to know which comes first. But it doesn’t matter much—the prescription is the same.

Why you should take a dedicated daily walk

Getting 7,000 steps by moseying through daily life—grabbing the mail, walking the aisles of Target—is good. But it may not be the same as getting those steps from a dedicated walk.

Researchers who study walking often look at cadence, which is how many steps you take per minute. They find that faster steps—100 a minute or more—lead to additional benefits compared to slower steps4.

That is to say, the benefits of walking seem to come from both volume and intensity. Moving more overall matters, but moving briskly for some of those steps may amplify the effect.

When I covered The New Science of the Two Percent Mindset, I spoke with the wise of the Substack. We talked about a recent internet drama over a study, and Brady pointed out:

All steps are not created equal. If you get 10,000 steps that are vigorous versus 10,000 steps that are moseying around the house, those are vastly different in terms of how those are going to impact your health. I think it’s reassuring for people who find it hard to get 10,000 steps. You have to walk for 1.5 to 2 hours a day to reach 10,000 steps. So if you can’t get it, do brief, vigorous bouts where you’re walking fast across a parking lot or hustling up stairs. Those actually have a big impact on your health.

My takeaway: When we take a dedicated walk, we tend to walk faster.

So go for a daily walk at a decent pace. You don’t have to be an Olympic speed walker. One hundred steps per minute is considered a “moderate” pace for most adults. It’s about a 20-minute-mile pace.

If you don’t think you can take a dedicated walk, I suggest you check your phone screen time. Stare in horror at the number of minutes you spend on habit-forming apps. Then go outside.

Walking and your headspace (mood + ideas)

As I mentioned up top, I’ve been surprisingly mellow despite a looming deadline and a feral puppy. This tracks with the science.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied5 the health benefits of walking and other forms of exercise and found:

• No significant difference between the mental health benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy and movement (especially walking).

• No significant difference between the mental health impacts of antidepressants and movement.

“Thus,” they concluded, “exercise appears to be as effective as other psychological or pharmacological treatments.” And if we walk outside, we tend to get even more benefits for our headspace, according to the research.

Then there are the ideas. The best ideas and lines in my new book came to me on my walks. I am not unique in this.

People who came up with far better ideas than I also found a connection between thinking and walking:

• Darwin developed and sharpened his ideas on natural selection while taking walks on a loop outside his home, now called “Darwin’s thinking path.”

• Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said sitting hindered his thoughts and noted, “My body has to be on the move to set my mind going.”

• Nietzsche walked every day with a notebook and said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

• Emerson and Thoreau were “walker-thinkers” who developed their philosophies on the move through the New England woods.

• Virginia Woolf walked to develop her writing.

• More recently, Steve Jobs took a walk anytime he was stumped, which led him to develop his most innovative Apple products.

There are a few theories around why walking seems to unlock thinking:

• It seems to enhance blood flow and connectivity to regions of the brain involved in creative thinking.

• It removes you from digital distractions, allowing your mind to wander. Ideas often come together when nothing interrupts them.

• We may have evolved to walk and think. USC anthropologist David Raichlen points out that for all of time, humans had to come up with creative solutions while moving. “When you’re foraging for food, you are physically active, but you’re also cognitively active,” he said.

Putting it all together

Walk often. Walk far. Walk today. Walk tomorrow. Walk outside in the sunshine and rain, cold and heat. Walk alone or with someone. Walk like you mean it. Just walk.

Have fun, don’t die, walk,

-Michael

I sent in a full first draft of my next book to my publisher this morning.

Nearly every morning since September of 2024, I’ve gotten up between 3 and 4 a.m. and worked on the book for at least a couple of hours. That’s, at minimum, 1,114 hours of writing.

So: It’s 3 a.m., and my job is to arrange words in an order people will enjoy. How do you do that?

Coffee, obviously. Lots of it.

Flipping on the coffee maker and pouring a cup is the only thing I did between waking up and writing. That’s my three-step “morning routine.”

Which brings us to today’s Gear Not Stuff. A friend recently asked me what the best purchase I’ve made in the last year has been1.

My answer: A really kick ass coffee maker.

It makes the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.

Another friend who visits often asked, “Why has the coffee here been so much better lately?” The addition of this coffee maker.

Given this publication’s focus on health, this is where you’d expect me to list the research-backed health benefits of coffee. But I’m not going to do that.

Yes, there probably are some health benefits to drinking coffee.

But those benefits are wildly overblown, over-covered, and based on questionable research. Smart people lose all skepticism when bad research confirms their bias toward coffee.

As recently wrote in Medscape:

In , he picked apart a study claiming to find a 25% reduction in dementia in heavy coffee drinkers, writing, “Nearly every study like this are flawed by confounding factors.” Many “coffee does X incredible thing for your health” are just like that: bad. Read more.

That said, what I can definitively conclude is that coffee—particularly when it’s from this coffee maker—makes me happy. And if I’m happier, I’m better at arranging words at 3:00 a.m. Which is enough of an experiment for me.

From here you’ll learn:

• Why most “coffee for longevity” studies are fundamentally flawed.

• How a 1960s engineer perfected the science of the home brew.

• The 3 specific downsides of the world’s best coffee maker (and why I ignore them).

• Five coffee beans I love.

Read more

Hope is a hell of a drug: its highs are high, and its lows are low.

Right now, it may feel like we’re in a low. A big one.

FFS, where do we start? War in Iran. Existing conflicts between Israel and Palestine. The looming threats of nuclear war, AI coming for our jobs, and (insert 500 other things).

Despite all of this, there’s a strong case to be hopeful. Hopeful people:

• Generally have better mental health1.

• Cope with setbacks better and are more likely to achieve goals and solve problems2.

• Recover from illness better and are less at risk of some diseases, like heart disease3.

• Tend to make more money4.

Even when things seem like they’re going to absolute shit, there are ways to find hope. And if we can find hope, we’ll not only feel better—and live longer, according to research—we’ll also be more likely to do things that improve the world.

Which is exactly what today’s post is about.

We’ll cover four mindset shifts for the dark times—whether that’s the state of the world or something happening in your life.

The science of hope and hopelessness

Feeling hopeless sucks in the moment, but it’s actually useful.

Good moods and bad moods (hope and hopelessness) likely evolved as signals that helped our ancestors direct their efforts toward actions that helped them survive.

An example: If food in the area where our ancestors lived was plentiful, these people would feel great. But if drought swept over the landscape and food became scarce, hopelessness would set in. Those low feelings would lead these people to withdraw, ruminate, and mope around—the classic signs of depression. That did two things:

1. Saved energy. The sluggishness that came from feeling hopeless conserved precious energy in times when food was hard to find5.

