Welcome to the positive corner of the internet. We’re here to make your life healthier, happier, and less stressful. At the bottom of each email, we explain our editorial process, stance on AI, and partnership standards.

If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free daily email here.

Today’s Health Upgrade

• Can you microdose workouts?

• Why stability is underrated

• Book of the month

• Adam’s corner: Selective ignorance

On Our Radar
Your Scattered Workout Still Counts

Eleven minutes of exercise doesn’t sound like much. And now imagine breaking those 11 minutes into bursts shorter than three minutes, scattered from breakfast to bedtime. To most people, that sounds more like cheating your way through activity than a workout.

That may be exactly why it works.

In an eight-week trial, participants who spread 75 minutes of bodyweight exercise across the week improved about as much as those who performed the same exercises during longer high-intensity interval workouts.

The difference was that the scattered workouts consistently felt easier.

One group completed brief “exercise snacks” throughout each weekday. The other condensed the same work into HIIT sessions. Both groups performed the same basic movements: jumping jacks, squats, lateral jumps, and high knees. The only difference was that one group did it across many mini-workouts.

By the end, both groups improved their weight, body fat, and performance on a running-based fitness test.

Unfortunately, the study didn’t include a group that did nothing. That means we can’t know how much of the change came from the exercise itself rather than motivation, ordinary fluctuations, or simply performing the fitness test a second time.

But that doesn’t change the fact that spreading the movement throughout the day didn’t appear to weaken the results. And it made the effort feel more manageable. The key to seeing changes was the intensity and consistency.

We’ve discussed “exercise snacks” in several issues of APC, as positive research continues to be published.

Two meta-analyses suggest exercise snacks can reliably improve cardiovascular fitness. And while this latest study found something different, the general evidence is less convincing for weight loss, blood pressure, or cholesterol.

If you’re someone (or know someone) who finds it hard to make time for exercise, this study once again shows that it’s time to remove the belief that exercise only counts if you can protect a 30- or 60-minute block.

A few minutes before work, a few more at lunch, another burst later in the day all count. And if that makes exercise easier to repeat, the scattered workout may have one advantage the perfect workout doesn’t: It gets done.

Together With NOBULL 
Steady Isn't a Feeling

Every lifter knows the moment. You unrack a heavy squat, sink into the hole, and somewhere in the drive back up your foot either feels solid and stable or it doesn't. We treat it as a matter of a position. And it is. 

But sometimes, when you just never feel strong, the problem might not just be your form but also your footwear. 

"Steady" isn't only something you feel. It's something a force plate can measure. And the shoes you wear influence your stability, force, and power more than you might realize. 

In a study from the Footwear Biomechanics Symposium, researchers put competitive lifters through heavy barbell squats in two kinds of shoes: firm, stable lifting shoes and ordinary cushioned athletic shoes. They tracked the center of pressure under each foot, basically the wandering dot that shows where your weight is balancing millisecond to millisecond. The more that dot travels, the more your body is fighting to stay upright instead of moving the bar.

At the heaviest load, the firm shoes measurably shrank how far that pressure point drifted. The lifters weren't just reporting that they felt more solid. The plates showed it. 

A cushioned midsole compresses unevenly under a heavy load, so your foot is constantly making tiny steering corrections it never registers. This makes you less stable, which means it’s harder to perform the exercise. 

A firm platform doesn't sink, so there's less to correct. It's the difference between planting a ladder on concrete versus on a mattress.

It was a small study, but it highlights the broader research on squat stability: the surface you stand on matters. 

A dedicated weightlifting shoe delivers that with a raised heel. But if you squat, then lunge, then carry, then jump, then walk out to the car, you want that same firm, non-sinking base in one flat, grounded shoe you can do all of it in.

After years of testing gym shoes, the shoes we keep coming back to is the NOBULL Outwork. It offers a low-profile base (independent testers clock the stack around 15mm, near-zero drop), a dense sole that won't collapse mid-rep, and an upper that shrugs off outdoor abuse for years.

It now comes two ways: The original Outwork is the pick when power transfer is the priority and you want the most stripped-down feel underfoot. 

The Outwork Flex keeps that same grounded base but adds a shorter break-in, a smoother ride, and more lockdown, built for people who blend lifting and conditioning and want one shoe from warm-up to cool-down.

For the next 48 hours, APC readers get 35% off both the OG Outwork and the Outwork Flex. The discount applies with code APC35 at checkout. 

Good form and mechanics are the foundation of movement and put you on the right track for results. The right footwear ensures your feet aren’t working against you. 

Mindset
Book of the Month: Stay Calm

Today, we’ve got a book recommendation. And it might surprise you.

Stay Calm, by David Booth, is about financial markets, not fitness. But it more than earned its spot as the book of the month.

So why are we recommending it? For starters, here’s what the boss had to say: 

The reality is, financial markets impact your fitness. Depending on the study, 70% to 85% of Americans are facing financial stress that causes them mental and physical health issues.

