“Knowledge is nothing if it is not shared.”

– John Wooden

Deep Squats (Thoughts)

Thank you to “The Community” for today’s contribution. Maybe it will help get more people “moving” in this direction if a high profile university Chair is saying it.

Here’s a link to the full conversation and transcript from an interview between Eric Topol and Euan Ahsley.

“Exercise may be the single most potent medical intervention ever known.” This is the claim by Euan Ashley. Stanford’s newest Chair of the Department of Medicine.

“One of my favorite facts, I think I first saw it probably on a presentation a few years ago, but I looked up the original and recalculated it. But if you look at this very big study of half a million people and look at their physical activity over the course of years and correlate it with their likelihood of being alive or being dead, then it was clear that one minute of exercise bought you five minutes of extra life. And I just thought that was just a really interesting way of putting it essentially. And actually it’s a little more, if you did high intensity exercise, one minute would give you seven or eight minutes of extra life. So I tell this to my patients when they come in and tell me they don’t have enough time to exercise. I said, oh, well, one minute of exercise. I’m not very popular when I tell them that, but anyway.”

“The data is large, I mean half a million people. I think we’ve also seen it currently since the early fifties when we were first doing the London bus conductor study that Jerry Morris did that you will know well, where he compared bus conductors in London to the bus drivers and found a significantly reduced cardiovascular mortality among the conductors because they were on their feet all day up and down stairs and the driver was otherwise in the same environment, the drivers were sitting. So I think we have a wealth of epidemiologic correlative evidence that exercise leads to a greater length of life, greater longevity, maybe more than for anything else. The causal evidence is less of course, but we do have causal evidence too. There are enough randomized trials and now increasingly some genetic causal evidence that helps us understand that this is really a causal link and that we actually can change our outcome if we do additional exercise.”

“I mean I think that it’s very clear from the data and as you mentioned, you and I tend to focus first on the cardiovascular benefit, which is very significant, potentially 50% reduction in risk, but there are similar sorts of numbers when you look at mental health and exercise as an intervention for mental health has been very well studied and has these really dramatic benefits. And I think even if we go in the more general population and think about the fact people talk about a runner’s high or an exercise high, and many, many of us, myself included, feel that. And a few years ago, I started exercising every morning and now if I don’t do that, I really feel like I’m missing something, there’s something in the chemistry of my brain is not quite right. And so, I think that benefit for those who have mental health issues is also very much felt and is real at the brain chemical signaling level and with this few adverse effects as exercise has, I do think we need to think of it earlier and more prominently for almost every disease.”

There’s so much more to this talk. If you don’t want to watch/read on substack, then you can also find him on Plain English with Derek Thompson on Spotify.

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Overheard in Class:

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Timfluencing

A Game Plan for Life is John Wooden’s moving and inspirational guide to the power of mentorship. The first half focuses on the people who helped foster the values that carried Wooden through an incredibly successful and famously principled career, including his college coach, his wife, Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Teresa.

The second half is built around interviews with some of the many people he mentored over the years, including Kareem Abdul- Jabbar, Bill Walton, fellow coaches, family members, and even a middle school coach in Canada. Their testimony takes readers inside the lessons Wooden taught to generations of players, bringing out the very best in them not just as athletes but as human beings.

In all, it’s an inspiring primer on how to achieve success without sacrificing principles, and on how to build one of the most productive and rewarding relationships available to any athlete, businessperson, teacher, or that of mentor and protégé.

Thank you for your support.

I look forward to what we will do together.