💪 The everday athlete newsletter #14

👋 Hey.

Welcome to issue #14 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter. Thanks for being here!

🚀 I misfired #13 on Wednesday last week. Back to our usual Fridays...

Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (3.5 min read):

😥 Magic portals to cooling the body

You're running a marathon...

Under a spicy Aussie summer sun.

Red-faced. Sweating bullets. Going's tough.

A shaded drink stop a few hundred metres ahead keeps you moving forward. 

Get to it.

Cool towel around your neck. Bitta water. Fuel. Time to keep going.

The thing is... 

Overheating is terrible for our performance. We've all felt the drain it can have on us.

But that cool towel is only really cooling our neck muscles. We wanna lower our core body temp!

Enter, glabrous skin surfaces.

They're specific parts of the body (palms, forehead and soles of feet) where the veins and arteries are wired a bit differently from the rest of the body. 

They're like magic portals that (when cooled) can actually lower our core body temp.

So we actually wanna throw that cool towel on our forehead or between our palms. It'll quickly (within seconds) cool the blood there, send it back to the heart and out to cool our other muscles.

Early research is suggesting the effects are seriously significant for strength and endurance (+25% !!).

Strength (May 4 = no cooling, May 8 = cooling) 👇

Endurance (max effort test: white dots = no cooling, black dots = cooling) 👇

📝 Note: A cool towel is perfect. Ice or anything too cold that tightens the veins (vasoconstriction) won't work. Blood flow is crucial.

Pro teams are even using tools like this.

So next time you're playing in the heat and the cool towels come out, slap one on your forehead and press your palm against it.

Or even just hold a chilled bottle of water in your palms for a minute when you're out and about on a hot day.

❓And a bit of trivia... It's also how you'd help cool someone suffering from hyperthermia (overheating).

📚 Chapter: Choosing to care for yourself (from the Navalmanack)

The Navalmanack is a book that collects the wisdom of Naval Ravikant.

He's not a health expert. But he is generally a wizard. He's got a unique way of making complex ideas simple.

One chapter looks at his perspective on physical health. You can read the whole chapter here.

If not, these are my favourite highlights:

• 🤸‍♂️ "In terms of exercise, we’re probably meant to play instead of running on a treadmill."
• 🏊‍♂️ "The best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day."
• 🍏 "World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume."

💁 Fixing imbalances: dominant arm internal rotation

A lot of us have poor internal shoulder rotation in our dominant arm. Particularly if you play sports like tennis and cricket (with lots of throwing and single-arm, overhead movements).

Internal shoulder rotation is the ability to rotate your upper arm down towards the torso 👇 

Poor rotation is essentially from overusing the muscles around the back of the shoulder. So they get tight and restrict rotation.

An easy way to test yours is by doing a shoulder flexibility test (one arm reaching overhead above your back, the other behind, and trying to touch), like the dude here 👇 .

Notice if there's any difference between each side. Or poor on both (whether you can touch fingers is a pretty good indicator).

Healthy and balanced internal rotation can prevent pain and injury down the track.

Here's an easy way to release those tight muscles and improve your internal shoulder rotation:

1. 🥎 Lie on your back on a golf/trigger ball
2. 🫲 Put your arm behind your back (bent at the elbow at 90˚)
3. 🦾 Place the ball under the muscles around your shoulder blade
4. 💥 Move around until you find those painful spots
5. 😮‍💨 Stay there and breathe into those spots
6. ⚖️ Adjust the amount of weight on the ball with your arms, hips and legs

How-to video here.

I feel like I'm gonna rip my shoulder off every time I throw a ball. So this could be an easy weekly/twice weekly insurance plan to be able to play cricket with kids/grandkids/great-grandkids.

✌️ 

That's it!

• If you've got a mate who'd enjoy this, share and get rewarded (more info 👇 )
• Is there a specific topic you want to see in future issues?
• Also, if you have anything interesting to share, I'd love to hear about it.

Have a great weekend 

Matt

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