2. Often led us to think of ways to improve our situation. Rumination is a classic sign of low mood. In our example, our ancestors might consider moving to a place with more food.

That system worked really well. For about 300,000 years.

Today, most of us in the developed world live in more physical safety and comfort than any humans ever have. We don’t worry much about not having food or water, or rival tribes coming in to murder us in the night. And yet research suggests feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and depression keep climbing in the safest countries.

We’ve engineered away immediate, life-threatening problems and replaced them with more vague and future-oriented ones—news cycles about violence happening far away, political dread, the lingering sense that something bad will happen sometime.

The same system that once helped us survive a famine can get hijacked by our political news drug of choice: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Newsmax, X.

That’s not a reason to dismiss bad events around the world. But it does suggest that feeling low is worth examining.

Hope isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t. It’s a skill you can build. And when it breaks down, it usually breaks in predictable ways. The good news is that it’s also fixed in predictable ways, and they’re easier than we might think.

Today you’ll learn:

• The two-part definition of hope, and why understanding it changes how you look for hope and in turn lowers your risk of heart disease, cancer, loneliness, and mental health issues.

• The formula for why we become hopeless.

• How to recognize and dismantle the psychological defense mechanism of expecting the worst.

• The true science of cynicism.

• The one question to ask yourself when you feel powerless that’s more useful than any motivational advice.

• What to do when you genuinely can’t fix anything—and why that’s not the same as giving up.

Thanks to our partners

• GTFOutside with Janji, an independent running brand making gear built for ultra-distance pursuits. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—my favorite kind. I love this new weird, amazing jacket they released. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

• David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

Read more

Remember: Only two percent of people take the stairs when an escalator is available.

This Substack explores the “metaphorical stairs”—the slightly harder choices that yield massive long-term benefits for how we live, perform, and age.

Today, however, we’re dropping the metaphors and covering an exercise that helps you climb and descend actual stairs: stepups.

Because if you can do stepups well, you can maintain fitness, function, and independence for the long haul. Stepups can even help us avoid one of the major killers of older adults.

Researchers in the Czech Republic pointed out:

The single stepup is an integral movement performance for functional mobility and activities of daily living.

It’s always been like this. Humans have long needed to be good at stepping up and down to survive and thrive. We evolved to walk on two feet in a rough environment that demanded we ascend and descend rough terrain.

The ability to do that well still matters today.

One study1 found that people who performed better at climbing four flights of stairs were less at risk of dying from any cause. Another noted2 that the ability to climb stairs well reduces the risk of catastrophic accidents in older adults.

This is exactly why the January and February Burn the Ships workouts contained so many stepups. In training to do epic stuff outside, we train to offset the perils of modern living.

Today you’ll learn:

• The surprising reason stepups are an essential exercise (performance + longevity).

• How to do stepups correctly: movement and equipment tactics.

• How to use stepups in a workout.

Quick housekeeping

• In case you missed it:

  • On Wednesday, we explained what to do after a workout: The Two Percent Cool Down. (You asked for it in the survey).

  • Friday was part III of our three-month Burn the Ships workout plan that will make you ready for the mountains (and life).

• Thanks to our partners:

  • Go outside with Janji, an independent running brand making gear built for ultra-distance pursuits. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—my favorite kind. I love this new weird, amazing jacket they released. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

  • David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

Let’s roll …

How stepups improve performance

Research is just starting to catch up to the power of stepups. The Olympic performance coach Carl Valle said:

In my experience, no other exercise has had so much success with adoption but so little useful research on its effectiveness and execution as the stepup exercise.

The exercise has some of the greatest carry-over to performance in the outdoors and everyday life.

This is probably why the thinkers at MTNTOUGH and Uphill Athlete frequently include stepups in their programs. So do the folks at the Mountain Tactical Institute (MTI). As Rob Shaul from MTI put it:

Loaded stepups are a functional, transferable, and no-excuse way to directly train hiking uphill under load—a foundational fitness demand for all mountain sports.

Two other performance benefits worth knowing:

• They work your glutes harder than any other exercise. Glutes are your “go muscles,” and they act as shock absorbers as you run, hike, and ruck. A study in the Journal of Sports Science & Medicine3 concluded: “The step-up exercise and its variations present the highest levels of [glute] activation followed by several loaded exercises and its variations, such as deadlifts, hip thrusts, lunges, and squats.”

• They’re safer than many other popular lower-body exercises. They don’t load your spine as severely, and they happen on one leg at a time, which generally reduces injury risk and fixes strength imbalances.

How stepups help us age better

As we age, we’re often fine at climbing up stairs. But we start to lose the ability to slow ourselves down as we descend stairs or step off a curb. I.e., the “brakes” die before the “engine.”

Researchers call the ability to slow yourself down while descending “eccentric deceleration.”

If we don’t have the strength and coordination to decelerate and land softly, our chances of falling skyrocket. Notice how no one says “I fell up the stairs.” They say, “I fell down the stairs.”

And if we fall and break a hip, we’re screwed. You’ve probably seen me cite the data here, but a new review4 updated the numbers. It found 21.8% of older adults who break their hip will be dead within a year.

Stepups build eccentric deceleration because the lowering phase trains your brakes.

Stepups also:

• Reveal and fix your asymmetries. Because you work one leg at a time, you can see if you’re weaker or moving differently on one side. Fixing relative weaknesses and movement asymmetries can help you avoid injuries and stay mobile.

  • Many people discover after a DEXA scan that one leg has significantly more muscle than the other. Single-leg exercises like stepups fix that.

• Protect your knees. Stepups work muscles that stabilize your knees, which can help you avoid pain from running and living. The “Patrick stepup,” in particular, has research behind it and is also often used in physical therapy settings.

How to do stepups correctly

The famed strength coach Mike Boyle calls stepups “hard to do well and easy to do poorly.” Here’s how to do them right.

1. Use the right height box or step

Tall boxes are where good form goes to die.

The height of the box or step you use should depend on your height and ability level. Use common sense. Start with a step or box that’s anywhere from 3 to 12 inches off the ground.

Once you’re comfortable with one height, gradually go higher.

Eventually, you want to use a box that puts your front thigh parallel to the ground in the “down” position. Going higher than that has diminishing returns. For example, MTI has its athletes use boxes that are 17 inches or shorter.

2. Drive upward with your front leg

The “working” leg—the one on the box or step—should do most of the work.

