Fast Exercise – by Dr. Michael Mosley & Peta Bee
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We’ve written before about the benefits of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), but there’s more to say than we can fit in a short article!
Dr. Michael Mosley, who hates exercise but knows his stuff when it comes to the benefits, teamed up with Peta Bee, who loves exercise and is a science journalist with degrees in sports science and nutrition, to bring us this book.
In it, we learn a lot about:
- the science of HIIT
- what makes it so different from most kinds of exercise
- exactly what benefits one can expect
…in a very detailed clinical fashion (while still remaining very readable).
By “very detailed clinical fashion”, here we mean “one minute of this kind of exercise this many times per week over this period of time will give this many extra healthy life-years”, for example, along with lots of research to back numbers, and explanations of the mechanisms of action (e.g. reducing inflammatory biomarkers of aging, increasing cellular apoptosis, improving cardiometabolic stats for reduced CVD risk, and many things)
There’s also time/space given over to exactly what to do and how to do it, giving enough options to suit personal tastes/circumstances.
Bottom line: if you’d like to make your exercise work a lot harder for you while you spend a lot less time working out, then this book will help you do just that!
Click here to check out Fast Exercise, and enjoy the benefits!
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Fascia Hopping: The Powerful Over-50 Exercise You’re Probably Not Doing
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A 62-year-old man reported feeling 10 years younger after just 8 days of fascia hopping. Now, anecdote ≠ data, but it seems worth investigating:
Let’s hop straight to it
Fascia is the web-like layer of connective tissue that divides your muscles and organs from each other. It simultaneously holds some stuff in place, and allows other parts to glide over each other with minimal friction.
At least, that’s what it’s supposed to do.
Like any body part, it can go wrong. And like any body part, it needs maintenance. In fascia’s case, the maintenance is to keep it slippy where it should be slippy and grippy where it should be grippy.
Here’s an exercise series for that, as described/shown in the video:
Prepping the fascia:
- Align posture: head lifted, shoulders down.
- Stretch fascia in all directions (up-down, left-right).
- Maintain a “fascia wetsuit” concept—taut but not unduly tense.
Springboard feet setup:
- Stand on balls of feet, heels slightly raised.
- Bounce gently to engage fascia elasticity.
“Fascia Strength & Power” dance:
- Move hips in a figure-eight motion.
- Keep shoulders relaxed, allowing movement to flow from the center.
Fascia hopping:
- Keep heels fixed, bounce lightly.
- Progress to small hops if possible.
- Maintain a smooth rhythm to activate elasticity.
Do these for 2 minutes daily for 7 days. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated exercise session; you can do it while you’re waiting for the water to boil in the kitchen, or things like that.
For more on these exercises plus visual demonstrations (it’s very simple), enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Fascia: Why (And How) You Should Take Care Of Yours
Take care!
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Deskbound – by Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza
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We’ve all heard that “sitting is the new smoking”, and whether or not that’s an exaggeration (the jury’s out), one thing that is clear is that sitting is very bad.
Popular advice is “here’s how to sit with good posture and stretch your neck sometimes”… but that advice tends to come from companies that pay people to sit for a long time. They might not be the a very unbiased source.
Starrett and Cordoza offer better. After one opening chapter covering the multifarious ways sitting ruins our health, the rest of the book is all advice, covering:
- The principles of how the body is supposed to be
- The most important movements that we should be doing
- A dynamic workstation setup
- This is great, because “get a standing desk” tends to present more questions than answers, and can cause as much harm as good if done wrong
- The authors also cover how to progressively cut down on sitting, rather than try to go cold-turkey.
- They also recognize that not everyone can stand at all, and…
- Optimizing the sitting position, for when we must sit
- Exercises to maintain our general mobility and compensate about as well as we can for the body-unfriendly nature of modern life.
The book is mostly explanations, so at 682 pages, you can imagine it’s not just “get up, lazybones!”. Rather, things are explained in such detail (and with many high-quality medical diagrams) so that we can truly understand them.
Most of us have gone through life knowing we should have “better posture” and “move more”… but without the details, that can be hard to execute correctly, and worse, we can even sabotage our bodies unknowingly with incorrect form.
This book straightens all that out very comprehensively, and we highly recommend it.
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Vaginal Dryness In Menopause | Causes & Solutions
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Vaginal dryness is mostly* caused by declining estrogen during menopause, leading to thinner tissues, less lubrication, more pain during penetrative sex, and increased susceptibility to UTIs and infections due to pH changes and reduced “friendly” bacteria.
*There are also other causes and contributing factors; we’ll discuss those too!