When you add to that a whole new generation envisioning get-rich-quick schemes as they play day-trader on their smartphones and find themselves on the wrong side of a bet, you have an explosive combo.

David Booth and his fellow University of Chicago economists won Arnold over with their calm, grounded investment strategy decades ago. And since then, they’ve proven that relying on evidence works.

Arnold calls backing Dimensional Fund Advisors and their philosophy his best investment.

Stay Calm not only provides a framework that sets you up for financial success, but enables you to stop worrying about money along the way.

At a time when more people than ever are treating the stock market as a casino they carry in their pocket, we think that David’s stable and sane advice can save people from a lot of stress and guide better decision-making. 

He’s the opposite of the financial gurus you see on Instagram. In fact, you’ve probably never seen him. And that’s a big reason why Stay Calm is worth your time. 

Adam’s Corner
I Don’t Preach Ignorance

The last run of the day was supposed to be the easy one. 

We took a wide groomer. The kind of terrain your skis carve without thinking, so you can leave the slopes on a high. 

I was 23 and two minutes from the bottom. I turned right, and one ski popped off clean.

The other one stayed on with an uncharacteristic death grip.

I still can't fully explain what happened next: the way a leg can be twisted in directions a leg isn't built to go while the ski that should have let go just kept holding on. 

When I finally stopped tumbling, the ski was still attached. But my knee felt like it became a separate matter entirely.

One moment I was flying down the mountain. 

The next, I was covering my eyes in pain, afraid to look at what happened. 

Accountability And Acceptance

By the time I was taken down by ski patrol, I had a good sense of what I was about to learn. The MRI confirmed I tore my ACL and MCL, my lateral and medial meniscus were also toast, and the cherry on top was a fractured kneecap.

Before I understood the damage, sitting in the snow, I told my dad the thing I hadn't thought twice about that morning.

I didn't have health insurance.

Or, more accurately (as I tried to convince my father), I was “insured,” but the insurance didn’t take effect for another 9 days. I was between jobs, and had a fourteen-day gap with no coverage. 

And like the 23-year-old I was, unwilling to think a scenario all the way through, I had picked those fourteen days to go skiing instead of sitting still in bubble wrap, waiting for the new policy to kick in.

My dad lost his mind.

“Are you a f***ing idiot? Have I taught you nothing? How do you have no health insurance?”

He was scared. That was fear coming out in expletives that caught the attention of everyone on the mountain

My dad was my hero. And that’s partly because he told me what he thought. That was the only way he knew how to love someone.

But in the moment, my leg feeling like 10,000 pounds and on fire, I was on the ground thinking, “Dad. My knee. Please, focus on the knee.”

He couldn't. He was too busy being amazed by my poor decision-making.

Looking back, what did I expect? One of my dad’s favorite mantras was, “I don't preach ignorance.”

That was his line. He must have said it ten thousand times. 

It was code for something simple: I will not beat around the bush, and I will not skip the hard conversation to spare your feelings. 

You could ask him about anything — drugs, money, the girl you were dating, the way you ran your business — and you got the truth whether or not you were braced for it.

My dad was not a man of many words and not very social. But when something moved him to speak, you never had to guess. No games, no decoding, just the truth handed over plainly, sometimes with the edges still on it.

I built a lot of who I am on that. On the belief that you look hard things in the face and you say them out loud.

And then the hard thing became his own life. And the man who didn't preach ignorance embraced ignorance in a way that changed me. 

Maybe You Know Too Much

Last week, Ketch posted his latest bloodwork in the app. Six months of numbers, February to August, and nearly every one moved in the direction you would want. 

His ApoB fell from the low 120s into the 70s. His LDL more than cut in half. Each year, my Co-CEO gets older and keeps getting healthier.

Then he said the thing he didn't have to say but was honest and helpful:

“I'll be straight with you about the cholesterol and ApoB numbers, because I told you earlier this year when it happened: I went on a statin. My doctor said it was time. My Lp(a) is genetic and barely responds to diet or training, my calcium score was zero, and we wanted to keep it that way. I've got two toddlers and a baby on the way and I'm 42. All of my effort is about being there for them, and when my effort can't fill the gap, I will reach for modern medicine without apologizing for it.”

The comments filled up fast, and almost all of them asked the same thing. What about the side effects?

Ketch admitted he didn't know. He'd never asked, and he didn't want to. 

He had done everything right for a decade — the training, the food, all of it — and the LDL still would not move, and it was the one crack in an otherwise healthy body. 

So he took the drug his doctor told him to take, and he decided not to go hunting for reasons to feel worse. Not knowing, he figured, would probably serve him better than knowing.

There’s research that suggests he's right. 

Scientists took patients who had quit statins because of side effects and put them through a blind rotation. Some months a statin, some months a sugar pill, some months nothing at all. Around nine out of ten of the symptoms people had blamed on the drug showed up on the sugar pill too. When they showed the patients their own results, a good number of them restarted their statins.

The aches were real. The cause was a story.

Ketch’s move was the right one. Rather than be weighed down by a bunch of what-ifs, or have symptoms planted so deep in his head that they would become his reality either way, he chose not to focus on it because he needed the medication. 