A common mistake is pushing off the back leg to generate momentum, then bending forward and using your back to finish the rep. When that happens, the front leg barely works.

To fix this, do three things:

1. Push through your front foot.
   Think of your back foot and leg as a rudder that keeps you on course rather than an engine—it shouldn’t be pushing you up. The pushing should come from the front leg.

2. Pull your toes toward your shin on your back (non-working) leg.
   That makes it harder to cheat by pushing off your back leg.

3. Stand tall.
   As you execute the exercise, you’ll naturally lean forward. But try to avoid leaning too far forward. Your chest should be up. This takes strain off your back and helps you avoid jerky momentum.

3. “Lock out” your hips at the top

When you reach the top of the movement, come to a full standing position. Your ankle, knee, hips, and torso should all be in a straight, stacked line.

You can use different tricks to ensure your hips lock out. For example:

• Drive your non-working leg upward and lift it until your thigh is parallel with the ground and knee is bent 90 degrees in front of you.

• Touch your back leg’s heel to the front of the box.

• Flex your butt at the top. (This is what I do. It’s the simplest cue—and it works).

4. Lower yourself slowly

This is the most neglected part of the exercise and arguably the most important. Don’t flop back down to earth. Control the descent. That’s where eccentric deceleration gets built—and where the real payoff for aging, trail running, and rucking lives.

Putting it all together …

Here’s a quick-and-dirty video showing you the difference between a good and bad stepup.

Note how in the good example I:

• Use a Yeti cooler as a step. My standard Rogue box is a bit taller than is ideal for stepups for most people most of the time.

• Don’t push off my back leg.

• Stand tall and lock out my hips.

• Lower myself slowly.

In the bad example I:

• Use too tall of a box.

• Push off from my back leg.

• Don’t lock out at the top.

• Plummet back to earth.

How to Use Stepups

• As a warmup: Bodyweight stepups are a great way to get your lower body and core firing before a workout. Do a set or two of 10 onto a low box.

• To protect your knees: If you’ve ever had knee issues (or if you run often), try the “Patrick stepup.” Some studies show it can help with knee pain and protect knees, and it’s also often used in physical therapy settings.

• In a workout: Weighted stepups are great, but a little weight goes a long way. If the weight messes up your form, use less weight. I’ll do them while wearing a weighted pack, or holding dumbbells or a sandbag.

• As a workout: I’ll often set a timer and do stepups for 40 minutes straight. I usually wear a pack that weighs about 10 to 15 percent of my bodyweight. The point isn’t to accumulate as many reps as fast as I can. The point is to pack in a lot of great reps to prepare for the mountains. I do this when I have something good to watch on TV, like a documentary or Golden Knights game. The time goes by surprisingly fast.

• Try different variations: Each has unique benefits. For example, researchers at Marquette University5 found that regular stepups are best for your glutes and hamstrings. Crossover stepups hit the side of your glutes, which helps with stability. Lateral stepups hit your outer quads.

Have fun, don’t die, do stepups.

-Michael

It’s the first Friday of the month—which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.

On the first Friday of every month, we publish a new Burn the Ships workout for Members only.

If Two Percent is a cult, these Burn the Ships workouts are our Kool-Aid.

Members of the Two Percent community do the workout every weekend—a bunch of us satellites, spread out across the world, all sweating and improving together as one extended network.

Burn the Ships workouts are hard, safe, and effective. They improve your strength, cardio, movement quality, and mindset—and, in turn, your life.

We’ve provided scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them. That is to say, you.

• We’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.

Burn the Ships: March 2026

Spring is coming. Daylight saving time is Sunday.

I love this time of year because it sharpens my focus. I use January, February, and March to prepare for spring and summer outdoor adventures. And without fail, that training puts me in the best shape of the year.

If you asked me the best way to live well, live long, and stay capable, my answer is simple: Train like an outdoor athlete.

Humans evolved to move across the wilderness, using our bodies in different ways along the way. We’re adapted to it—and it can still help us today.

Outdoor fitness will help you develop the exact capacities that keep us alive, independent, and able to handle what life throws at us for decades.

Outdoor training demands:

• Enough muscle to lift, carry, climb, and protect your joints—but not so much that you’re slow and fragile.

• A high strength-to-weight ratio, which matters far more in real life than max strength.

• Endurance that can go for days—the ability to keep moving for hours, especially when the going gets tough.

• Durability and resilience, so you don’t fall apart when conditions get uncomfortable or unpredictable.

That combination is what actually matters in the long run.

A hill I’ll die on: Being able to hike a mountain near your home is far more indicative of how long you’ll live than a lab-based VO2 test.

Research across physiology, psychology, and neuroscience shows that outdoor-style training delivers outsized benefits for the body and brain.

A new Burn the Ships experiment

We’re now in the final month of our three-month Burn the Ships workout plan. Each month builds on the last. Now we’re at the grand finale.

If you missed January and February, start with January now and work through the months. The three-month plan leans into the essentials of outdoor training and lays the groundwork to get you ready for an epic spring and summer.

• January: The Approach (read it here)
  Build a broad base of endurance and resilience. I.e., create an engine that can go for days and that won’t break when the going gets tough.

• February: The Crux (read it here)
  Add strength and uphill power. I.e., add more horsepower to the engine and load tolerance to the frame.

• March: The Summit Push
  Convert it all to real-world outdoor performance and readiness.

By April—or June if you’re starting now—you’ll be mountain-ready and mountain-tough.

And even if you never leave the gym or pavement, you’ll still be more holistically fit, stronger, and more durable.

Here’s our roadmap:

• First, we’ll cover the science of why one tough weekly workout is the non-negotiable sweet spot for both physical and mental health.

• Then, we’ll unpack the story behind The Summit Push. You’ll learn why it works and how it will improve your fitness and resilience.

• Finally, I’ll give you the complete The Summit Push workout, with exact steps, full videos, and scaled versions and exercise swaps to get it done anywhere.

Thanks to our partners

• During this workout, I’ll wear Janji, an independent running brand making gear built for ultra-distance pursuits. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for long adventures—my favorite kind. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores.

• Maui Nui Venison, the healthiest meat on planet Earth. The research on the nutrition in axis deer is incredible, and Maui Nui might be the only company harvesting meat ethically. Right now, Maui Nui is offering a free 6-pack of their venison jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more. Go here to get it.

The case for one tough weekly workout

• Section summary: One challenging workout per week is ideal for health and fitness.

There’s magic in pushing it once a week. First, there are the brain benefits.