Dr. Jennifer Roelands recommends 6 things that we can do about it:
Let’s get down to it
Aside from declining estrogen levels, other contributing factors include smoking, medications like many antihistamines and many antidepressants, as well as using scented soaps or douches which disrupt vaginal pH, the microbiome down there, and tissue health. So it’s good to avoid those where possible, and really, the only ones that may be unavoidable are the medications; everything else, it is best to absolutely skip entirely.
Aside from those things to avoid, here are 6 things to consider doing:
- Lubricants: offer temporary relief during penetrative sex but don’t restore moisture; avoid scented or chemical-laden products (counterintuitively, silicon-based is much better than water-based in this regard).
- Moisturizers: daily use products like Vag of Honor (with hyaluronic acid) help retain moisture and improve tissue health.
- Estrogen therapy: includes vaginal creams (e.g. Estrace), tablets (e.g. Vagifem), rings (e.g. Estring), or compounded formulas tailored to individual needs.
- Vaginal DHEA: improves tissue thickness and may enhance libido by converting to local estrogen and acting on androgen receptors.
- Probiotics: especially strains that support vaginal flora and pH; options with D-mannose and cranberry also support urinary health.
- Vulvar balms: for external dryness or conditions like lichen sclerosus; use simple, scent-free products like Vaseline or even coconut oil.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
“Why Does It Hurt When I Have Sex?” (And What To Do About It)
Take care!
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How To Plan For The Unplannable
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How To Always Follow Through
❝Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference:
Now my socks are wet.❞~ with apologies to Robert Frost
The thing is, much like a different Robert wrote, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”, and when we have a plan and the unexpected occurs, we often find ourselves in a position of “well then, now what?”
This goes for New Year’s Resolutions that lasted until around January the 4th, and it goes for “xyz in a month” plans of diet, exercise, or so forth.
We’ve written before on bolstering flagging motivation when all is as expected but we just need an extra boost:
How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!
…but what about when the unexpected happens?
First rule: wear a belt and suspenders
Not literally, unless that’s your thing. But you might have heard this phrase from the business world, and it applies to healthful practices too:
If your primary plan fails, you need a second one already in place.
In business, we see this as “business continuity management”. For example, your writer here, I have backups for every important piece of tech I own, Internet connections from two different companies in case one goes down, and if there’s a power cut, I have everything accessible and sync’d on a fully-charged tablet so I can complete my work there if necessary. And yes, I have low-tech coffee-brewing equipment too.
In health, we should be as serious. We all learned back in 2020 that grocery stores and supply chains can fail; how do we eat healthily when all that is on sale is an assortment of random odds and ends? The answer, as we now know because hindsight really is 2020 in this case, is to keep a well-stocked pantry of healthy things with a long shelf life. Also a good stock of whatever supplements we take, and medicines, and water. And maintain them and rotate the stock!
And what of exercise? We must not rely on gyms, we can use and enjoy them sure, but we should have at least one good go-to routine for which we need nothing more than a bit of floorspace at home.
If you’re unsure where to start with that one, we strongly recommend this book that we reviewed recently:
Science of Pilates: Understand the Anatomy and Physiology to Perfect Your Practice – by Tracy Ward
Second rule: troubleshoot up front
With any given intended diet or exercise regime or other endeavor, we must ask ourselves: what could prevent me from doing this? Set a timer for at least 10 minutes, and write down as many things as possible. Then plan for those.
You can read a bit more about some of this here, the below article was written about facing depression and anxiety, but if you can enact your plans when unmotivated and fearful, then you will surely be able to enact them when not, so this information is good anyway:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
Third rule: don’t err the same way twice
We all screw up sometimes. To err is, indeed, human. So to errantly eat the wrong food, or do so at the wrong time, or miss a day’s exercise session etc, these things happen.
Just, don’t let it happen twice.
Once is an outlier; twice is starting to look like a pattern.
How To Break Out Of Cycles Of Self-Sabotage, And Stop Making The Same Mistakes
Enjoy!
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Elderhood – by Dr. Louise Aronson
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Where does “middle age” end, and “old age” begin? By the United States’ CDC’s categorization, human life involves:
- 17 stages of childhood, deemed 0–18
- 5 stages of adulthood, deemed 18–60
- 1 stage of elderhood, deemed 60+
Isn’t there something missing here? Do we just fall off some sort of conveyor belt on our sixtieth birthdays, into one big bucket marked “old”?
Yesterday you were 59 and enjoying your middle age; today you have, apparently, the same medical factors and care needs as a 114-year-old.
