We’ve all heard the claims, “Fluent in 3 Months!”, “Russian in Two Weeks!”, “Overnight Mandarin Chinese”, “15-Minute Arabic!”, “Instant Italian!”.

We see the same in the world of health and fitness too. So how does this one’s claim of “five minutes’ physical fitness” hold up?

Well, it is 5 minutes per day. And indeed, the author writes:

❝The total time [to do these exercises], then, is only one minute and thirty seconds. This series I call one round. When it has been completed, execute another complete round. You should find the exercises easier to do the second time. Executed this way, the exercsies will prove very effective, though they take only three minutes in all. After you have leaned back into the final position, you must remain in that posture for one minute. That brings the total time to four minutes. Even when [some small additions] are added, it takes only five minutes at most.❞

The exercises themselves are from makkō-hō, which is a kind of Japanese dynamic yoga. They involve repetitions of (mostly) moving stretches with good form, and are excellent for mobility and general health, keeping us supple and robust as we get older.

The text descriptions are clear, as are the diagrams and photos. The language is a little dated, as this book was written in the 1970s, but the techniques themselves are timeless.

Bottom line: consider it a 5-minute anti-aging regimen. And, as Nagai says, “the person who cannot find 5 minutes out of 24 hours, was never truly interested in their health”.

Click here to check out Makkō-Hō and schedule your five minutes!

There are a lot of books that advise “Unplug once in a while, and go outside”. But it doesn’t really take a book to convey that, does it? And it just leaves all the digital catching-up once we get back. Surely there must be a better way?

Rather than relying on a “digital detox”, Dr. Newport offers principles to apply to our digital lives, that allow us to reap the benefits of modern information technology without being obeisant to it.

The book’s greatest strength lies in that; having clear guidelines that can be applied to cut out the extra weight of digital media that has simply snuck in because of The Almighty Algorithm—and even tips on how to engage more mindfully with that if we still want to, for example using social media only in a web browser rather than on our phones, so that we can ringfence the time for it rather than having it spill into every spare moment.

In the category of criticism, the book sometimes lacks a little awareness when it comes to assumptions about the reader and the reader’s social circles; that (for example) nobody has any disabilities and everyone lives in the same town. But for most people most of the time, the advices will stand, and the exceptions can be managed by the reader neatly enough.

Stylistically, the book is not very minimalist, but this is not inconsistent with the advice of the book, if you’re curling up in the armchair with a physical copy, or a single-purpose ereader device.

Bottom line: if you’d like to streamline your use of digital media, but don’t want to lose out on the value it brings you, this book provides an excellent template

Click here to check out Digital Minimalism, and choose focused life in a noisy world!