Scientists at King’s College London analyzed 58 studies on intense exercise and mental health. They found that harder efforts led to:

“Improvements in mental wellbeing, depression severity, and perceived stress compared to non-active controls, and small improvements in mental wellbeing compared to active controls.”

Translation: hard exercise doesn’t just beat doing nothing (duh). It often beats doing only moderate exercise.

Intense exercise also comes with physical upsides.

It has an edge over less intense exercise for increasing VO2 max—one of the strongest predictors we have for longevity and disease resistance. A rule of thumb: the higher your VO2 max, the farther you are from death, disease, and decay.

In sum: All exercise helps. But going hard—sometimes—matters.

What’s “sometimes?”

The smartest trainers I regularly speak with suggest that one tough workout a week is the sweet spot for health and performance (info on that here).

More than that, and we tend to get burned out and beat down. Less than that, and we miss out on some health and performance upsides.

Enter Burn the Ships.

This month’s workout: Summit Push

Why it works

• It builds real-world endurance and strength

  • The first two workouts built the engine and added horsepower. Now we’ll pull it all together and push the distance.

  • In the mountains, the summit push is the long and hellish grind. You have to keep moving for hours with tired legs and gear on your back. This workout recreates that demand.

• It teaches pacing

  • Most workouts are short bursts of effort. Real outdoor objectives aren’t. In the mountains, the biggest mistake people make is going too hard too early.

  • Move steadily. Knowing how hard to push and when is often the difference between reaching the summit and turning around.

• It helps you find the breakthrough

  • I’ve found that longer workouts give me a moment. The beginnings are rough and hard—but eventually, I have a breakthrough where I suddenly feel like I could keep going for days.

  • We often miss that in shorter workouts. At some point in this workout, your legs will feel heavy, your shoulders will ache, and the voice in your head will urge you to stop early. Keep moving anyway. Don’t quit until the moment happens.

• P.S. You don’t need perfect terrain or expensive gear for this one. Throw some weight in a backpack—books, water bottles, a bag of salt—and head out the door. Hills are great, but flat ground works too. What matters is a pack and a path ahead.

Equipment needed

• A backpack with weight in it.

Time commitment

• This workout should take you 70 to 130 minutes, depending on which version you do. (I recommend doing the 130-minute version at least once this month).

• I’ve also included ways to shorten the workout in the Questions and Substitutions section.

What I’m listening to as I do this workout

• This is a long one. Might as well settle in. Might as well play a live Grateful Dead show.

• My friend Graham Callaghan, a fellow Deadhead and a Dean and English teacher at Avon Old Farms boarding school, texted me a great show—09.16.1987—yesterday. That’s my pick.

How to do it

Start with any warmup that helps you. Or don’t if you’re short on time. This workout warms you up as you go.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Exactly how to do The Summit Push workout.

• The full breakdown of reps, rounds, and times for your fitness level.

• Complete videos for each exercise in the workout.

• Substitutions and scaled versions of the workout so anyone can do it, no matter your equipment or fitness level.

Read more

One request that came out of our recent survey: Cool downs.

Many of you noted that you were using and loving the Two Percent Warmup. It was helping you move and feel better during and after a workout, and fixing some nagging pains.

A few asked what I did to cool down after a workout. Ask and you will receive.

Most people don’t even warm up, much less cool down.

And when people hear the word “cool down” they assume it’s a time to, like—I don’t know—light an incense stick and do some weird breathing technique and affirmation mantras.

I see cool downs as an opportunity for two things:

1. A strategic use of a warm body. Your tissues are primed, and your system is still ready for work. That state lets you access a bit more range of motion safely than you could cold, which can make mobility work more impactful.

2. A chance to do the things you keep forgetting to do. There are a few exercises we should all do to offset the physical damage of modern living. If you put them in your cool down, you won’t skip them—and you’ll avoid the injuries that follow.

Thanks to our partners

• Run or ruck forever with Janji, an independent running brand making gear built for ultra-distance pursuits. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—my favorite kind. I love this new weird, amazing jacket they released. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

• Maui Nui Venison, the healthiest meat on planet Earth. The research on axis deer is incredible, and Maui Nui might be the only company harvesting meat ethically. Right now, Maui Nui is offering a free 6-pack of their venison jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more. Go here to get it.

From here you’ll learn:

• The mixed science about cool downs, and the mental shift you need to make them work for you.

• The 5 movements I use while my tissues are primed to offset the physical damage of modern living—plus video for each movement.

• How to safely open up your spine, hips, and shoulders to prevent nagging joint pain before it starts.

The Two Percent Cool Down

Read more

I sent out a survey a couple of weeks ago. I figured a few hundred of you would fill it out. More than a thousand of you did.

I analyzed every response. You wrote paragraphs about your lives, your goals, what frustrates you, and what this newsletter has done for you.

Some of you wrote things that made me laugh. Some of you wrote things that gave me the feels.

I told a friend about the survey, and he asked what I found. I said: “I learned way more about who we Two Percenters are.”

Today’s post is different. I’m going to tell you who we are.

Quick housekeeping

In case you missed it:

• On Wednesday, we covered The Six Laws of Carrying Weight and 11 critical carries to try.

• Friday’s Gear Not Stuff was all about book recommendations from brilliant people, including NYT bestselling authors, performance researchers, a Navy SEAL, and more.

Check out our partners:

• Run or ruck forever with Janji, an independent running brand making gear built for ultra-distance pursuits. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—my favorite kind. I love this new weird, amazing jacket they released. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

• Maui Nui Venison, the healthiest meat on planet Earth. The research on axis deer is incredible, and Maui Nui might be the only company harvesting meat ethically. Right now, Maui Nui is offering a free 6-pack of their venison jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more. Go here to get it.

By the numbers

71% of paid members have been reading for over a year; 42% have been here one to two years. Another 18% for two to three years; 11% have been here since day one, about three years ago(!). Only 13% of you are in your first six months. (Two Percenters are committed.)

75% of you lift. 66% ruck. 53% hike, mountain bike, or do some kind of outdoor sport. 42% run. (Two Percenters are active.)

66% of you exercise 4 or more hours a week; 39% percent of you log 4 to 7 hours. About 20% do 7 to 10. And 7% of you do more than 10 hours a week(!). (Two Percenters are really active.)

The takeaway: The typical Two Percent member lifts, rucks, gets outside, and has been reading for more than a year. They also exercise more in a week than most Americans do in a month. Or two. My kind of people.

What you love

I asked you what your favorite part of Two Percent is. Here’s what you told me, ranked by how many of you said it:

#1: Workouts and fitness content (22% of you). Next was research and science (17%). After that was health and wellness broadly (15%), then gear (12%).

