health

Exercise uses energy, burns calories, perhaps maintains a certain level of fitness. Training aims at definite improvement. “The difference between a workout and training,” she writes, “is a smart, predictable increase of intensity.”

The cost of medications, testing, retrieval, and storage involved in egg freezing is just one series of numbers in a process and procedure that feels like a combination of math, alchemy, and luck.

Psychologists increasingly think effortful restraint is not the key to the good life. So what is?

Calorie intake, protein intake, and training volume are by far the most important factors determining your body composition and degree of swole-ness. Add in training intensity and specificity, and you’ve got the major factors determining strength as well.

Everything else is just details. And it’s not that details don’t matter; it’s just that unless you’re an elite-level athlete trying to eek out an extra percentage of performance, they don’t matter very much. In a complex, redundant system, details generally get lost in the noise, and end up having at most a trivial effect.