Post Summary
We’re answering the following questions from Two Percent readers:
How can I keep progressing while rucking if I’ve safely worked up to a heavy weight?
What’s an ideal minimum effective dose of exercise?
Can you tell us about your Don’t Die event and its takeaways?
I need a knee replacement. What can I do to help knee pain? (The answer is a bigger dive into fitness trends).
Housekeeping
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Audio/Podcast version of this post
In today’s AMA, we’ll be tackling four questions
Substack recently asked the Two Percent community to beta-test their live video feature—so we used the new feature to do a live AMA (Ask Me Anything, Ask Michael Anything … whatever you want to call it).
Today we’re airing video from the live AMA and dropping its audio in the podcast.
This was our second live video beta-test, and we plan to continue to do AMAs this way.
To field questions for the AMA, I created a chat within Substack. You can still add questions to the chat here. I’m keeping that chat open, so feel free to drop in Qs anytime and I’ll answer them in future live AMAs.
The questions we’re covering today are:
I’m rucking with your recommendation for the heaviest weight I should use (50 pounds). How should I improve from here?
What’s an ideal minimum effective dose of exercise?
What do participants learn at the Don’t Die event?
I need a knee replacement. Could the knees over toes methodology help me/what can I do to prevent knee pain?
Why each question matters/going beyond the questions
The rucking question: We all want to continue to improve. But, at a certain point, chasing improvement for the sake of it can come with downsides. The answer will help you think about progress in all forms of exercise.
The minimum effective exercise dose question: This answer will help you determine how much exercise you need to stay healthy. We’ve given answers that apply to both for the general public and to Two Percenters (people who want to go beyond).
The Don’t Die event question: We’ll explain the event’s origins, its key takeaways, and some lessons you should consider about living safer, longer, and better.
The knee injury question: Our answer will help you approach any trend in fitness smarter. The result: You’ll be able to analyze and use new ideas in health and fitness in a way that gives you benefits but helps you avoid the downsides of getting swept up.
Resources, citations, and links
The rucking question
The minimum effective dose question
The SUPERMEDIUM program is an ideal approach that greatly improves health and performance (it’s my go-to exercise, eating, and living routine). It’s available free to Founding Members of Two Percent.
The Don’t Die question
The knee pain question
Transcript
So let's roll into it. Okay. Very first question.
The rucking question
So what was interesting is that we had two people who had basically the same question about rucking and the questions they really revolved around rucking and how do you increase your weight as you ruck over time.
And I'm going to read one person's question.
“If you've safely worked up to the threshold of rucking 50 pounds,and that happens to be over one third of your body weight, which is a rule we say to not go over, where do you go from there? I ruck one to two hours at a time, four to five times a week. So there is not a lot of room for time or improvement there.”
So this question to me, this person is basically asking, um, how much more weight should I add, given that I'm already kind of hit this threshold, given that I'm already rucking a lot of weight.
