Knees Over Toes Guy

Good morning 🦁 This is Andrew's Apples, the 2-min health email that's like the 3-course meal gum from Willy Wonka. Let's go. AND YES, I BLOOPERED YESTERDAY'S EDITION, MY APOLOGIES! 

• 🦵 Knees Over Toes Guy. In January, a 38-year old dude named Ben Patrick (known as "knees over toes guy") went on Joe Rogan's pod and has blown up since. Basically, he is making mobility cool. Dads with car tire guts who can't touch their toes is just the low hanging fruit for Mr. Patrick - he really wants to make extreme mobility, flexibility, and dunking a basketball as sexy for young dudes/ladies as beefcaking at the barbell gym. His videos on Instagram are money.

  • 🍎 Andrew's Take. The continued rise in popularity of various physical disciplines led to certain desirable (but not perfect) outcomes in recent years. CrossFit married cardio and gymnastics to heavy weightlifting. Long distance running retaught many how to breathe during total mental misery. Yoga elongated the limbs of moms first, but now people of all stripes. I think mobility is the next chapter. The hops of a bunny rabbit with the grace of a nimble housecat... this is where we are headed.

• 💪 Maintaining muscle mass, mister. Typically, as Americans age they get less active. When they get less active a loss of muscle mass occurs, aka sarcopenia. Combine inactivity with smaller protein intake and you got yourself a nasty cocktail that accelerates muscle loss. Muscle loss = feel weaker = more prone to injury and illness. The best and easiest thing someone can do is take a whey protein supplement (specifically, one that has leucine in it, as it helps slow down protein turnover in your muscles). Similar to creatine, whey is a no-brainer given its accessibility and inexpensiveness.

  • 🍎 Andrew's Take. Just keep moving and glug back the whey. I remember when whey tasted like trash. No longer the case. This one is perhaps the best in the game.

• 🥔 A calorie's a calorie? What is the difference between a carb and a fat in terms of energy balance and weight gain/loss? We know, roughly, that a gram of protein is a gram of protein, no matter the source (emphasis on "roughly"). A study claims that low-fat diets (vs. low-carb diets) are difficult to maintain because fat better rewards the brain. At the end of it, we cannot at this moment equate a fat calorie to a carb calorie.

  • 🍎 Andrew's Take. Keto freaks think that fat is the best energy; marathon runners think that carbs are god's gift to the brain. The brain can munch on either and I am sure it depends on the individual. In general, dose up on carbs as you move more; dose down on carbs if you are just lifting with minimal cardio (or doing nothing at all).

• 🕊️ Tweet of the Day. Purely from a metabolic health standpoint, alcohol is not good for you even in small amounts. Leave alone socializing, culture, customs, etc. It gets trickier when viewed holistically like that. It's interesting that the threshold is two drinks/week and there are two days in a weekend. Some sort of sign?

How about them Apples? Hit me with any comments or questions. 

Your friend, 

Andrew🍎  

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