Dr. Louise Aronson, a geriatrician, notes however that medical science tends to underestimate the differences found in more advanced old age, and underresearch them. That elders consume half of a country’s medicines, but are not required to be included in clinical trials. That side effects not only are often different than for younger adults, but also can cause symptoms that are then dismissed as “Oh she’s just old”.
She explores, mostly through personal career anecdotes, the well-intentioned disregard that is frequently given by the medical profession, and—importantly—how we might overcome that, as individuals and as a society.
Bottom line: if you are over the age of 60, love someone over the age of 60, this is a book for you. Similarly if you and/or they plan to live past the age of 60, this is also a book for you.
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How does the hair-loss drug finasteride work? Can it affect my mental health?
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For many men the gradual thinning of hair is about more than just their appearance. Finasteride, a drug widely prescribed for the treatment of male pattern baldness has been used effectively for many years for this deeply personal problem.
Yet, behind its use are growing concerns about its link to the development of depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts.
There is now critical discussion among both users and health-care professionals about the potential hazards associated with its continued use.
So how does the drug work? And what does the evidence say about the risk of developing a mental health problem?
agrobacter/Getty How does finasteride work?
Finasteride is used to treat androgenetic alopecia, also known as male pattern baldness. It works to regrow hair and prevent the further loss of hair.
One of the key causes of pattern baldness is the production of a hormone called dihydrotestosterone which the body makes from testosterone. When it binds to the follicles of hairs, it initiates a process called hair follicle miniaturisation. This is where the growth cycle of the hair becomes progressively shorter, resulting in thinner and weaker hair.
Finasteride works by blocking the enzyme that converts testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. By blocking the enzyme, dihydrotestosterone concentrations can be reduced by around 60–70% for the majority of men.
Finasteride was first approved in the late 1990s as a prescription-only medicine and is taken as a daily 1 milligram oral tablet. Medications available at a higher 5 mg daily dose are not used for baldness, but as a treatment for non-cancerous prostate enlargement.
This medication is not indicated for women, even though they can also have this type of hair loss.
How can it impact your mental health?
Changes in mental health are not listed as an established side effect in Australian guidance given to health-care professionals.
Based on clinical trials, the most common effects include:
- decreased libido
- erectile dysfunction
- reduced semen production.
The guidance also describes an increased risk of prostate cancer and a potential risk for breast cancer. Yes, men can get breast cancer too.
While initial clinical trials conducted to obtain approval for the drug didn’t demonstrate mental health concerns, monitoring of patients using the drug has since indicated a potential increased risk of depression and suicidal thoughts. But as this is based on patients self-reporting symptoms, according to the guidance there is no definitive link.
However, in May 2025, the European Medicines Agency safety committee stated suicidal thoughts was a confirmed side effect of finasteride. The European Union also advises patients that finasteride can cause a depressed mood and depression.
Similarly, in a warning about compounded finasteride, the United States Food and Drug Administration stated in April 2025 that topical formulations of the drug has similar side effects to the oral version. These include depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
What should you do if it is affecting your mental health?
If you notice changes in your mental health while taking the drug, try not to handle significant mood changes by yourself. If you’re feeling unusually low, anxious or emotionally unstable, check in with a doctor so they can help you figure out whether finasteride is contributing to your mood and what support you may need.
If the symptoms are mild, they may suggest pausing finasteride to see whether things improve, or continuing with additional mental health support. If your symptoms are more severe, stopping the medication and getting prompt medical review may be appropriate.
If you are taking finasteride and are worried about its side effects, it is safe to stop immediately. Most side effects ease once the medication is out of your system, although a small number of people have reported symptoms that persist.
If you do decide to stop, this will mean that your hormone levels will gradually return to baseline and the hair growth seen with the drug will be lost over time.
If finasteride is not the right fit for you, there is another evidence-based alternative.
Topical minoxidil is a first-line treatment that can be used on its own or with other treatments and is available from pharmacies over the counter. It only works while it’s being used and may irritate the scalp, but its effectiveness is well-established and widely recommended.
While depression and anxiety are associated with minoxidil, the incidence is much lower because of their topical application.
There is also a medication called dutasteride. However, as it works in a similar way to finasteride, it may also increase your risk of developing mental health problems. So it is best to avoid dutasteride if finasteride is not suitable for you.
If this story has raised any issues for you, please contact one of the services below:
- Lifeline: 13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au
- Suicide Call Back Service (ages 15+): 1300 659 467 or suicidecallbackservice.org.au
Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University and Jasmine Lee, Pharmacist and PhD Candidate, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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