OsteoStrong

Four big learnings on health (Part Four: Exercise and X3)

Note: I originally wrote this on Medium on Jan. 17, 2021. I then forgot to mirror it here! This is still my daily workout but one thing has changed since then: in the original below I’m talking about doing a long elbow plank, but I switched to a long straight arm plank to make it more challenging. I put a lot of additional padding underneath my yoga mat by folding a thinner yoga mat into four. I’ve built up to a 14-minute, 30-second straight arm plank each time I do this workout now (five to six days per week). That is the only thing that has changed below. Oh, and even with the pandemic subsiding in the US and gyms being deemed safe again for the fully vaccinated, I still have no reason to return with this terrific, very effective, home workout. Now, back to the original post:

I was debating whether to title this post “The Ultimate Pandemic Workout”, “Maximum Efficiency with Maximum Results”, or something else, but stuck with the thematic of my four-part series on health.

In the first three Parts, I covered:
1. Nutrition (and my vegan power breakfast smoothie recipe)
2. The Cooper Clinic
3. OsteoStrong

Two and a half years ago I had a really traumatic injury the day before the TED 2018 conference in Vancouver. I wrote about it on Facebook:

Four big learnings on health (Part Three)

In the past year, I’ve been asked about health more than any other topic outside of tech and data. I’ve decided to consolidate my responses to those questions in a series of four Lucky7 posts.

Specifically, I’ll cover:
1. Nutrition (and my vegan power breakfast smoothie recipe)
2. The Cooper Clinic
3. OsteoStrong
4. Exercise and X3

For Part Three, I decided to do something different as I cover the health benefits of OsteoStrong. The Austin franchisee, Deepak Suthar, is a good friend and used to work with me at Bazaarvoice. He agreed to be interviewed for this post, and I’ve had him speak about OsteoStrong and X3 at our data.world office.

For me personally, OsteoStrong has been a real game-changer. In April of 2018, I had the biggest workout injury I’ve ever experienced — I was at the TED conference with Debra and we were working out the day before the event started. I was doing a heavy bench press and it was my last set right before we went to eat breakfast. My body was tired but I needed to press on and make this last set count. On the third rep, I felt a massive rubber-band snap inside my chest and body and 911-level pain. Fortunately I had a spotter pull the bar off of me as I went to the floor, writhing around in pain. I knew something inside of me was really broken.