And now, Ketch is a lot healthier, and he hasn’t noticed anything because he didn’t know what he was supposed to experience.

I had seen a version of this before, on a life-and-death scale.

Are You Seeking Information Or Trying To Escape?

When my dad was diagnosed with brain cancer, some of the doctors suggested he might only have six months to live, or maybe a year. They laid out the grim map of how it would go and what his body would do on the way.

My dad heard them. He understood the disease. He just refused to study it.

I'm convinced he read almost nothing about it. The man who didn’t preach ignorance got a terminal diagnosis and went fully ignorant.

He found the doctor he trusted and did exactly what that doctor said. That meant brain surgery, chemo, and radiation. My mom became his personal chef, and he adjusted everything he ate. 

All the while, he kept training, even on the days the treatment left him with nothing. 

And for two and a half years the doctors kept shaking their heads in joy and surprise because he was traveling and skiing and climbing actual mountains, and if not for the device on his head you would never have known he had brain cancer.

There’s no science to it, but I’m sure my dad’s defiance and ability to live healthily and fully for so much longer than anyone anticipated was connected to his intentional ignorance. 

He didn't know what the disease was supposed to do to him, so it never told him who to be. And he was the healthiest brain cancer patient you could imagine.

Until the disease eventually gave him no choice.

About six months before the end, everything turned. The cancer spread and began taking him apart one piece at a time. His legs. Then his arms. Then his sight. 

And in those last weeks, I remember how he felt blindsided by it all. Genuinely shocked that his body was doing this to him.

At first, I thought he was angry about losing the fight. And then I realized it was something else. My dad never read the way this was supposed to go, so it was a lot to take in. To have his life and existence stripped from him.

I would give almost anything to erase the pain and suffering of those six months for him. To those who have been through cancer, it’s a shared story and heartbreaking experience. 

And yet, I believe the ignorance that made his end of life even harder to comprehend than the physical decline alone is the same ignorance that gave him two and a half years of a life worth living. 

The man who told me ten thousand times that he didn't preach ignorance was saved, for a while, by exactly that.

Knowledge Is Power (And Sometimes Kryptonite)

I've written this newsletter every morning for three years. More than a thousand editions. Thousands of studies read and many more discarded, most of them never reaching you because they weren't worth your time. 

I stay up late every night writing Arnold’s Pump Club, working with Arnold and Ketch, hoping that there’s at least one tip you can take with you that makes you better.

Because I believe that knowledge is power. I've also learned it has a shadow.

Ketch not cataloging every side effect lets him take his medicine, be a father, train hard, and live his life with a lot fewer worries. 

My dad not memorizing the arc of his disease let him spend two years believing his life could still be full, which is part of the reason it was. 

Some facts hand you power. Others just hand you a set of expectations your body starts meeting whether or not they were ever true. 

The people on the sugar pill hurt more because they believed they were supposed to.

This is easy to twist into permission, so I want to be careful.

It is not permission to look away from what you would rather not face. 

Most of us already do too much of that. We call it ignorance, but it's usually denial: the workout we keep skipping, the food we keep explaining away, the number on a chart we don't want to see because seeing it would mean we would have to change something. 

Refusing to look at what you could fix isn't peace. It's avoidance wearing a calmer face.

The line between the two can feel complicated but sometimes be simple. Ask how knowing this information changes your reality. And whether the knowledge puts you in the mindset of being the person you want or retreating from being what you need.

I thought my dad spent his whole life refusing to look away from anything. It made him hard to argue with and impossible to lie to. 

But maybe all along — or at least as he prepared for the biggest battle of his life — he understood there were certain things he didn't need to see. Or he knew that they would only distract from what he needed to do.

Sometimes, we think we need to stare down everything. But we all have choices. My dad’s choice to embrace ignorance made him optimistic, helped him push harder, and he beat cancer every step of the way. In the end, he just ran out of time.

My dad believed in the hard conversation until the day he died. 

But he understood that doesn’t mean you need to have every conversation. And it’s our job to choose which ones we're having to keep us honest, and which ones are worth limiting to keep us focused.

So maybe my dad did preach some ignorance. He just never mentioned that there’s a kind you choose.

My dad didn’t dwell on or overthink variables he couldn’t control, and threw everything he had at what he could control.

That's the only kind of ignorance worth choosing. The kind that frees your hands instead of covering your eyes. -AB

-Adam Bornstein is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Arnold’s Pump Club

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.

1. The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).

2. Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to edit and review our interpretations of the research, ensuring scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.

3. Yes, we have partners (all clearly noted by “Together With”). Why? Because it allows us to keep the APC emails free. We first test products, and then reach out to potential partners who offer ways to help you improve every day. The bar is set high, and to date, we have turned down millions in ad deals. (Example: we will not partner with any non-certified supplements or those without evidence in human trials). If we won’t buy the product, we won’t recommend it to you. And if there’s no evidence it works, then there’s no place for it here.

—

Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell