Health, Wealth & Happiness
For activation, I like to use this set of resistance band glute exercises at home and at the gym.
For building muscle I like this great set of exercises for glutes that can be found on Bret Contreras’ (The Glute Guy) website.
You should also be aware of how many times to train glutes per week. You should be doing more exercises than just squatting to built great glute muscles.
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
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:
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:
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.
Sleep is one of the most important things we need to take care of in order to live a healthy life and have enough energy to do all the activities we want to do on a daily basis.
When discussing sleep, the first thing we need to learn is that the idea that sleep is just one long state that we enter every night is a false one. Our sleep time is actually broken down into what are called sleep cycles.
Each sleep cycle is around 90 minutes long. There is some variation here between 70 and 110 minutes, but 90 minutes is a good figure to keep in mind as a start.
During the night, sleeping follows a predictable pattern, moving back and forth between two different types of sleep.
These two main types of sleep are referred to as non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. On an electroencephalogram (EEG), REM sleep, often called “active sleep,” is identifiable by its characteristic low-amplitude (small), high-frequency (fast) waves and alpha rhythm, as well as the eye movements for which it is named.
Many sleep experts think that these eye movements are in some way related to dreams. REM sleep comprises about 20 to 25 percent of total sleep in typical healthy adults. The average length of the first NREM-REM sleep cycle is between 70 and 100 minutes; the average length of the second and later cycles is about 90 to 120 minutes.
