Jean Galea

Health, Wealth, Relationships, Wisdom

Should You Switch to a Standing Desk?

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For the last few years, I’ve been coming across articles extolling the benefits of standing desks. Due to being a digital nomad, however, I’ve found it difficult to actually get one and try it out. Finally, in our condo building in Chiang Mai (Thailand), I found the perfect place to experiment with standing desks.

This was the first experiment with working standing up. In Chiang Mai I got the opportunity to switch between a standing desk and a traditional seated desk in the same office.

Claimed Benefits of Standing Desks

Before I share my experience, let’s take a look at the claimed benefits of standing desks:

  • More energy
  • Improved posture
  • Reduced risk of diseases (cancer, diabetes)
  • Lower long-term mortality risk

Perhaps more worryingly is the fact that research has indicated that sitting is killing us, shortening our lifespans by up to 15 years. Sitting has also been referred to as the new smoking in terms of harmful effects.

Many people try to restore balance in their lives by sitting for six hours at work and then heading to the gym afterward, however, this does not seem to do the trick. Evidence suggests that the negative effects of extended sitting can’t be countered by brief bouts of strenuous exercise.

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Best Luxury Real Estate Agencies and Developers in Spain

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In recent years I’ve taken quite an interest in real estate, and I’ve been learning the ropes by investing through crowdfunding platforms such as StockCrowdIN in Spain/Italy/Portugal, Property Partner in the UK and Raizers in France.

I also love checking out what’s on the market. I have always loved great design, and buildings are one of the most obvious incarnations of design that we see and interact with on an everyday basis. Unfortunately, there are so badly designed buildings, especially where I grew up in Malta, but also in other countries of course. I, therefore, love when I come across amazing properties and so it’s become a kind of hobby to keeps tabs on amazing apartments and properties, especially in Spain where I now reside.

For anyone else who is interested, I’ll be keeping this list of awesome developers or agencies that I come across. Mostly they deal with high-end properties as that’s where most of the quality stuff happens.

The best website overall is probably LuxuryEstate as it aggregates offers from various top agencies in Spain and also in other countries. On the main Spain landing page, you can also check out the best areas in Spain for luxurious properties. Surprisingly, Barcelona and its surroundings have clearly inferior offerings than other areas like Madrid or the Spanish coast further down south.

Architects

Agencies

New Builds

If you have any more positive experiences with developers and agencies let me know and I’ll include them in the list.

How to Warm Up Before a Padel Match

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An essential part of every padel match is the warm-up phase. You should arrive at the venue around 30 minutes before your match and warm up before you enter the court to play.

The five minute warm up we see during World Padel Tour matches can be misleading. The players aren’t actually warming up during those 5 minutes. They are not even sizing out their opponents. The only purpose is to get used to the bounce of the court and the general atmosphere of the venue. The actual warm up for these professional players would have started around an hour before the match in another court.

Injury prevention is as important to the pros as it is to amateurs, and that means that we all need to warm up properly before our matches.

Warming up serves two primary purposes:

  • Lets us perform at our max right from the start of the match.
  • Helps prevent injuries due to muscles and joints not being warmed up.

A mistake that many players do is to stretch before a match. This doesn’t help and can even hamper your performance. Here I am referring to static stretching specifically. When you perform static stretching, it goes against what you will be doing in the match itself. You are stretching specific muscles, while in the match those muscles need to be contracting.

What we want to be doing is warming up those muscles and move them through the movements we will be doing in the match. Once the match is over, our muscles will be all tightened up, and that is the correct time to perform static stretching to return the muscles to their natural relaxed state.

The pre-match warm up doesn’t need to be done in a padel court, so there aren’t really any excuses.

You should maintain your activity intensity at around 10-20% of the match intensity.

I usually do around 20 minutes of warm up in summer and 30 minutes in winter, because Barcelona can be quite chilly in winter, and it takes more time to warm up the body.

Here’s a typical warm up routine that I follow:

  1. Jogging for 5 minutes.
  2. Different kinds of movements that mimic the ones used in padel, for another 5 minutes. Typical movements would be lateral runs, backward runs, crossovers, knee ups, butt kicks etc.
  3. One minute of short sprints, change of directions and virtual padel shots.
  4. Five minutes of dynamic stretching.
  5. Five minutes of rallying in the court or outside volleying with my partner.

As mentioned earlier, remember to do some static stretching after the match. This will keep your muscles in good shape and aid recovery.

Here’s a static stretching cheat sheet for padel:

What are your favorite tips for warming up and cooling down for padel?

Should I Buy or Rent a Garage / Parking Space for My Car?

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I will shortly be needing a parking space/garage as I plan to buy a car in the near future. I therefore started looking at some prices for buying spaces and renting them out.

The going rate where I live is 18,000€ for a parking space in a communal roofed garage. I expect the value to appreciate steadily over time, although not at the same rate as an apartment in the same area.

I could also rent a parking space right in front of our apartment for 120€ per month.

The question is, therefore, whether it’s best for me to buy the space or rent it. Whenever it makes sense, I like to rent instead of buy. I think that buying stuff ultimately adds worry and financial burdens to one’s life, so you need to be careful with what you buy. This article perfectly illustrates the concept I’m talking about.

Since I’m not sure whether I’m going to be living in this area next year and I like to be free to move from one area to another in a city, or even to other cities in Spain or just moving to another country, freedom is very important to me and buying property is a restriction on that freedom. Moreover, the area where I live might not be the best place to invest in, so having the freedom to invest anywhere in the world is much better than forcing yourself to “invest” in property right where you live.

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Should You Vaccinate Your Child? – My View as a Skeptical Person

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Becoming a parent heralds a time of much learning for the new parents, especially if they haven’t had prior experience with children through other family members or close friends having kids. It can be overwhelming especially in the first few weeks until they get adjusted to the new realities and convince themselves that they can do a decent job of caring for this new person and take important decisions on their behalf.

Perhaps one of the most important decisions you’ll have to make is whether to vaccinate your child or not. I love to dig deep into pretty much any topic that I take fancy with, and so I armed myself with several books for new parents and enjoyed preparing for the arrival of my child and the changes happening in my wife throughout the pregnancy. But when it came to vaccinations, I fell down a very deep rabbit hole.

I decided to start investigating myself to try to come to an educated decision on the subject. I’m an equal-opportunity skeptic. I’m skeptical about alternative medicine, pseudoscience, and quackery; but I apply the same standards of skepticism to conventional medicine.

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Jean Galea

Investor | Dad | Global Citizen | Athlete