The ‘Suck-Less-At-Being-Healthy’ Framework—Part 3 of 4

There are 4 pillars of health

  1. Exercise

  2. Nutrition

  3. Sleep

  4. Stress management

It’s not that there aren’t other things you can do to better your health—those four just happen to be the easiest levers to pull that are within your control—which is why I’m so focused on them.

And here’s what’s effin’ mind-blowing…

Each of those pillars are interrelated to an unbelievable degree—meaning if you improve one area you’ll notice the others improving.

Similarly, if you start letting one of those slip, you’ll see the others suffer.

Take, for example, the relationship between exercise and sleep:

Evidence suggests that getting daily exercise increases the amount, and quality, of your sleep (1). Flip it around and you’ll see something similar…

…which is the more (and better) sleep you get, the better your capacity to exercise.

With better sleep, you can expect things like (2):

  • Your motivation to do anything (especially exercise) is increased dramatically

  • Peak muscle strength increases (in compound movements)

  • Your ability to respire and expel carbon dioxide is improved

  • Likelihood of injury risk markedly decreased

  • The time it takes to reach physical exhaustion increases

And to wrap up this example you’re already sick of reading about…I’ll say that sleep helps with recovery (like from a challenging workout) and therefore the more/better sleep you get, the sooner you’ll feel good enough to do it again.

Okay, so…

…if you want to suck less at being healthy, the quickest way to do that is to make any one of a million possible adjustments to any single one of the four pillars.

The trick is figuring out:

1) which pillar(s) that you should attack; and

2) which actions you should take that will provide the biggest impact in exchange for the least amount of time and effort…

…to get you from—‘kind of a slob’ to ‘someone who (somewhat) has their sh*t together’—which is the type of lofty goals we have here at SSH.