health

2022 New Year’s Eve Letter

Dear family and friends,

As we have in prior years, we are sending this end-of-year letter instead of mailing holiday cards.  Instead, we’ve made a large donation in your honor to the Anti-Defamation League (unfortunately antisemitism continues to be on the rise).  If you haven’t read my newest friend Noa Tishby’s book on Israel, it is a real treasure.  It isn’t just about Israel (although that would be enough given its title and importance), it is also about Western values and the value of democracy itself.

2022 was an incredible year in so many ways but it was also a rollercoaster (if you let it be).  From a market that was at a peak at the end of 2021 to rising inflation, a rising Fed funds rate to try to combat it, the shocking Russian attack of Ukraine, but also with many truly amazing technological breakthroughs, including at data.world, and beautiful moments of humanity (including Ukraine’s improbably successful resistance) - wow, what a year it was!

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:

How to build up to a 10-minute plank

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

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

I haven’t written Part Four yet on exercise and X3, and I want to take a quick diversion to talk about the benefits of planking. I’ll also reference this post in Part Four, so it is a good primer.

When I turned 48-years old on Feb. 14, I announced on Facebook that I felt like I was close to being in the best shape of my life and I had achieved a new health milestone - my first 10-minute plank. That got quite a bit of attention from my friends, including many texts to my mobile phone, so I wanted to talk about how I did it since I’ve received so many questions about it.

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.

Four big learnings on health (Part Two)

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 Clinic3. OsteoStrong4. Exercise and X3

For Part Two, I would like to discuss the benefits of an annual comprehensive physical examination. Personally, I chose to do this at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas ever since I turned 40. Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper is the founder and I always do my best to book with him. The Cooper Clinic has over 40 years of data about patients like me, which provides them with a level of pattern recognition that is unusual.