If you pinned me down and asked me upon pain of humiliation and death what I’m good at—like actually competent at—I’d say, “My ability to see patterns and relationships.” In this miraculous age of information overload, sorting through the noise of advertising, gimmickry, quick fixes, and fads taxes even what I believe to be my meager self-professed super-skill. And I’ve had training and experience—a lot of it. Thinking about restoring and optimizing the human condition is an all-out obsession for both me and those coaches and teachers in what my brilliant business partner and wife, Juliet, calls my “nerd cabal.” So to say that even I sometimes find myself struggling to keep up with the fire hose of often conflicting and always varied health and wellness information out there makes me appreciate the potential Gordian knot that our friends and neighbors face when it comes to taking control over their long-term health.
On the face of it, the simple complexity of the human being is downright overwhelming. The human brain alone is the most sophisticated and complex structure in the known universe. Add that “machine” to the self-healing, tolerant, extraordinary, anti-fragile human body, and it’s hard to know where to even begin. Oh, and we are complex psycho-emotional beings to boot! What I can tell you with 100 percent certainty is that a few pieces of information apply to you:
1. You have no idea of the depth of your physical capacities or resilience.
2. The resting state of the human is pain-free.
3. Your body is designed to function well over a lifetime that could easily last a hundred years.
I’ve spent decades in the trenches of the battle for human performance, and I believe unabashedly in these three statements. And what I’ve come also to believe is that you don’t need a fancy coach, sleep tracker, protein shake, supplement, or degree in bio-hacking to benefit from what is your human birthright and inheritance. On the contrary, you simply need a different framework to see through all the noise and interference. Fortunately for you, you’re holding it in your hands.
We have a saying around our house: “Show me you can be consistent before you are heroic.” Consistency isn’t sexy. Informed simplicity will never be “Insta-famous.” One of the issues of being a modern human is that it’s hard for us to appreciate how long a hundred years really is. Advanced medicine makes it much more likely that, barring catastrophe, most of us will make it to a significantly advanced age. The question this naturally begets is, “How capable do I want to be when I get there?” The flip side to this impending amortality is that who we are and what we do today dictates the experience on the back half of our lives.
Yes, our human physiology is remarkably tolerant, but no, it won’t put up with our crap forever. It’s confusing, I know. I have Olympic gold medalist friends who could eat a whole bag of little chocolate donuts, sneak a cigarette, pull an all-nighter, and still run rings around me on my best day. But I don’t use this as an excuse to believe that my lifestyle doesn’t matter. On the contrary, I take this extraordinary built-in human capacity as a sign that I don’t have to get it right immediately, and that I can afford to not be perfect. It’s never too late to make positive change. At what age again does your body stop healing? Oh, that’s right. Never. The magic of this book is that Aaron has given us a template that we can begin to lay over our lives today, and one that will continue to work long, long into the future.
If you are obsessed with pattern recognition and understanding how things relate, then at some point you have to ask, “What is essential here?” If you talk to any of the greatest minds alive today about what would improve any output of human function and overall quality of life, most would agree that the lessons contained in these pages are the place to start. Most of my “deep nerd” friends would concur that the point of studying sports and human performance is so that we can apply lessons learned to the rest of our “mere mortal” selves and lives. In a not-insignificant twist of ironic fate, we are coming to realize that the first principles of being human aren’t really that complicated or even that sexy: sleep, play, get out in sunlight, eat whole food, foster community, be active in nature, and, perhaps most important, move. Wash, rinse, repeat for the rest of your life.
You see, we tend to treat our health and wellness like a finite game. Such games have clear beginnings and ends, and the rules are clear to everyone. Infinite games, on the other hand, can’t ever be “won.” The rules are unclear (stress, disease, injury, life, children, work), and we aren’t really sure when the game will end. The only way to win is to keep playing, and to play as well as you are able today. Tomorrow, you’ll have a chance to play better. Now, if only you had some kind of primer, some sort of guidebook to make it easier to play your own infinite life game a little better, with more joy and less confusion. Aaron knows your body is extraordinary and he wants you to play beautifully. The game is on.
Kelly Starrett, DPT