I think it’s very important for anyone who wants to have serious discussions and conversations about important topics to have a good grasp on world history.

So many people form erroneous ideas of how things work just because they don’t have the right background on how we arrived at this stage in our human development.

The best resources for learning world history that I’ve come across are the following:

YouTube series: CrashCourse World History

Podcast: Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History

Books

• The story of civilization by Will and Ariel Durant
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
• A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson

Of course, there are many more books you can read if you want to dig deeper into specific topics, but Homo Sapiens addresses some of today’s hot topics from a historical perspective, while Dan Carlin’s podcast will get into the historical details and is very well researched apart from entertaining. The YouTube series can be considered a light overview but is a great visual introduction to world history.

I’d be glad to know about any other books and resources that you have used to learn world history.

Sometimes I meet men who tried to grow a beard but ended up shaving it all off due to it becoming too hard to maintain or due to some irritation or other bothersome things. There are a few simple beard maintenance tricks that can usually avoid all that.

Beard oil is definitely a necessary product when it comes to a healthy beard, but there are also other factors that will go into it.

For example, you’ll want to make sure that you’re using a high-quality beard wash 2-4 times a week to scrub the beard and skin underneath. This will help cleanse the pores and the beard to keep the beard clean.

You’ll also want to exfoliate with an exfoliating face wash or a boar’s bristle brush on days that you’re not washing to stimulate blood flow and remove dead skin.

Finally, you’ll want to use beard oil or utility balm daily to moisturize not only the beard but the skin underneath.

And that’s basically it. When you have a special occasion and want the beard to be in absolutely perfect condition, just blow dry it and apply some beard wax to keep everything in place.

I have a fairly structured morning routine that I’ve developed over the years. It used to go something like this before we had kids:

1. Wake up and go to the toilet.
2. Go back to bed for an HRV reading.
3. Take a shower immediately.
4. Brew a cup of coffee with coconut oil and do a ten-minute meditation.
5. Foam roll for 30 minutes while listening to a podcast.
6. Study a language for 15-20 minutes on Duolingo.

It takes around an hour and a half, and I try to be up by 7am on a good day, so by 8.30am I’m ready to start my day with some good wins in my bag.

Now that we have kids, I’d say it’s more like this:

1. Wake up and go to the toilet.
2. Apply creams in the bathroom.
3. Brew a cup of coffee with coconut oil.
4. Spend 10 minutes applying the Theragun.
5. Head to work/gym/time with kids.

As a morning person with the Lion chronotype, I have no trouble waking up and getting out of bed in the morning. I tend to wake up without any alarm clocks after 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep, and I’m immediately ready to jump out of bed with lots of energy and start the day.

I like to take a shower as it makes me feel fresh and ready to approach the day. The act of showering is more than just an act of basic hygiene; it gives me an extra boost psychologically, so I rarely go without it, even though I usually shower again during the day after training or in the evening before I head to bed.

The brewing of coffee is a meditative process in itself and gets me primed for the structured meditation that comes after it. By using a moka pot and manually grinding the beans I would have previously selected from a local roastery, I’m injecting a bit of art and manual work into the process, and it definitely means more and feels more satisfying to finally drink the brewed shot of coffee while I start my meditation, compared to if I had just used a Nespresso machine.

For meditation, I use the Calm app and adopt a zen meditation pose. The ten minutes of meditation give me the chance to heighten my awareness and build resilience for the day ahead.

When that’s done I move on to foam rolling, which is an essential way for me to iron out the knots in my muscles and stretch them out. Since I train so much, I tend to wake up with sore muscles and overall a stiff body, and foam rolling works wonders for that. I follow a number of podcasts so I’ll just pick up where I had left off the previous day or select a new episode that I fancy from the list of available ones. If my wife and son are awake by this time, I’ll skip the podcast and chat with them while I foam roll.

After foam rolling, I do the last part of my morning routine, which consists of studying a language using the excellent Duolingo app. There’s not much to say about this, except for the fact that it’s a compounding exercise. Although I do just 15-20 minutes a day, when you add it up over a year or two you can really get familiar with a language and be able to make practical use of your new skill.

During certain parts of the year I like to train first thing in the morning. Usually, I do this in the hotter months so that I avoid the heat later on in the day and also to make sure I get a good workout done and be free for the rest of the day.

When I switch to this variation of my routine, I skip the shower, foam rolling and language studying and do those after training.

If you’re doing a lot of training or missing certain dietary requirements for some reason or another, you might want to turn to supplements.

When you’re training hard, you need to make sure that you are also taking care of your body’s nutritional needs. You want to make sure that you have enough energy to cover all your expenditure during training and competing, as well as taking in enough protein for muscles to repair themselves and grow if needed to adjust to higher demands.

Here’s what I recommend.

Protein Shake

I take a daily protein shake to help cover my protein needs. This can be taken right after your training session or padel match. After such hard exercise, your muscles will have many micro tears that need to be repaired, and protein is what your body needs to be able to do so.

Optimum Nutrition is the number one brand for protein shakes. I’ve tried their Vanilla, Cookies & Cream and Double Chocolate flavors. Double Chocolate is my favorite, and Vanilla is also pretty decent if you want to keep it plain. I wasn’t a big fan of the Cookies & Cream flavor, although it’s bearable. Some flavors work well with milk and water, while others are only tasty if combined with milk. Double Chocolate tastes great either way.

I buy the 2.2kg tub which serves me for around 2.5 months.

Here in Spain, I buy my shakes from one of these two shops, depending on which one of them has the best pricing at that point in time:

• Bulevip
• MasMusculo

Amazon also carries most variations of this protein shake, but the other two shops tend to have better pricing and occasional freebies.

Fruit

I know these are not really considered supplements, but it’s important to mention them as they are some of the major sources of fuel during intense activity like long padel matches. Bananas are my favorite food during matches together with dates.

BCAAs

I use BCAA powder to mix in with my water during intense workouts. While I haven’t found obvious evidence about this, my friend Andrew from MirrorFriendly recommends taking BCAAs, so I am currently doing so. The idea is that they protect your muscles from breaking down during intense activity.

Omega 3

I take a dosage of 1000mg of fish oil daily as its effects have been widely studied and fairly conclusive.

It’s all about maintaining a good omega-3:omega-6-ratio.

Take 2 g EPA and 1.5 g DHA per day.My favorite brands:

• Olimp Sport Omega 3
• Aavalabs Omega 3
• Viva Naturals Omega 3

Creatine

The positive effects of this supplement have been widely studied as well, so I’ve been using it since I’m doing weight training as well as part of my overall training regimen. It might be the best supplement to use in fact, since it has proven effects and little to no downsides. I use MyProtein’s Creatine Monohydrate pack. If you want something better you can get Creapure. Creapure® is the brand name for pure creatine monohydrate produced by AlzChem Trostberg GmbH in Germany. MyProtein sells both Creapure and Creatine Monohydrate, and Creapure costs around 3x as much.

When you workout and exercise, whether this be weight training or cardiovascular activity, your body requires energy to perform muscle contractions. Muscle contractions move your body parts. For example, when you perform a bicep curl you will contract your bicep muscle, and to do this requires energy.

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the chemical compound your body uses for energy. For a muscle to contract, it will break off a phosphate molecule from ATP, meaning ATP becomes ADP (adenosine diphosphate). To form more ATP your body will take a phosphate molecule from your body’s stores of creatine phosphate.

So as you have probably worked out, creatine is vitally important for muscle contraction. Therefore, supplementing with creatine can help your body to perform more muscle contractions, meaning more reps, and more reps can breakdown more muscle fibers. With the right nutrition and recovery, this can increase your potential for muscle growth.

According to studies, there are no negative effects of long-term supplementation with Creatine.

Our bodies produce creatine endogenously at around 1g per day. You can also obtain small amounts of creatine through food, especially red meat. At a max you’re looking at 1g per day in food, so at best you have a total 2g of creatine in your body per day without supplementation.

Supplementation increases muscle creatine content by around 20%. The biggest effects of creatine are seen in anaerobic short duration sports activity (less than 30 seconds) so you’ll see a difference while lifting weights, for example.

I target 3g per day usually at some point after training. You could also have a loading phase of 20-25g per day for 3-5 days following which you’d switch back to 3-5g per day. If you don’t load, you will start seeing the effects of creatine in a few weeks versus a few days with the loading phase.

Note that in around 20-30% of the population supplementation has no effects due to them having already high levels of creatine in their muscles and less type 2 fibers.

Here’s a good article if you want to read about creatine in further depth (in Spanish).

