Honey, use those legs. If he dies he dies

Here’s everything that came out in the last month:

• a 30% discount on She’s A Beast subscriptions, which will only be available through Sunday! Comes with a ~free~ copy of LIFTOFF, too
• 50% off LIFTOFF for the noncommittal, also ends Sunday! That’s only $10 for 12 weeks of programming, including spreadsheets and instructional videos
• The new She’s A Beast store with stickers, shirts, a hoodie, and a very smart little hat. 20% off the store was also added as a subscriber benefit✨
• New subscribers to the free newsletter now get the first 17 pages of the LIFTOFF e-book, so you can get a feel for the ethos; tell your friends!
• A follow-along workout video for Phase One of LIFTOFF, which will hopefully make it even easier to get started. Put it this way: the way LIFTOFF works, you are not supposed to work out MORE than the 14 minutes this video runs, three times a week. Refreshing, isn’t it?
• Q&A stories on the @couchtobarbell Instagram (DM your questions any time!)
• Images of Natalie Portman’s Thor arms

Whew!

What subscribers will be receiving this week: After I wrote “How to eat like a big beautiful horse,” a bunch of wonderful people from our community have asked me how to FEEL like a big beautiful horse. This seems to be of particular interest to folks trying out LIFTOFF, because it’s not a weight loss program where you diet. In our lockstep body positivity times, this is very nearly a taboo question, which is why I save the answer I’ll be sending out Sunday only for the people I know who can handle it: my dear paid subscribers.

Subscriptions are still 30% off, and the offer expires May 1; this is the LAST newsletter reminder you’ll be getting!

Eat

What the Fitness Industry Doesn’t Understand: Great piece from Amanda Mull on the dearth, or even just unnecessary obscurity, of beginner content. The internet and Instagram are littered with content that is, at best, targeted at but poorly tailored for the actual beginner; the real beginner stuff barely exists and can be very difficult to find. This is confusing when something like 80% of people don’t meet the suggested minimum amount of physical activity, and 39% don’t work out at all. I have a LOT more theories about why this is and how it could be fixed that I will get into someday.

~THREE Discord Picks of the Week: Cardigans brought into the lives of all our new members these training programs for crushing a watermelon between your thighs. And also: a nice, simple, unjudgmental flowchart for taking care of yourself when you feel like shit. And also:

“Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you

could be cured with a hot bath...

The voice never

panders, offers no five-year plan,

no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy

white beard hooked over ears.

It is small and fond and local.”~

Let’s hear from Terry Adams, the oldest athlete to qualify for the X Games (who, to be clear, is all of 38): "

“So much of the sport is reliant on your core strength and balance. I had a lot of natural ability and strength when I was in my 20s, but lost it when I was going into my 30s. I was also picking up these small back injuries. That’s when I got with my coaches to develop some routines that would really address that issue...These days I do core on Tuesdays and Thursdays, strength on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” Way to go, Terry Adams!

Hearing good things about how camp The Northman is. This interview with Alexander Skarsgard’s trainer was overall very refreshing; he covers using big compound movements, his take on training splits is not entirely unhinged (whether you can benefit from more than 3 full-body training days a week or absolutely MUST split things up is definitely highly individual/a matter of debate/dependent on training history/maybe all three; not a cut and dry rule like he says). As an aspiring delt-haver, I appreciate that the training involved “a little bit of an extra focus on shoulders.” Same.

The mostly untold story of how the sports bra conquered the world and tore its inventors apart.

An interview with a weight-neutral dietitian on body liberation.

A 63-year old runner changed the way I think about regret.

Me after two drinks.

“I have to do lots of squats, for my butt.”

Drink

Wellness is dead; long live the martini.

Why aren’t there any fat Peloton instructors? There’s clearly a mandate for instructors not to talk about weight or beach bodies or any such thing. But the instructor selection speaks volumes.

The most expensive Pilates class is $75. When you see something like this, it’s very important to take a deep breath, remind yourself the person in question is doing wealth extraction from the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world, and just keep moving, knowing you are missing nothing.

What lipo-etched abs look like on a pregnant person. Buried lede: Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima has lipo-etched abs. At the risk of being extreme, don’t believe anything you see in the whole world.

The algorithmically-generated Etsy t-shirt called and it wants its joke back.

selfcarewithwall (and an increasing number of things) are just an imitation of the iconic @afffirmations account, without the keen sense of irony.

youngstrength

A post shared by Jonathan Young (@youngstrength)

Rest

I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once a few weeks ago and neglected to talk about it. I thought it was so genius, to the point that some of its wackiness felt like it was flinching at letting its central elements run (like, literally a better Matrix-style mechanic than The Matrix). To that end, this piece was great.

If you, like me, are sometimes white-knuckling every climate change headline and attempting a “it’s okay, we just need to make it to electric cars” cope, we’re going to have to try a lot, a lot, a lot harder.

An interview with Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.

At the suggestion of my friend Kate (and because the Discord was chatting it up!) I started watching this season of Survivor, which features the extremely muscular Jonathan. He turns every challenge into the Crossfit Games, in an awe-inspiring way, to the point of sometimes literally carrying his entire team on his back. Kate looked up his Instagram and he really does eat 18 eggs in a sitting. The game design in this season is also just really excellent, and it has so many esoteric side-plays that Jeff Probst is giving “Your second-nerdiest friend brought Munchkin to the group vacation weekend and is trying to teach 8 zooted people how to play it.” Maryanne is a delight.

That’s all for today, but not for this week! Stay tuned for that big beautiful horse email Sunday. Love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—