But the thing you value most is something you can use and do in your active lives. No matter what it is.

That’s probably why the single most common word in the entire survey was “actionable.” Many of you used it without prompting. I.e., You wrote the word in an open-text box where you could have written anything. “Practical,” “tips,” “ideas,” and “insight” were other popular words.

• One of you wrote that you like Two Percent because it gives you: “Something actionable I can do to make my life even a little bit better every week.”

• Another wrote: “Small daily takeaways and tasks to be healthy, fit, and sane.”

The message is hard to miss.

Many of you also used some version of “no BS,” “unbiased,” or “honest.”

One of you put it like this: “There is too much info out now that is not based on data … just people pulling stuff out of their ass. You make honest assessments.”

I try—I’ve taken this feedback to heart and will lean into it even more.

What you’ve gained

This was the section that gave me, as the kids put it, “the feels.”

I asked what you’ve gained from reading Two Percent.

A quarter of you said you feel smarter about your health. “I now understand how to think about this stuff in a way that’s really helped me,” one of you wrote.

Another quarter said your health has measurably improved. You noted that you’ve lost weight, increased your fitness, improved your health markers, repaired injuries, boosted your mental health and, generally, now live a richer life.

A fifth of you said you’ve formed habits that have become part of who you are. Health practices no longer feel like a battle—you just do them. (I think that goes back to the pairing of “actionable” and “practical.”)

One in ten of you mentioned rucking. Many of you had never heard the word before this newsletter. Now you’re frequently slinging weight on your back and walking, just like humans were born to do. Even better: many of you have gotten your spouses and friends into it.

No surprise, many of you mentioned stairs. One of you wrote: “I now ALWAYS take the stairs. I was just traveling and, despite luggage, didn’t use the escalators or people movers.” That mindset shift spreads everywhere.

One of you said the biggest benefit was (and I’m quoting exactly here) “to chill the f*ck out on my overanalyzing of fitness. My fitness has been simplified around what I actually care about, and it has skyrocketed.”

I loved that—one of my key goals is to make us less neurotic about our health—and actually enjoy what we get from improving it.

Who we are

About 60 percent of us are men, and 40 percent are women. We come from all ages and backgrounds.

Many of you are doctors, and you reference Two Percent when encouraging your patients to live healthier.

Others are military and first responders, who’ve used the information on Two Percent to do your job better and safer.

Others are busy professionals across industries who use Two Percent not only to stay physically and mentally healthy despite a desk job, but also to perform better at work. Many of you ended up making more money based on a simple tweak you learned about in Two Percent.

Others work in physically demanding jobs, and you’ve used Two Percent to offset some of the harms of manual labor and feel better every day.

Others are parents who—and I loved this—have used Two Percent to improve the health of your entire family.

The list goes on.

What you’re working on

I asked what you’re trying to improve over the next three to six months. Your answers, ranked:

32% said fitness and strength. 18% said diet and nutrition. 15% said career and professional growth. 14% said general health. 13% said running or endurance. 12% said mental health and mindset.

Your #1 frustration: Time—25% of you said it. You have the will—but you need the hours. After that, the biggest frustrations were injury and aging (13%), consistency (11%), and diet (9%). (I’ll keep this in mind moving forward).

The #1 topic you want me to write about this year: longevity and aging. You’re active people and want to know how to live well for the long haul.

To accomplish that, you don’t want longevity-fairy-dust protocols, or obscure supplement stacks, or 47-step morning routines. (Thank God, because you’d be in the wrong place for that).

You want to know how stay strong and bulletproof—and keep doing what you love—as your body changes. You had questions like, how do master athletes adapt? What does the research say about training through your 40s, 50s, 60s?

One said you wanted me to address: “How to stay fit while getting older so that the quality of my life remains high longer.” Another wrote: “Tailored exercise structured for older readers.” Another: “Women and aging.”

Again, I hear you, and we’ll deliver.

The cement that binds us: community

Several of you wrote some version of this: “For a long time I felt like an outcast, until I found this place.”

And this: “No one supports me. No one lives like this. Two-Percenters are rare, and they get a lot of flak. It’s good to be seen.”

I know that feeling. We do weird shit like taking the stairs when 98 people ride the escalator. We don’t give in as easily to the machine—of ultraprocessed food, social media, stagnation, and avoiding what is hard.

It can be weird to be, well, weird like us.

This survey told me that for many of you, Two Percent is proof that there are other people out there who think and live the way you do.

One wrote: “In line with the common phrase of ‘You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with’—I often consider Michael Easter to be 1 of my 5.”

I’ll say this: This community guides what I write. So, really, this community is one of your five. As for me? All of you are one of my five. And I’m better for it.

So we’ll keep being weird together and making this place and its comment section the best damn spot on the internet.

Two more things: Thanks and why we sent the survey

Two final things:

• First, thank you for being part of this project. I love that we’re all here, and I get so much joy from it.

• Second, we sent this survey because we want to make sure we’re delivering on what will help you most. We have some big new projects in the works, and what you sent will guide them accordingly. Keep an eye out.

Have fun, don’t die, and thanks for being here.

-Michael

Audio Version

It’s time for Gear Not Stuff.

We live in a world of mass consumerism, where we have more stuff than ever. As I point out in Scarcity Brain, the average home contains at least 10,000 items. Yet minimalism, as I wrote here, has failed us.

When considering how to make smarter purchasing decisions, I’ve started distinguishing between gear and stuff.

• Stuff is a possession for the sake of it. Stuff clutters. We buy stuff impulsively to alleviate boredom or stress, or to solve problems we could have tackled creatively with what we already have.

• Gear, on the other hand, has a clear purpose of helping us achieve a higher purpose. Gear is a tool we can use to have better experiences.

This month’s gear: books. Good ones.

We’re still in the grips of winter, with heinous storms hammering the East Coast.

Sounds like a great time to sit down with a book.

Which is why I reached out to some of my favorite thinkers and asked them a simple question: What’s the best book you read in the last couple of years?

Their answers were incredible. Not a single book was expected. All of them sounded fascinating and made my “to-read” list.

For each person below, I’ll reveal the book, what it’s about, and the person’s explanation of why they loved it.

