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Today’s Health Upgrade

• Can an inversion table fix your back?

• The shoe test

• The ancestral skin care protocol

• Adam’s Corner: The last to believe it

Use It Or Lose It
Do Inversion Tables Actually Fix Your Back? Here's What the Best Evidence Says

Like most good topics, our curiosity starts from real conversations. Last week, this text hit:

That moment was enough to send us down a rabbit hole of research. 

If you’re not familiar, the idea of inversion is intuitive: you literally invert yourself. Flip onto an inversion table or hang upside down from a pull-up bar, and the ache in your lower back is supposed to let up. 

It turns out that relief is real. It's also why these gadgets sell, and why the internet is full of people swearing they fixed their back by going upside down.

Hanging upside down can take the edge off for a minute, but in the long term, it doesn't appear to beat a placebo for lasting back pain.

Inversion is a form of traction that pulls your spine apart to relieve pressure on your discs. And something is happening. 

Flipping over briefly widens the gaps between your vertebrae and lowers the pressure inside the disc. The changes feel almost immediate when you stand back up. The problem is what happens weeks later. 

A Cochrane review, the closest thing we have in the research world to a referee, pooled 32 randomized trials testing traction for low back pain. 

The scientists found no edge for pain, function, or getting back to work, with or without sciatica. And experts don’t seem to think it’s a topline treatment. The American College of Physicians guideline doesn't list it among the treatments that help, either.

The research suggests that physical therapy and movement is far more effective at getting you out of pain and fully functioning.

That said, don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. If you like hanging upside down for quick relief, it's fine for most people. And if it works for you, then you don’t need a study to prove it. 

However, if you’re interested, there are some people who need to think twice. If you have high blood pressure, heart disease, glaucoma, or other eye conditions, or you're pregnant, inversion spikes the pressure in your head and eyes, and could cause issues.

For those scenarios, please consult your physician before hanging around in the name of back relief.  

Together With NOBULL 
The Shoe Test That Settles All the Others

Most people wear the same shoes for running and lifting. It looks fine on the shelf. Same laces, same logo. 

But when researchers had people lift weights in running shoes, that cushioned heel pushed them almost an inch farther forward than a flat shoe did. An inch doesn't sound like much. But it dumps the load off the bar and onto your lower back, rep after rep.

That's the trap with footwear. The right choice depends entirely on what you're doing in it, and the wrong one can look identical to the right one.

So we built five tests and ran more than half a dozen shoes through them. 

Can you feel the floor?
Does the sole hold still under load?
Can your foot spread out?
Does it lock you in?
Will it survive months of real training? 

The NOBULL Outwork Flex was the most impressive of all the shoes we tested. 

Flat and grounded, so the force goes into the bar instead of the foam. A roomy toe box so your foot can spread and grip. A firm platform that doesn't sink mid-lift. And unlike the stiffer OG, it breaks in over days instead of weeks, with an updated harness that holds your foot down without choking it.

It's the shoe we now reach for on mixed training days.

The shoe launched a few weeks ago, and if you missed the special offer, the $50-off window is open again for 48 hours. 

That puts the Flex at $100, down from $150. Every color but Pink Glo (which is nearly gone) is now available. 

Use the code APCFLEX at checkout.

Fact Or Fiction
Is Beef Tallow The New Face Moisturizer?

We haven't seen the claims personally, but you won't stop asking about them, so we decided to dive into the research.

Beef tallow is not just making its way into fast food chains. Apparently, it's also being championed as a superior, "chemical-free" moisturizer that clears up acne, eczema, and psoriasis.

It reminds us of the coconut oil craze of 10-15 years ago. But rather than making assumptions, we took a closer look at the science.

The idea took off with the carnivore and ancestral-living crowd, and the pitch sounds reasonable. The fats in beef tallow look a lot like the oil your own skin makes, so the theory goes that your skin recognizes it and soaks it up. No additives. Just cow fat.

The theory isn't crazy. But the evidence is barely there.

Tallow can soften dry skin, but no one has tested whether it treats a single skin condition, and for acne-prone skin, the ingredients could make things worse.

A 2025 analysis reviewed 200 of the most popular tallow posts on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Claims that it heals acne, eczema, and psoriasis were everywhere. Evidence was almost nowhere. Most posts cited nothing, and the majority came from people selling a product rather than anyone with medical training.

But it's not all negative. Tallow's fats do help your skin's outer barrier hold moisture. The wild card is oleic acid, the most abundant single fat in tallow. 

In lab studies, it can loosen that barrier, allowing water to escape, which is bad news for dry or eczema-prone skin. Up close, the picture only gets murkier: in a molecular model of skin lipids, small amounts of these fats packed into the layers and tightened them, while larger amounts of oleic acid did the reverse and pulled the structure apart.

There's a possible upside for acne, too. In a dish, oleic acid blunted the enzyme that acne bacteria use to inflame skin. And the one fat with real human acne data, linoleic acid, shrank early pore clogs by about a quarter in a small placebo-controlled trial, except tallow carries it only in trace amounts.

So the same jar holds fats that might help acne and fats that might make it worse. And nobody has tested the actual product on actual skin to know which outcome is more likely.

So is beef tallow the new face moisturizer? That’s a stretch, as it’s more hypothetical than rooted in reality. But we'll offer one exception. 

If your skin is dry and not acne-prone, tallow works fine as a basic moisturizer, about as well as a spoonful of Crisco. What it can't do is beat a ceramide cream that's been through real testing, and there's no proof it treats acne, eczema, or psoriasis. 

If you're acne-prone, the most proven approach is to stick with an active ingredient like benzoyl peroxide, a retinoid, or salicylic acid, paired with a non-comedogenic moisturizer. Pick one, give it six to eight weeks, and skip the urge to pile on five products at once.

Adam’s Corner
The Last To Believe It

The first time Ben Riley met Arnold, he’d already lost 85 pounds, and he still spoke like a guy who had accomplished nothing.

You’d think 85 pounds would change the way a man carries himself. It hadn’t. Not yet, at least. He shifted around a little, the way you do when you’re working up the nerve, and then he asked Arnold the one question that had been on his mind: What should I do next?

I’ve stood next to Arnold while people asked him things for years now, and most of them want a plan. Sets, reps, and what to eat every three hours. I’m not sure what Ben was after that day, but I imagine part of him wanted somebody to tell him he was allowed to keep going. And then offer a blueprint for how.

But Arnold saw something and understood it immediately. The 85 pounds weren’t a number on a whiteboard somewhere. They were gone. Off his body, and the most powerful sign of all.

He was the proof. But Ben was the last person in the room to believe it.

Arnold didn’t give him a program. He gave him something better. You already know what to do, he told him. You lost the weight, didn’t you? The question was never what comes next. It’s whether you believe you’re the kind of guy who does this now.

Hope Is Not Belief

I’ve spent twenty years standing next to people on the day their lives turn over.

People who dropped 200 pounds. People who came back from cancer, or clawed out of the kind of loss that should have flattened them for good. And almost every one of them, once the dust settles, tries to thank me for it.

I tell them all the same thing, and I mean it every time. It wasn’t me. I handed them some tools, then mostly shut up, listened, and provided support and accountability. They’re the ones who showed up on the mornings when staying in bed would’ve been so much easier. They’re the ones who looked doubt dead in the eye.

And somewhere in all of that, almost without noticing it themselves, they stopped hoping and started believing.

People toss those two words around like they’re the same thing. They’re not even in the same neighborhood.

Hope is wanting something while you keep one hand on the door, already half-writing the apology for when it falls apart. Belief is when you let go of the door.

Ben had hope when he walked up to Arnold. You could hear it in how careful he was with the question. But hope is a flimsy thing, and his was still just standing there, waiting for somebody to tell him it was safe to want more.

I know that spot. I lived in it for years.

If you knew me in high school, you would not recognize me now, and not for the reason you’re thinking. Everybody assumes the transformation I’m proud of is the physical one. It isn’t. Losing the weight, getting strong, that part was almost easy next to the rest of it. The hard part was the voice in my head and how long it dug its heels in about who I was allowed to become.

I was the weakest guy in the gym. The kid pinned under an empty bar. That kid somehow ended up as Arnold’s nutrition and fitness guy, which still makes me laugh. But I didn’t get there by talking myself into it. Believe me, I tried. The voice in my head wasn’t taking suggestions.

So how does it actually change? Not the way the internet keeps trying to sell it to you.

The Argument You Can’t Win

There’s a whole industry built on talking yourself into who you want to be. Stand at the mirror, say the words, repeat the affirmation until it sticks. I am confident. I am disciplined.

It’s not worthless, but for many people, it just doesn’t take. And once you see why, it’s almost funny.

Say you tell yourself I’m disciplined, but some part of you isn’t buying it. Your brain does what brains do. It starts arguing. It goes looking for proof you’re wrong, and it does not have to look hard.

No you’re not. Remember last week? 

The cruel little joke in all of it is that the people who need the affirmation most, the ones already feeling like garbage about themselves, are exactly the ones it blows up on.

Now flip the order around.

You don’t just tell yourself you’re someone who trains. You get in the car in the rain, and you go do it. That’s not a claim anymore. That’s a thing that happened, with a witness. And your mind can argue with a sentence all day long, but it cannot argue with what you actually did this morning.

Nobody prints that on a poster, but it’s the whole game.

You don’t think your way into being a different person. You do the thing first, and your mind comes dragging along behind you, rewriting the story to match the evidence you keep leaving on the floor.

So if you’re facing a closet full of doubt, do something this week you couldn’t do last week, and there is nothing left to debate.

This is why lifting weights is so effective. The bar could not care less how you feel about yourself. It comes off the floor, or it doesn’t. But even when it doesn’t, it’s there waiting for another attempt.

And when it does, one stubborn little fact gets bolted down somewhere it can’t be pried loose: I did that. Me.

Do that enough weeks in a row, and one day you catch the voice in your head telling a different story. Not because you finally won the argument with it. Because you buried it in evidence.

Action is the affirmation you can’t argue with.

It doesn’t have to be a barbell, by the way. It can be a run. A meal you cooked instead of ordered. A conversation you’ve been ducking for a year. Anything that drags a private little wish out into the open and makes it a thing that actually, verifiably happened.

But I keep coming back to the gym, and not for the reason you’d guess.

Arnold and Ketch give me endless grief about the hoodies. I train in long sleeves, sweating through them in a warm gym, and every single time, Arnold looks over and asks the same thing. Adam, aren’t you hot?

I am. That was never the point. I don’t train for my body. That’s a side effect, and a nice one, but it’s not why I’m there.

When I broke my back, the gym was what dragged me back into my own life.
When my wife and I lost pregnancies, it was the one place I could set the grief down for an hour.
When my dad was dying of brain cancer, it gave me sixty minutes a day to feel strong at a time I had nothing left for anybody, including myself.
And when a business I’d bled into for years came apart, the gym is what reminded me that a missed rep is just the thing that happens right before you finally hit the number.

So no, I’m not in there chasing a six-pack. I’m in there to remember where I started, and to prove to myself one more time that the only thing that has ever really stopped me is the guy between my own ears.

Off The Floor

Three years after that nervous question to Arnold, Ben Riley deadlifted 483 pounds.

That’s a lot of weight. But the number is much heavier than the plates stacked on each side of the barbell.

Back when Ben was at his heaviest, when he says he was basically dying, the scale read 479. So the day he pulled 483 off the floor, he lifted more than he weighed. He picked the old version of himself up off the ground and set it back down.

It wasn’t an easy journey, by the way. Plenty of days the bar didn’t budge. A year prior, he stated his goal out loud and missed in front of people. And it happened again last March in the UK. He just kept coming back to it.

And the guy who couldn’t believe he’d lost 85 pounds? That day, he didn’t have to believe a thing. Belief wasn’t required anymore. The bar was off the floor. The argument was over.

You don’t change your mind about who you are by deciding to. You do one thing your old self swore you couldn’t, and then you stand there while it runs out of things to say.

You might not be reading this standing over a 483-pound bar. You’re back where Ben started. 85 pounds in, maybe, or barely off the couch, with a head full of doubt and a sneaking suspicion that this stuff works for other people and not for you.

It works for you, too. You just can’t get there from inside your own head.

That old voice is the hardest thing you will ever try to leave behind. It’s been living in there your whole life. It knows every soft spot you’ve got, and it does not go silent because you asked it to. You can’t win the argument. It always has a comeback.

So stop arguing with it. The arguing is what keeps it breathing.

Go get a fact instead, and create receipts.

One rep. One walk around the block. One morning you got up and did the thing when everything in you was begging you to stay down.

It can’t argue with that one, because it already happened and it’s got your name on it. Then go get another tomorrow. And another.

You stack your wins until the proof stands taller than the doubt, and somewhere in that pile, the old voice finally runs out of things to say.

That’s how you earn it. Not in one heroic afternoon. One undeniable thing at a time, until belief shows up late and out of breath, holding everything you did while you were still waiting on it to arrive.

And the day it does, you’ll catch yourself doing something you haven’t done in years. Looking forward instead of over your shoulder. Turns out there was never much back there worth staring at.

So go. Fail at something today. Get up tomorrow and go fail a little better.

That isn’t the thing standing between you and the person you’re becoming.

That is the person you’re becoming. -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 review our interpretations of the research and ensure 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.

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell