planking

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.