Today, you’ll learn from:

• Cal Newport, NYT bestselling author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism

• Melissa Urban, founder of the Whole30 health empire and elite reader

• David Epstein, NYT bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene

• Doug Fabrizio, host of NPR’s RadioWest and the absolute best interviewer I know

• Melissa Ilardo, PhD, professor of evolutionary genomics, who studies what makes humans resilient

• Sam Alaimo, former US Navy SEAL with a Master’s from Columbia University

• Kate McKay, half of The Art of Manliness and the DYING BREED Substack

• Brett McKay, founder of The Art of Manliness and the DYING BREED Substack

• River Selby, author of Hotshot: A Life On Fire, one of the best books I read recently

• Lynda Easter, my mom, who reads more than everyone1

Check out our partners

• Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

• David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• I’ve been carrying MKC knives into the wilderness for years. They’re bombproof, razor sharp out of the box, and made in Montana. My everyday carry: The Mini Speedgoat 2.0. Check them out here and mention you heard about MKC from Two Percent. MKC knives sell out quickly, but here’s what’s currently in stock.

The books

Read more

The book explains why humans evolved to carry heavy things, what happened when we stopped, and how putting weight back on your body might be one of the simplest ways to rebuild strength, fitness, and resilience.

Most of the book focuses on weighted packs and vests.

But that’s only one slice of the story.

For nearly all of human history, we didn’t carry neatly balanced backpacks and vests. We carried awkward loads: Rocks, water, meat, children, tools, etc. We carried things however we could. It was necessary for survival.

It turns out that variety matters.

Carrying in different ways unlocks benefits we can’t get from machines and perfectly symmetrical lifts and packs. It opens up a world of physical benefits:

• More strength where you need it most.

• Real-world fitness and endurance that translates beyond the gym (and, by proxy, gives you a better and longer life).

• Armor against the injuries that sideline most people.

Today, we’re diving into the power of carrying weight and 12 ways to carry weight that most people have forgotten.

Trainers call these exercises “loaded carries.” And any good trainer will tell you, if they tell you the truth, that these exercises might be the most underrated movement patterns in modern fitness.

Housekeeping

• Become a premium subscriber of Two Percent and get proven, no-fluff tools to master your health, mindset, and performance—3 per week for less than a cup of coffee.

Subscribe now

Check out our partners:

• Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

• David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• I’ve been carrying MKC knives into the wilderness for years. They’re bombproof, razor sharp out of the box, and made in Montana. My everyday carry: The Mini Speedgoat 2.0. Check them out here and mention you heard about MKC from Two Percent. MKC knives sell out quickly, but here’s what’s currently in stock.

From here you’ll learn:

• The 6 laws of carrying weight—rules that separate random effort from full-body stimulus.

• 12 loaded carries (with video demos of each) that expose your weak links and build the kind of strength and endurance that transfers to real life.

• Why each carry works—what it trains, what it fixes, and when to use it.

• Research behind carrying weight—why it’s one of the most powerful yet overlooked tools.

• The surprising link between your grip strength and a 31% reduction in mortality risk.

Let’s roll …

Read more

My guidebook to rucking—Walk With Weight: The Definitive Guide to Rucking—is out today in print, audio, and e-book. You can get it here.

This book is different than my last two books, The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain. Those two books explored big ideas across an adventure narrative. This one is a tactical manual.

It covers why walking with weight is arguably the most powerful physical activity you can do, and gives you strategies and tactics to do it better—whether you’re new to rucking or have been doing it for years.

Why I wrote it

The book was born out of necessity.

Chapter 20 of The Comfort Crisis argued that carrying weight shaped human evolution and is our most important physical act—and that modern life engineered it out.

I suggested a simple fix: walk with weight in a pack. That’s an easy way to add carrying back into our lives to improve our fitness, health, and mindset.

After the book came out, I talked about walking with weight on many podcasts. The idea spread, and the act took off. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and more covered the rucking boom, crediting The Comfort Crisis for helping spark it.

Then the emails started. People from around the world began contacting me with questions.

I went deeper into the research. I spoke with military physiologists, anthropologists, physical therapists, and more. I tested everything myself.

When I told my publisher about the flood of questions I was getting, they suggested I do a manual for walking with weight.

The book is separated into three parts:

• Part I: Why we should walk with weight.

• Part II: How to walk with weight (strategies and tactics for all levels, gear considerations, nutrition, etc)

• Part III: Live the practice (training plans, hacks, mindset, challenges)

In today’s post, I’ll run through the chapters and give you one practical and actionable takeaway from each.

A funny story: When I planned this book with my publisher, a higher-up asked, “Can you really write an entire book about walking with weight? It’s just one exercise.”

My answer: “There are thousands of books and hundreds of monthly magazines dedicated to running, and running is just one exercise. So, yeah, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

Let’s roll …

Quick housekeeping

In case you missed it:

• On Wednesday, we covered a longevity tactic that actually works (and doesn’t suck the fun out of your life in the process).

• On Friday, we ran a Q&A where I answered 9 of your questions. The one about the benefits of manual labor was my favorite (even Leah said, “that one was surprising”).

Shoutout to our partners:

• Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

• David Protein Bars have the highest amount of protein per calorie of all protein bars. That makes them a great option for anyone who wants protein on the go without the excess sugar and fat of most bars. Visit DavidProtein.com.

• I’ve been carrying MKC knives into the wilderness for years. They’re bombproof, razor sharp out of the box, and made in Montana. My everyday carry: The Mini Speedgoat 2.0. Check them out here and mention you heard about MKC from Two Percent. MKC knives sell out quickly, but here’s what’s currently in stock.

Chapter 1: Born to carry

You’ve probably heard that humans are “born to run.” That idea came from a 2004 Nature paper1 and an ensuing book with that title. It set off a running boom, especially barefoot running.

But we missed something critical. In my research, I discovered we were missing another, more powerful evolutionary advantage beyond running: our ability to carry weight.

Running helped us hunt, but carrying helped us dominate and take over the world.

Once we ran an animal down, we’d have to carry it back to camp. We’re the only mammal that can pick up a weight and efficiently carry it a long distance. We also carried water, tools, gear, and our babies.

Walking with weight might be our greatest and arguably most unique physical feat—even more so than running. After all, many other mammals can beat us in a distance race on a cool day. None can out-carry us.

We carried constantly, and it shaped us into who we are. It’s critical for our health.

But today, it’s mostly been offloaded to technology. We have grocery carts, roller bags, cars, carts, and myriad other ways to transport items—and ourselves—more easily.

We outsourced the burden, and with it, a lot of our strength and health.

• One lesson: Looking at what all humans did in the past is generally a good guide to what keeps us healthy today. In this case, the takeaway is simple: carry more.

Chapter 2: From carrying to walking with weight in packs

From ancient warriors to D-Day paratroopers, walking with weight has been the foundation of physical preparedness for warfighters.

But somewhere along the way, rucking got wrapped in boot-camp culture: Harder, heavier, faster.

That hasn’t always been a good thing. It’s why I started using the term “walk with weight2”—it makes the act accessible again.

This chapter traces how clever mothers thousands of years ago invented packs, and teaches us how the military has changed rucking—both the good and the bad.

Understanding this history tells us that we don’t need a death march. We need a weight we can carry consistently.

• One lesson from the chapter: Find a “go-to” weight. One that feels uncomfortable but isn’t so heavy that the walk feels awful. For most people, that’s between 15 and 25% of their bodyweight.

Chapter 3: Lifespan and healthspan

Walking with weight is strength and cardio fused into one practice. Think of it as cardio for people who hate to run and strength for people who hate the gym.

It burns more calories per mile than walking or running, improves metabolic health, builds or maintains muscle and bone, improves balance, and has a far lower injury risk compared to running.

Its true power lies in its sustainability—you can do it for decades.

The key to living long and well is to find physical activities that engage as many critical systems as possible and don’t leave you injured along the way.

This chapter explores 11 ways walking with weight supports both lifespan (how long you live) and healthspan (how well you live).

• One lesson from the chapter: If you’re trying to lose weight, walking with weight is one of the safest and most effective tools available. It burns more calories than lifting, but also works your muscles more than most endurance sports. It seems to preferentially burn fat—more weight loss coming from fat improves long-term health outcomes.

Chapter 4: Be SUPERMEDIUM

Modern culture tends to push extreme body types. Many people want to get waif thin like a runway model. Others want to be as muscular as possible, like a bodybuilder.

Both approaches have tradeoffs.

• Having too little muscle is risky: A study of 50,000 Canadian women found that those most at risk of death registered a “healthy” BMI but had the lowest levels of lean muscle.

• So is having too much muscle: It increases fat accumulation, slows you down, increases injury risk, and puts more stress on your organs and joints.

Walking with weight allows us to hit the sweet spot. We call this being SUPERMEDIUM: strong enough, lean enough, durable enough, and metabolically healthy enough to handle life and whatever it throws at you.

This chapter argues that loaded walking builds the kind of balanced fitness that makes you useful in the real world.

• One lesson from the chapter: BMI often gets criticized, but it’s actually a useful metric for most people, most of the time. The takeaway is to be active—lift, ruck, and do other forms of endurance—and aim for a BMI that’s between 20 and 253. Most of the research suggests that’s the sweet spot for health and overall performance.

Chapter 5: How to start

This chapter hammers the fundamentals. It’s geared to people new to walking with weight, but those accustomed to it will also gain important insights.

It covers:

• The pack or vest you should start with.

• The types of weights you can use to load the pack.

• The amount of weight you should start with.

• How to load the pack.

• How to adjust the straps.

• The type of shoes you should wear.

• The pace at which you should start walking.

• What your posture should look like as you walk with weight.

• How often and how far you should walk at first.

As my friend, the thriller writer Jack Carr, wrote, “Being an ‘expert’ in anything means doing the basics exceptionally well.”

• One lesson from the chapter: The most common mistake beginners make is using the wrong weight. Here’s a generality backed by years of observation:

  • Women tend to go too light at first, which makes for a more enjoyable walk but also leads them to miss a lot of benefits.

  • Men try to be heroes, going too heavy too soon. This delivers more benefits, but it also makes the initial walks suck and overloads them before they’re ready.

  • A good starting weight: 10 to 15 percent of your bodyweight.

Get Walk With Weight

Chapter 6: Level up

Once you’ve mastered the basics outlined in Chapter 5, you’ll start to really experience the overall benefits, and you may be ready to level up.

Just like with any workout, there are myriad ways to improve your performance. This chapter covers:

• Four ways to increase the intensity.

• Why you probably shouldn’t run while wearing a weighted pack or vest.

• The heaviest weight you should walk with.

• The benefits of sternum straps and hip belts on backpacks and how to use them to your advantage.

• The new science of goal setting.

• Why you should make weighted walking as easy as possible.

Understanding or implementing each tactic will teach you to walk with weight stronger and faster so you can expand your health, fitness, and what you’re capable of.

• One lesson from the chapter: The book includes sidebars throughout that answer common questions. A sidebar in this chapter examines the optimal number of daily steps. There’s uncertainty in the science, but looking at it in totality, here’s what I landed on:

  • 7,500 steps a day: Bare minimum for general health.

  • 12,000 steps a day: Ideal number for health. This number maximizes your benefits in the least time (health benefits start to drop off steeply after 12,000 steps).

  • Of course, if you add a pack, you’ll get more from every step.

Chapter 7: Support

Over the years, I’ve discovered numerous tips and strategies that help us walk with weight better. This chapter covers:

• Hydration and dispelling myths around hydration.

• Nutrition for your goal (e.g., performance versus weight loss, etc)

• How to alleviate any shoulder discomfort when you walk with weight (the fix takes 30 seconds)

• How to protect your knees and hips and avoid pain.

• Exercises that bulletproof your back and prevent back pain.

• How to avoid the most common rucking injury.

The little things often mean a lot. Thus, the chapter covers helpful advice that I believe can make your walks and workouts as effective as possible.

• One lesson from the chapter: Some people face shoulder discomfort when they start rucking. I talked about this topic with Doug Kechijian, a Doctor of Physical Therapy, who is my favorite fitness thinker (hit him up if you live in the NY/CT/NJ area).

  As long as you stay within smart weight recommendations, it’s unlikely you’ll injure your shoulders while rucking. “Most people are not really in true pain shoulder-wise after walking with a weighted pack,” Doug said. “It’s more like discomfort. This isn’t bad per se, and your body adapts. But it is fatiguing.”

  • His fix: Hang from a pullup bar for at least 30 seconds after your walk. The ruck compresses your shoulders, but hanging does the opposite. That relieves the discomfort and preps your shoulders for future walks.

Chapter 8: Packs, vests, and other gear

The question I get asked most often is some variation of “Should I use a backpack or a weighted vest?” It’s a great question. Over the years, I’ve seen more people out in my neighborhood carrying weight in packs and vests. It’s a beautiful thing.

When you’re just getting started and considering buying gear, however, it can be hard to decide which to use. As you may have guessed, I’ve done the research here, and my big takeaway for you is this: That you carry weight is far more important than how you carry it. Pick whatever you like most.

• One lesson from the chapter: That said, for most people most of the time, a backpack wins. For one, you don’t have to go out and buy new gear—most people already have a pack lying around. For another, backpacks are more versatile. You can easily change the weight. You can carry items like water and a jacket. You can maintain better form on longer walks.

