Welcome back to the Daily Dumbbell, where we break down complex topics into more bite sized pieces. Educational sliders if you will. Before you ask, the secret sauce is Fast & Furious puns.

Today, we thought about skipping our normal routine. Because who needs Friday Finds when you have Family? Right?

But then we remembered, Fonda trumps Family. So we delivered the goods as per usual.

Let’s dive in!

Fonda Friday:
On Perfection

Perfection, with its elusive allure, can trap us in a perpetual cycle of self-doubt and inaction. It whispers sweet promises of flawlessness, but in reality, it only serves as a paralyzing coping mechanism.

The pursuit of perfection becomes a formidable barrier on our path to progress, casting shadows of inadequacy. It shackles us with the fear of failure and masks the upside of our own unique strengths.

But let us tell you a secret: perfection isn't a strategy; it's an illusion. The true challenge lies not in chasing an unattainable mirage, but in embracing our whole selves, embracing the messy, imperfect, and beautifully flawed aspects that make us human.

Friends, don't succumb to the allure of perfection. Break free from its grip, and embark on a journey to become whole, embracing your quirks, strengths, and vulnerabilities along the way. In that wholeness, you'll discover the power to grow, evolve, and achieve everything you’re striving for.

Friday Finds:

An Article:

The 7 most common ways runners injure themselves. Don’t worry, we’ll list em out for you here:

1. Inconsistent Training

2. Relying on Mileage and Pace

3. Running Too Fast Too Often

4. Not Listening To Your Body

5. Poor Decision-Making About Pain

6. Skipping Warm-ups & Cool-downs

7. Relying Solely on Bodyweight Strength Training

These can be lumped into 3 main groups:

1. Poor Programming: You’re running too fast or too often, or you’re relying too much on mileage and pace and not listening to your body. Which…

2. Not listening to your body. 

3. Only Running: Make sure you’re warming up, cooling down, and cross training. If you’re just pounding out miles and that’s it? A recipe for injury. Running and doing push-ups isn’t going to get it done.

A Statistic:

Do we harp on this a little too much? Probably. But big yikes.

Remember the study from last week that showed Sucralose to be toxic to DNA? You may have seen headlines like:

You could be forgiven if these headlines freaked you out. If Fox News or the New York Post ran with it you might roll your eyes, but News Medical and Chemistry World? Those seem legit right?

But here’s the rub, the study showed that exposing cells to 500ug/ml of Sucralose-6-Acetate can lead to a mild amount of genotoxic damage. But there’s a problem with that…

• Sucralose-6-Acetate isn’t in the foods we eat. Our body turns less than 10% of the Sucralose we ingest into that compound.

We’re going to spare you the math here and just cut to the chase. You’d have to drink 50,000 cans of diet coke in less than 2 hours to reach that level.

Friends, we can’t think of a nicer way to say it; this study was stupid. And because the media doesn’t have the scientific literacy needed (or the integrity to be honest instead of chasing clicks) the public is now, once again, worse off.

This Study suggests that the improved life satisfaction scores among people who wake up earlier in the morning can be at least partly explained by a correlation.

With religion!

More devoutly religious people tend to wake up earlier in the day as it is seen as more pious. Those people also tend to report a higher satisfaction/happiness with life.

As Jesus always said: “Nothing good happens after 2am.”

Food for thought!

Happy Friday! Hope you learned something this week and crushed all of your goals. We’ll see you next week for more fun in the sun.