Some people recommend using 0.1 grams per kg of bodyweight, but it is not proven to be more effective than a more moderate amount. According to scientists at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, at 0.1 grams per kilogram of bodyweight, male athletes excreted 46% of the ingested creatine within 24 hours. For a 220 pound lifter, this means that if he consumes 10g of creatine, 46%, or 4.6g of creatine, is wasted. In another study performed at the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, scientists confirmed that lower doses of creatine monohydrate (5g/day) are effective, and that results can even be achieved without a loading phase.

I therefore stick to 5g daily.

Caffeine

Probably the most commonly used supplement. Everyone knows the effects of caffeine as a stimulant. It helps you be more active and alert, but on the downside it can also make you edgy.

Vitamins

I’ve experimented with vitamins over the years but have never found any obvious results due to their intake. The scientific opinion these days seems to be that unless you have major nutritional deficits you should be able to obtain all the vitamins you need from your food and some daily exposure to sun (Vitamin D).

If you live in countries that are not blessed by daily sunshine, you might need to supplement Vitamin D. Check out this free full-text paper on vitamin D in health and disease.

Moreover, vitamin D may boost strength and athletic performance. 2000 IU/day is a conservative and safe dosage, but some go higher without negative implications. (>5000 IU).

On the other hand, we need to be very careful with sun exposure. In countries with outdoor courts, padel players can end up accumulating many hours in the sun and that’s proven to not be a healthy thing.

Skin cancer is a real thing and we need to protect our skin against it. I use an SPF 30 sunscreen by ISDIN (a good brand here in Spain) and apply it 30 minutes before I play. Typically one application will last for 2 hours, which conveniently is just about the time that a match lasts on average. If you sweat a lot like me it is also a good idea to reapply sunscreen in between sets to make sure that you are still protected. Make sure to apply cream over all exposed areas of the body including often forgotten areas like the back of the neck and the tops of the ears. Bald guys need to be especially careful with their heads when playing in the sun, and here the best option is to use a hat and possibly even glasses to protect the eyes from harmful UV.

Remember that while some sunshine is healthy, we are talking about only around 15 minutes of sun exposure to get all the vitamin D needed for the day. So a full match in the sun is definitely too much exposure unless adequate protection is used. The sunscreen I use is specially formulated to be water and sweat resistant and designed for use in sports. One final option is to cover yourself using long sleeved t shirts and longer shorts, although I’m not a big fan of that and prefer to use sunscreen.

I do regular bloodwork to make sure that all my vitamin levels are good. A good doctor will easily identify any issues there and suggest which supplements to take, if any.

Supplements like vitamin B12, iron, magnesium, zinc, folate etc can easily be tested and there is no real need in supplementing if your levels are adequate (worth extra vigilance if following a restrictive diet e.g. veganism).

As a general rule, using a multivitamin is not a good idea.

While multivitamins may appear to be an easy panacea, their execution tends to be poor. Focusing too heavily on the “multi” aspect, most tend to have below-optimal dosages of vitamins, tending to focus more on having a plethora of vitamins/minerals present. Some vitamins are simply not really needed at all (vitamin C for example). It is likely more prudent to get a few specific vitamins and minerals in isolation.

An easy method to cover yourself is to eat LOTS of vegetables with each meal or snack. Order an extra side salad when you eat out, make extra vegetables when you cook and have vegetables (and fruit) easily available to snack on.

It’s also important to customize your supplementation plan according to your needs. One thing I’ve done is to download the raw data from my 23andme profile, then run it through Rhonda Patrick’s Genetic Reports system to get a custom report on what things I need to look out for due to my DNA markers. For example, I discovered that taking a fish oil supplement is particularly beneficial to people with a particular gene that I have.

What supplements have worked for you? I’m curious to know, just leave a comment below.

If you want to learn more about supplementation, the best resource I’ve found is Examine.com and you can also check the analysis done on Labdoor and Consumerlab.

You should also get regular bloodwork done and discuss the results with your nutritionist for further fine tuning. I find this website really good for digging deeper into specific bloodwork results and to help you understand such results.

Which Supplements to Buy

It’s very important to know what supplements actually work, and the best resource I’ve found for that is Examine.com.

Then, to find out which brand I should buy (supplement quality varies a lot between one brand and another), I rely on the analysis done on Labdoor and Consumerlab.