Your 2-Day Workout

Welcome back to One Day Better, where I share small steps that can help make today just a little better than yesterday. This week, I’m writing about:

• The essential 2-day workout!

• Why your kids don’t gross you out

• Joyscrolling!

Try this 2-day workout

Here’s the smartest piece of health advice I read this month:

“I wish everyone would lift something moderately heavy at least twice per week.”
— Stuart Phillips, exercise science researcher at McMaster University

As someone who has long struggled to make strength training a consistent part of my routine, I couldn’t get this advice out of my head after first reading it in the Washington Post. It sounded too simple to be real. I called Dr. Phillips to learn more, and our conversation was packed with genuinely useful, practical advice. Here’s what we talked about.

What should I be lifting?

Dr. Phillips’ answer is basically: almost anything, as long as it creates real resistance. If you don’t want to go to a gym or you’re not a “weight person,” he says you can use resistance bands, household items like soup cans, or your own body weight. Just. Lift. Something.

What does “moderately heavy” actually mean?

Moderately heavy means you have to make an effort to lift it, but not so much that you can’t do three sets of 10 reps. On an effort scale of one to 10, you should be aiming for about an 8. If it’s easy to get to 30 reps, whatever you’re lifting isn’t heavy enough or you need to do more reps.You’ll figure it out. Just think 8 for effort, and be honest with yourself.

Just two days?

Dr. Phillips said the biggest health payoff happens when you take someone who does nothing or very little and get them to do something. That’s where the curve is steepest. One day is better than zero days. Two days are better than one. But beyond that, the gains become more marginal. (Don’t let that stop you from doing three days of strength work if you want to.)

Think “Push, Pull, Squat.”

I find strength training so intimidating but Dr. Phillips breaks it down into three easy movement patterns: push, pull, squat. A push is any motion where you press something away from you — pushups are a great example — you can do the real kind, modified or a wall pushup (my favorite). A pull is the opposite: pulling something toward you, which you can do with resistance bands or during a pull-up or a rowing move. For your lower body, think squat — down and up. You don’t have to drop it low (or as Dr. Phillips said, no need for “ass to the grass”). Even going from standing to a partial squat can engage your muscles. Dr. Phillips said to work within your limitations. He’s helped plenty of older adults with knee replacements, hip replacements and painful joints do a version of squats.

How long should my lifting workout be?

His practical prescription is 20 to 30 minutes, twice a week. Try 10 reps followed by a one-to two-minute rest between sets and you should be pretty tired after about 30 reps. If you’re not, you should be lifting a heavier weight or shortening the rest period -- whatever it takes to get to an 8 effort. This means, do some combination of push, pull, squat until you hit 20 to 30 minutes.

Just keep showing up.

Your effort doesn’t have to be Herculean, the weight doesn’t need to be extreme, but you need to be consistent about whatever you do, said Dr. Phillips. Start slow -- maybe a 6 out of 10 the first time, maybe do only one set. Then build toward that steady 8 out of 10 effort for 20 to 30 minutes. Over time, there should be some form of progression. Add more weight, add another set or shorten the rest. The goal is consistency.

The bottom line of all of this, said Dr. Phillips, is to move more and sit less. A recent Lancet study used data from wearable devices worn by more than 40,000 people. It found that very small increases in daily movement and small decreases in daily sitting could prevent a meaningful share of premature deaths. Adding moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for just 5 minutes a day was associated with preventing 6 to 10% of deaths. Sitting less also helped. Reducing daily sedentary time by 30 minutes is linked to preventing roughly 3 to 7% of deaths.

“The biggest reduction in risk happens when you move someone who does nothing into doing something,” said Dr. Phillips. “If you had to rank things that people could do that would ensure that they age a little bit better than they are right now, physical activity would be the top of my pyramid.”

Why parents don’t get grossed out

I was amused by a new study that I’m sure every parent can relate to. In the early months of parenthood, a dirty diaper can seem like a biohazard. Disgust, after all, exists for a reason: it’s one of our most ancient defenses against disease, hard-wired to make us recoil from things that could make us sick. And unlike fear or anxiety, disgust is famously stubborn. Psychologists often describe it as “cognitively impenetrable” — you can’t reason your way out of feeling disgusted by something icky, and repeated exposure usually doesn’t help. Once gross, always gross. Which is why a new paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology is so interesting.

Most evidence for “getting used to” gross things comes from professions like medicine or caregiving. But it’s likely that people who are less squeamish self-select into those jobs, and the most disgust-sensitive quit early. So researchers decided to study parenthood as a kind of natural experiment to test whether long-term disgust habituation is even possible. Parenting guarantees relentless exposure to disgusting things, but it’s not a “job” that self selects for less squeamish workers.

The scientists found that parents don’t just endure diapers. Over time, their disgust response genuinely changes. They measured this by asking participants to complete a “disgust scale” questionnaire. Then they measured participants’ reaction to disgusting images, using a measure called “dwell time” -- how long they looked at an image or avoided it. Sure enough, parents spent much less time avoiding disgusting images than non-parents. Importantly, this effect appeared only after children began weaning, not during early infancy, suggesting that being a parent for a while changes how much disgust you can tolerate.

Parents of weaned children showed almost no avoidance of dirty diapers, and remarkably, that desensitization spilled over to other forms of bodily grossness that had nothing to do with babies. In other words, this wasn’t just about learning to cope with your own child’s mess. The brain itself appeared to recalibrate its disgust threshold after sustained exposure.

This means that disgust, a reaction once thought to be nearly immune to habituation turns out to be flexible — given enough time, repetition and diapers. The takeaway: parenthood toughens you up and retrains your brain to survive conditions that would have previously required hazmat gear.

Joy scroll with me!

Here’s my weekly roundup of good news and interesting links to counteract the gloom.

Take a longevity course. I have to give credit to fitness writer Gretchen Reynolds at the Washington Post for the tip from Dr. Phillips noted above. I spotted it in the Longevity Checklist newsletter course, created by Gretchen and nutrition writer Anahad O’Connor. Click on the link to sign up!

Watch a whodunit distraction. I’ve just started watching “The Residence,” about Cordelia Cupp, an eccentric detective, who arrives at the White House in order to solve a murder which happened during a state dinner. I love it! It’s streaming on Netflix. Here’s the NYT review.

Make Sheet Pan Bimbimbap. This is my favorite NYT cooking recipe. So good. Make the recipe. Watch Eric Kim make this on YouTube. Read Eric’s great pandemic story about cooking with his mother.

If you’ve had a bad day. Watch this dog doing head flops to the tune of “Bad Day.” Watch here.

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Every week, the One Day Better newsletter celebrates the power of small steps. If you enjoyed reading, please share it with a friend. This newsletter is free and reader-supported. If you’d like to support my work, you can make a contribution here.

Tara Parker-Pope, MPH is an Emmy Award–winning journalist who shared in the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. She has an MPH from the Yale School of Public Health and is the Chief Content Officer at Thrive Global. This newsletter represents her personal views. Learn more at taraparkerpope.com.