Exercise and meditation don’t have to compete for your time. You can do both at once. Mindfulness can be practiced during physical activity, including vigorous aerobic exercise. That combination may be especially interesting because aerobic exercise is a powerful stimulus for neuroplasticity, increasing the brain’s capacity to change in response to experience. Pairing the neuroplastic effects of exercise with intentional mental training is an opportunity to cultivate awareness, connection, compassion, or other constructive states of mind. From the latest episode of the FoundMyFitness podcast with @RichieJDavidson.

In last week's newsletter, I talked about how resistance training can support cardiovascular health in postmenopausal women. It's not just aerobic exercise! You can now read the issue - and sign up for free - in our archive. We send it out every week.

Resistance training is cardiovascular medicine for postmenopausal women. It reduces resting heart rate, blood pressure, and even improves measures of artery stiffness and endothelial function in women aged 52-78. Reminder that it's not just aerobic exercise that's good for the heart!

Most heart attacks today are not simply a cholesterol problem. Aside from a smaller group with inherited lipid disorders, many are connected to metabolic syndrome, prediabetes, and poor metabolic health. Too much sugar and starch can drive up insulin, triglycerides, and ApoB long before symptoms appear. The good news is that much of heart disease is preventable. Start with whole foods and limit ultra-processed foods. Combine aerobic exercise with strength training. Take a 10-minute walk after meals to help keep blood sugar under control. Prioritize sleep, manage stress, avoid smoking, and monitor your blood pressure. And do not assume that looking healthy means you know your risk. Go beyond the standard cholesterol panel. Ask your healthcare provider about ApoB, Lp(a), hemoglobin A1c, and fasting insulin. Check your blood pressure at home, track your waist-to-height ratio, and follow these numbers over time. Heart disease, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol, and insulin resistance are not separate problems. They are part of one interconnected biological system.

My brain scan explains why hate doesn’t bother me. I find it fun and easy. Here is what the data shows: + Amygdala 95th - emotion, threat detection + Putamen 99th - learning, habit formation + Caudate nucleus 97th - goal, decision, memory + Globus pallidus 93rd - movement control + Frontal gray matter 78th and still climbing How this might loosely map to what I do in life: > processing hate is an enjoyable activity for me > understanding it as information rather than threat > am a very fast learner > can maintain multiple threads in mind simultaneously > am a systems builder > can easily master habits > strong motor control Amygdala 95th percentile It’s the center of threat detection and emotional processing. The amygdala volume tracks the size and complexity of the social networks a person builds and maintains. Likely pointing to why my mind defaults to thinking about large social networks. Specifically, thinking about Don’t Die for all of intelligent life. Putamen 99th percentile This is brain infrastructure for learning. It turns repetition into skill, and skill into things you do without thinking. My daily protocol has hundreds of daily steps and none of them feel like effort anymore. Caudate nucleus 97th percentile Brain infrastructure for goal directed behavior, decision making and working memory. Makes sense given that daily I juggle being a founder, content creator, full-time rejuvenation athlete, and building the Immortals philosophy and movement. Pallidus 93rd percentile Brian infrastructure exercise. A good foundation for my attempt to dunk a basketball on a 10 foot rim. The above four regions are mostly hereditary. Twin studies put these structures at roughly 0.75 to 0.89 heritability, among the highest anywhere in the brain. If my brain is responding to what I'm doing day to day, it may be in my frontal gray matter. Adults who learned to juggle grew measurable gray matter within weeks. In a randomized trial, six months of aerobic exercise, three hours a week, grew the frontal cortex in people decades older than me. Brain structure follows use. My frontal gray matter sits at the 78th percentile and has been climbing steadily. It's up 1.35% over two years when it should be going down with age. This is the tissue of planning, self-control, and executive function. Inside the frontal lobe sits the anterior cingulate, also called the tenacity hub. It computes whether hard things are worth continuing. Superagers keep this region young. Mine has been getting stronger. Subjectively, that agrees with my life experience of how the level of work ethic required daily to maintain my rejuvenation athlete protocols plus two additional full-time jobs. This is of course speculative for my n of 1 context, yet the data strongly suggests it, and strong evidence backs it.