For nearly past 40 years, I’ve been tracking my workouts on paper. I’ve gone through various iterations ranging from binders full of detailed sheets specifying reps, sets and rest times to simple lists of core exercises and workout duration. For my current routine, I use a simple spreadsheet to note the duration of each segment…
Author: Steve Ainslie
The Stuff Is Only A Symptom
My mother’s recent car wreck and health crisis forced my sister and I to, once again, face our mother’s hoarding. My sister, along with two of her friends (saints in my opinion), spent an entire day clearing out trash and belongings from the first floor of my mother’s home. Eight hours and 35 bags of…
Self-Pity Olympics
One of the things I despise most about online forums is a hyperfocus on victimization and self-pity that is prevalent in many of them. People play a game of one-upsmanship (or one-downsmanship?) where they portray themselves as innocent victims who have experienced tragedy, unfairness and insurmountable suffering worse than anyone else. This is used to…
One Step Forward Two Steps Back
Just a week after mother’s car crash and subsequent dementia crisis, she has made a remarkable rebound. The symptoms of dementia that I thought were permanent and severe have dissipated. Every day, she regained her cognitive ability and now seems to have recovered to where she was before the accident. It must have been temporary….
Food Wars
I posted a link in the Solo forum to the Huberman podcast episode on how sugar and processed foods affect human health and described how eliminating both from my diet impacted me. Based on a few of the responses, you’d have thought I had directly criticized other people’s diets. One person agreed with some of…
Not Too Sweet
I listened to this Huberman Lab podcast on how sugar and processed foods affect your health yesterday. It was fascinating. Over the past 10 years as I transitioned from “clean eating” to paleo/primal to keto to carnivore, I’ve personally experienced phenomenal benefits by giving up sugar, processed foods, chocolate, cheese, ice cream and eventually all…
If I Was A Rich Man
Every so often, I’ll do a thought experiment I call “If I was a rich man…” It’s usually instigated by reading about some athlete’s huge contract, a celebrity’s net wealth or the latest CEO who is fired with a golden parachute of 10s or 100s of millions. Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s…
Light Up Night
I love my home. I especially love how the high ceilings, big windows and multiple sliding glass doors in my bedroom, living room and kitchen. It feels bright, open and airy. But in the coldest months of winter, these windows and doors are a conductor for the cold. For the past 5 years, I’ve had…
Holding Back The 2×4
I have some very strong opinions regarding my mother’s recent health crises, her capacity to care for herself and what should be done. My sister, who’s local and directly involved, shares some of my opinions but differs greatly on others. My mother has had a surprisingly positive reaction to my sister’s involvement, but eventually will…
Common Nonsense
This month I had two unexpected medical emergencies where I needed expert advice. So of course, I started by looking on the internet to do some basic fact gathering. My first emergency was an abscessed molar that I had a root canal performed on 3 years ago. The second emergency was my mother crashing her…