• P.S. I have a big gear announcement coming soon …

Chapter 9: Adopt a Two Percent mindset

You all probably know why this Substack is called Two Percent: only 2 percent of people take the stairs when an escalator is available.

To me, that figure isn’t really about the stairs. It’s a metaphor for our current health crisis and how to live better. We often avoid the easiest wins, and it’s killing us. Inactivity is a main contributor to the 10 leading causes of early death. Yet 98 percent of us avoid the simple, obvious, healthy choice of taking the stairs.

This chapter explores many ways to apply the Two Percent mindset to rucking.

• One lesson from the chapter: In a rucking survey I sent last year, many of you said wearing your packs around the house while doing chores was a game-changer. “It really got me used to the weight and allowed me to walk farther distances,” wrote one of you. I’ve done the same to prepare for big adventures—and it really helps.

Chapter 10: Challenge yourself

For thousands of years, militaries have used various tests to ensure their soldiers were fit for battle. This chapter lays out different challenges and shows you how to adapt them to your fitness level.

• One lesson from the chapter: One of my favorite challenges is an old military standard. British soldiers in the 1600s had to be able to finish a 15-mile ruck (no stopping) at a moment’s notice. Meeting that standard suggested they were in fighting shape. The soldiers used rather heavy weights—but you can use your go-to weight. Being able to walk 15 miles at any time suggests your endurance is strong and your body is functioning well.

Chapter 11: Training plans

This chapter covers different fitness weekly plans for your goals and time. They fuse rucking and strength training so you’ll meet or exceed the federal activity guidelines.

• The time-crunched plan: 3 hours a week.

• The moderately busy plan: 4.5 hours a week.

• The go-getter plan: 7 hours a week.

Each plan covers the basics you need to hit for health, performance, and general readiness (i.e., what you need to do to be a useful human) in the time you have.

• One lesson from the chapter: The strength training sessions for the time-crunched plan only require your pack as a weight. A few pack exercises I love: Reverse lunges, stepups, pushups, planks, rows. I’ll sometimes walk to a destination, do a quick workout with my pack on, then walk back.

Epilogue: Lace up

To me, walking with weight isn’t some new wellness trend. It’s what humans were born to do. It’s scalable, forgiving, meditative, and powerful. It’s a return to being human.

Walking with weight is about reconnecting—with your body, your mind, and the ancient rhythms that have shaped humanity—and becoming a better person in the process.

I don’t think we need more comfort or hacks. We need more acts like walking with weight. More effort. More presence. More friction. More long miles under load. On the other side of that effort isn’t just fitness. It’s strength, clarity, and truth.

• One lesson from the chapter: Don’t overthink it. Lace up your shoes. Grab a pack. Add weight. Start walking. Ideally soon. As the poet William Wordsworth said, “to begin, begin.”

Get Walk With Weight

Have fun, don’t die, walk with weight.

-Michael

Audio Version

It’s time for our Q&A.

In November, I polled you on format—video, audio, or text. Text won. So here we are.

Audio’s at the bottom if you prefer to listen while you ruck, lift, or pretend to work.

I’ll answer the following1:

• If you had to choose one set of gear for long-distance hiking, what would it be? I’m training to walk 100 miles in 50 hours.

• What are your two favorite books?

• What’s the two percent everyday carry, and what do people get wrong about what they carry every day?

• Can you remind us of your thoughts on kettlebells? If you like them, what weights should beginners and advanced lifters use?

• You lost a lot of weight and strength hiking the Hayduke Trail. What did you do to rebuild?

• Have you ever come across a study or any solid information on longevity and overall health for manual laborers?

• Is there an appropriate balance between hard physical labor and pushing my limits outside of work?

• We can’t all be about the gear. What’s your favorite piece of stuff?

• I have relatively low cardio fitness and would really like to improve it. How can I improve without boring cardio protocols?

Shoutout to our partners:

• Get outside with Janji, an independent running brand making gear built for ultra-distance pursuits. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—my favorite kind. Check out the Circa Daily Long Sleeve, great alone or as a layering piece. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

• Function Health, which offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. You’ll learn critical information that can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

Let’s roll …

Read more

Bryan Johnson is a rich guy who spends millions a year looking for The Secret to living forever—tracking his overnight erections, taking hundreds of daily supplements, and swapping blood with his son1.

He avoids going outside—“sunlight causes accelerated skin aging,” he says—and mostly sits at home with his team, who run him through his all-consuming daily protocols.

Johnson just opened applications for a program he calls “Immortals.” More than 1,500 people applied for three spots, for which they’ll pay Johnson $1,000,000 annually for access to his advice.

Imagine paying seven figures for a guy to tell you to measure your boners at night, eat a buffet of pills for dinner, and find yourself a blood boy.

Johnson is an extreme example. But he’s not that far from the mainstream. Longevity culture has tipped into neurosis—all sorts of biological tests and tracking, 47-step routines, chemical stacks, and protocols that require a spreadsheet to manage.

The problem: The whole enterprise happens indoors, in the comfort of home, with a lot of thinking and not much living—a life of screens and spreadsheets and data points that give the illusion of control. And maybe in trying to avoid death, people forget to actually live.

There is a better path.

Longevity is complex. There’s no silver bullet: genes and all sorts of habits factor in.

But if you were to load a silver bullet into a gun, put it against my temple, and ask “what’s one thing you’d do to live longer,” I have an answer.

That’s what we’re covering today. It has no waiting list. It costs zero figures rather than seven. It doesn’t require a lab, prescription, or measuring tape.

And it actively strips away the framework of comfort, control, and optimization that defines modern longevity culture.

It helps you live better, and—as you’ll see in all the research below—probably longer than the longevity-obsessed people with their hearts and minds hypnotized by spreadsheets.

Let’s roll …

Shoutout to our partners:

• Get outside with Janji, an independent running brand making gear built for ultra-distance pursuits. They’re the only brand making gear specifically for 200-plus-mile adventures—my favorite kind. Check out the Circa Daily Long Sleeve, great alone or as a layering piece. Find Janji at Janji.com and at REI stores nationwide.

Today you’ll learn:

• My number one longevity practices: I can’t promise that it’ll be comfortable. But I can tell you it will likely add time to your life and life to your time.

• Six researched-backed reasons it works: A dive into the new science.

• Why it helps prevent the most common diseases of aging: heart disease, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, etc.

• Why it teaches you that you can “just do stuff”: One of the most valuable lessons to maintain agency and healthspan into old age.

Read more