Doug Larson

Congrats 👏
Hard work paying off my friend 🥋
⬛️⬛️⬛️🟥🟥⬛️

New Zealand photo dump

An incredible trip with my brother Mike to celebrate his 40th birthday, hiking the Milford Track in Fiordland National Park in New Zealand. It’s one of the wettest places on earth, and we expected rain 100% of the time (which is part of the experience as it results in many hundreds of temporary waterfalls falling from 5,000-foot cliffs on all sides for the duration of the four-day hike). However, we were incredibly fortunate and had unrealistically good weather for the entire duration of the trip. It’s truly one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Overall an extraordinary time seeing my brother. He lives in Melbourne, Australia and in-person time is hard to come by, especially with just the two of us, so this was particularly special to me. Happy birthday brother 🥳

Phenomenal experience watching my friend go all in on training jiu jitsu; going from no experience as a white belt just a few short years ago to a highly competitive brown belt today. Happy for you brother 🤘

On the occasion that I volunteer to coach jiu jitsu I find it to be an incredibly meaningful and fulfilling part of my day. The intellectual side has always been just as interesting to me as a physical side and, the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve given time and attention to the academic side of the sport. There may be a time in the future where coaching jiu jitsu on a more regular basis will be a good fit for my goals and stage of life; that day is not today, but will likely enjoy it when the time comes 🥋

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Many times on I’ve mentioned how great I think it would be if I could easily measure, not just my body fat percentage, but also, my muscle mass percentage. Knowing the absolute value of each, as well as how each changes over time, would be incredibly useful for understanding my current state as well as tracking progress.

Getting body fat percentage measured is relatively easy. You can do it at a gym, a clinic, or with a cheap device at home. There’s a range of quality and accuracy etc but overall it’s cheap, easy and widely available. Everyone understands that too much body fat is bad for your health, in part, because we have well established benchmarks for healthy vs unhealthy. At 15%... 35%...

What about Muscle Mass Percentage? What’s yours? 30%? 40%? What’s “good”? What’s ideal for physical health? What puts you in the top 95% of 42 year old men? There’s certainly been some amount of research done to answer these types of questions but overall the answers aren’t yet widely known.

There hasn’t historically been a convenient way to measure muscle mass directly. Fat Free Mass Index calculations can be useful but are still just an approximation. So you can lift, eat well, and try to optimize your training, but you still don’t know the exact quantity of your actual muscle mass or the true degree to which it is going up, going down (let alone exactly which individual muscles have hypertrophied and/or atrophied).

All that said, I was very excited to see a few months back that was cleared by the FDA to deliver body composition metrics, including muscle mass percentage, as a part of their existing MRI based muscle analytics reporting. There’s finally a way to measure muscle directly, actual muscle volume, not an estimate!

This is HUGE for athletes (especially physique athletes; bodybuilders etc) as well as the longevity crowd and anyone that wants to know “if they have enough” muscle for optimum long term health.

⬛️⬛️⬛️🟥🟥⬛️ 🥋 Congrats 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Mount St Helens Summit 🏔️☀️

Team Half Dome 😃

☀️☀️☀️

Half Dome ✅