Today’s intro is a short one, as I have included a video below in the Brain section that I think we’d all benefit from watching.

Consider the 47 seconds I donate back as pocketed time to check this monologue out from Ryan Holiday.

The world, specifically the United States, is an amazing place full of opportunity and a chance to make an impact. Most people you encounter will smile back if you smile at them, most times you step outside you can find something to appreciate, most days you will have a meaningful interaction with another human, etc.. It can be easy to get lost in the blender of modern media and start to draw conclusions that the world isn’t this. That when drinking from the firehose of social media and talking heads, one can be faulted into believing many different narratives.

Life is experienced in the real world. Encourage you this week to spend more time there, being a light for others around you.

Brain - An Important Message from Ryan Holiday

Body - Heart Rate Zones - The Secret to Running Smarter not Harder

I am guilty of making general assumptions about things - especially when they come to fitness. After a certain period experiencing and training with different terminology, it becomes an almost second language, one that can be easy to not catch yourself using in environments where that language is one-sided. This is why sometimes I’m sure some of you have read / seen my content around heart rate zones and felt like I was the guy walking into a coffee shop in Kansas City and asking how much for an Americano, in Arabic. Today, I attempt to Rosetta Stone you into understanding HR zones and their importance.

Heart rate zones are like speed limits for your body—they tell you how hard your engine (aka your heart) is working and help you train more efficiently without burning out.

There are five heart rate zones that when tracked, allow you a look under your body’s hood, showing where and how it should be performing based on the perceived effort. Those zones are as follows:

Zone 1: The “I Could Do This All Day” Zone (50-60% of Max HR) 

This is your warm-up, cool-down, and casual "jog with a friend while complaining about work" pace. It’s so easy that it barely feels like exercise—but it’s still improving circulation and recovery.

Zone 2: The “Sweet Spot” Zone (60-70% of Max HR) 

The endurance sweet spot. You can hold a conversation without gasping for air, and this is where most of your long, slow runs should live. It’s the foundation of endurance training, teaching your body to burn fat efficiently and build stamina.

Zone 3: The “Comfortably Hard” Zone (70-80% of Max HR) 

This is where the pace grabs your attention. You can still talk, but it’s more like short sentences instead of long monologues. It’s good for building aerobic capacity, but spend too much time here, and you’ll end up exhausted instead of improving.

Zone 4: The “Gasping” Zone (80-90% of Max HR) 

This is threshold training—the edge of your comfort zone. You’re working hard, breathing heavy, and questioning training all together. Training here helps you run faster for longer, but it’s not sustainable for too long.

Zone 5: The “Send Help” Zone (90-100% of Max HR) 

Max effort. Sprinting for your life. The last few seconds of a race. You can barely speak, and your legs are screaming. This zone builds speed and power but should be used in short bursts unless you enjoy suffering.

Heart rate zones have become a central focus in endurance sports, specifically over the last decade. This is primarily because as data, science, and training protocols have evolved, world-class trainers and runners have discovered what truly works to not only help you improve your speed but also your endurance capability to cover long distances.

The modern formula is 70-80% of a person’s weekly runs / cardio efforts should be spent at zone 2. This zone is easy to recover from and trains your body to utilize fat instead of carbs for fuel. To get faster still, one must practice running fast - which is why 1 - 2 runs a week are going to be spent doing Zone 3 and Zone 4 training, in shorter intervals, allowing your body to recover, but getting your legs used to turning over quicker.

Take my advice and use the calculator below to calculate your max heart rate, and become incredibly diligent about dropping your ego and dropping your pace into that Zone 2 area.

Heart Rate Zone Calculator

Book - “The Changing World Order” by Ray Dalio

The turd blender of news and political strife this week jogged my memory of a book I read some time at the beginning of last year, particularly one passage that seemed relevant to this moment in time.

Ray Dalio is a renowned investor and hedge fund manager who has consistently outperformed the market over time. In 2021, he dropped a book titled “The Changing World Order” which was a reflection and peek inside how Ray studies history and trends to identify opportunities and times to scale back in the modern market / investing arena.

History, as we all know, repeats itself. In the business and investing world, this is more true than most other realms. This book is packed full of interesting insights pulled from comparing times in the past to the modern era, but one particular chapter stood out. The Superset will never become a place for political banter, but I think the premise of this idea is interesting enough to pique people’s interest to pick up this book themselves.

The segment was this - Ray studied the rise and fall of all of the great empires throughout history and tried to identify commonalities between both their ascent and crash. He ended up with the following rubric, which was almost line-for-line in similarity for the Dutch Empire, British Empire, Roman Empire, and Chinese Empire. It’s almost eerie. The formula for how empires rise and fall is as follows below.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but my sole opinion piece is this - we in the United States are in this “societal division” stage, and we can each play our part in helping bring the sides together rather than stoke the flame.

1. The Rise

   1. A nation starts with strong leadership, innovation, and productivity.

   2. Education, infrastructure, and economic output improve, leading to a competitive edge.

   3. The nation becomes a global trading power, accumulating wealth and military strength.

   4. The country’s currency gains international trust and becomes a reserve currency.

2. The Peak

   1. Wealth, military, and cultural influence reach their highest points.

   2. Strong institutions maintain stability, and citizens enjoy prosperity.

   3. Excessive optimism leads to increased debt, financial speculation, and overspending.

3. The Decline

   1. High debt levels, economic stagnation, and inflation weaken the financial system.

   2. Internal divisions grow as wealth gaps widen, causing social unrest.

   3. The country faces external challenges from rising competitors.

   4. The reserve currency starts losing its dominance.

4. The Fall

   1. Economic collapse, political instability, and social conflict intensify.

   2. The government struggles to maintain order, often resorting to money printing and capital controls.

   3. A major war or geopolitical shift cements the nation’s decline.

   4. A new rising power emerges to take its place.

The demise of all empires in history has come in the hands of a similar rubric. This read isn’t for everyone, and in no ways am I connecting it to some potential downfall of the US - but if you are interested in history, investing, and culture, it’s one that you will be glad you studied. It’s fascinating to see how large of a role citizens play over the course of these empires.