Fire apart
For those of us with an interest in human performance, behavior and the nervous system, there’s a powerful turn of phrase that’s been showing up with increasing frequency in both professional and popular press ...
Escape from the doll house
You’re trying your best to build a life and a career with meaning, substance and dignity. You want to create a healthier life for yourself and others around you but somehow, it feels like an uphill fight ...
Keep your eye on the whole
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness ...
Maximum mindfulness
As a kid, it was one of my favorite daydreams. I’d devour books about the big mountain and savor the descriptions of the Khumbu glacier, the treacherous icefall, the Western Cwm, the “death zone” and the Hillary Step ...
Health is an animal
The time has come to have a little talk about our talk, especially as it relates to those perplexing words, health and wellness. Clearly, we are having some serious problems on this score. Across the board, from training environments to clinical, academic and organizational settings, people have been struggling to come up with a working definition ...
What's the point?
As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body ...
Unnovation for health and performance
Everyone knows that something is desperately wrong with the human body and the human experience. Over the course of the last several decades, we have suffered a rapid and ominous increase in so-called non-communicable diseases, also referred to as “lifestyle diseases.” ...
Stretching out
We begin with the body and the physical. As children and young adults, play and sweat, run and jump, bike and swim. It’s all so wonderful, this love affair with our primal nature, but as we dig deeper into our experience, we begin to see possibilities that extend far beyond our original imagining ...
Decelerate or die
I hope you read this essay really, really fast because it’s going to have a lot of really great insights and hot tips about the nature of speed and acceleration, insights that will help you get more done and really achieve more every day and be more efficient and effective and faster and get everything done in half the time so that you can go faster which of course will allow you to go even faster ...
The beginning is near
There’s a common pattern that emerges in the life of health enthusiasts and environmental activists: We fall in love with the body and the earth and before long we begin to see pain and disease all around us ...
Many unhappy returns
Over the course of the last year, I’ve had a few close brushes with corporate wellness, a world that I’ve found to be strange and in many ways, extremely disturbing. In general, every encounter has had a strikingly similar look and feel: I make a pitch to someone in the organization and lay out all the advantages of a healthy workforce and the need for training ...
Pop goes the Paleo
I was recently contacted by a “journalist” who wanted some “secrets” about Paleo health and fitness. It was obvious that she had no interest in Paleo itself. Rather, she wanted a sentence fragment or two that might fit into an article with other weight-loss, lifestyle and fashion “tips.” ...
Anything is possible
Maybe you’re new to movement. Maybe you’ve been on the couch for the last few years. Or, maybe you’re an experienced athlete, but you’re stuck in a movement rut and you need some inspiration. Where do you turn for instruction? ...
Before and after the before-and-after
In the hyper-competitive world of physical training and health promotion, marketing experts tell us that we’ve got to have the images to make our case. Consumers are highly visual creatures and they’re more likely to respond to dramatic imagery than big blocks of explanatory text ...
Living and thriving in two worlds
There comes a time in every young Paleo enthusiast’s life when the magnitude of our predicament comes into sharp focus. We begin to realize that our bodies are truly ancient, sculpted over the course of tens of thousands of generations for survival in a world that, for all practical purposes, no longer exists ...
I’m funny looking, you’re funny looking
Sports commentators sometimes tell us that “every athlete dies twice.” The first death comes when injury forces the star into retirement, the second comes some years later when his heart beats for the last time ...
Take this story and call me in the morning
Are you a machine? Is your body like a very intricate watch, a complex system of mechanisms and feedback loops? Are you just a flesh and blood cyborg? Sounds kind of creepy, doesn’t it? And yet, that’s precisely how many people think about the human body ...
How to do one thing
Put down your phone now and read this.
Yes, you, I’m talking to you!
I know you’re distracted and frantic and in a hurry, you’ve got a million things to do and you need to find out what’s going on and, um…wait… where was I going with this?
Those deaf, dumb and blind kids
Back in my younger days, the rallying cry was “don’t trust anyone over 30.” At the time, I thought that there might be some merit to that advice. Adults do have a way of monopolizing the learning process and stomping on creativity ...