THE PERFORMANCE BRIEF
The science, ideas, people, places and discoveries worth knowing this week.
There is more information about how to live well than any of us could reasonably keep up with.
Every week brings new research, treatments, technologies, products, people, places and conversations competing for our attention. Some of it could meaningfully change how we understand our health and our lives. Some of it is interesting but still early. Some of it probably does not deserve nearly as much attention as it receives.
The Performance Brief is our weekly edit of what we think is genuinely worth knowing.
Not everything. Just the things that made us stop, think, look again or want to understand more.
Here is what caught our attention this week.
THE BIG IDEA
"A better life should still feel like a life."
We started 63° this week with a deceptively basic question. What does it actually mean to live better?
It is a question that becomes more interesting the longer you sit with it.
We have become remarkably good at measuring individual parts of our lives. We can count our steps, score our sleep, monitor our heart rate, analyse our recovery, measure glucose and track an expanding number of signals from our bodies. Used well, some of these tools can be extraordinarily useful.
But the ability to measure more does not necessarily mean we understand ourselves better.
Health matters because of what it allows us to do with our lives. It allows us to move, think, work, love, create, travel, contribute, play, care for people, remain independent and experience the world.
There is a point at which the pursuit of wellbeing can itself become another performance. Another set of numbers to improve. Another routine to perfect. Another thing we are somehow failing at.
Perhaps that misses the point.
The purpose of living better is not to become excellent at managing ourselves. It is to have more capacity for life itself.
That is an idea we suspect we will return to often.
SCIENCE
"After a sleepless night, could movement help your memory?"
This caught our attention because almost everyone knows what it feels like to face a full day after nowhere near enough sleep.
Researchers led by McGill University studied 54 healthy young adults who remained awake for 30 consecutive hours. Afterwards, some completed 20 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous cycling, some took a 90-minute nap and others did neither. When their memory was tested three days later, the people who had exercised or napped remembered significantly more of the images they had been shown than those in the control group. The difference was about 22 per cent.
What makes the study particularly interesting is that exercise and sleep appeared to help in different ways. Brain recordings suggested that the nap helped restore the brain's capacity to take in new information, while exercise appeared to help a sleep-deprived brain use the resources it still had more efficiently. The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
There is an obvious temptation to turn that finding into a life hack. Slept badly? Exercise instead.
That is not what the research says.
The study was small, involved healthy young adults and examined an extreme laboratory situation involving 30 hours without sleep. The researchers themselves are clear that exercise does not replace sleep. What they have identified is something subtler and potentially useful. A short period of movement may help protect some aspects of cognitive performance when adequate sleep simply has not been possible.
Think of a doctor coming off a long shift, a new parent who has been awake through the night, someone travelling across time zones or a person working in an environment where fatigue cannot always be avoided. Those are the circumstances in which this line of research becomes particularly interesting.
The practical takeaway for now is less dramatic.
If you are sleep-deprived, sleep is still the thing your body needs. But when sleep cannot happen immediately, a little movement may be more useful than we realised.
WORTH KNOWING
"Not all movement may affect the brain in the same way."
“Move more” sounds like one of the least controversial pieces of health advice there is.
A major new analysis suggests the story may be more complicated.
Researchers brought together 74 studies involving more than 4.2 million people across 30 countries and examined physical activity across different parts of daily life. People who were highly active during their leisure time had a 24 per cent lower risk of dementia than those who were least active. Physical activity at work, however, was associated with a higher risk.
That does not mean having a physically demanding job causes dementia.
The research is observational, which means it can identify relationships but cannot establish that one thing caused another. People who spend their days doing physical labour can differ from people exercising recreationally in countless other ways, including income, education, occupational exposures, stress, recovery, pollution and access to healthcare.
Still, the finding raises an important question about how casually we sometimes talk about movement.
Forty-five minutes of tennis after a day at a desk is not the same experience as eight hours of physically demanding labour. A morning run chosen for pleasure is not physiologically or socially identical to walking long distances because there is no other way to get somewhere.
Both involve movement. The context surrounding that movement is entirely different.
This difference becomes particularly relevant when health advice travels around the world. Recommendations built around sedentary populations with access to leisure time do not necessarily describe the lives of people whose days already involve significant physical work.
Perhaps the more useful question is not simply how much we move, but what kind of movement fills our days and what else is happening around it.
That is a much more interesting conversation.
THE EDIT
"A wearable that watches glucose and ketones at the same time"
The wearable-health conversation has spent years circling around steps, sleep scores, heart rate and recovery.
This week offered a glimpse of something more consequential.
The US Food and Drug Administration authorised Abbott's Libre Duo 10 Day, a wearable designed for people with diabetes that continuously monitors glucose and ketone levels together. It is the first wearable authorised in the United States to continuously monitor ketones and the first system to combine continuous glucose and ketone monitoring in a single sensor.
Ketones matter here because rising levels can signal diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA, a serious complication that can develop when the body does not have enough insulin. Conventional blood or urine ketone tests capture a reading at a particular moment. The new system is designed to monitor levels continuously and alert the wearer when ketones are rising.
The significance goes beyond one device.
Much of the consumer wearable boom has been about giving healthy people more information about themselves. Increasingly, some of the most interesting developments are happening elsewhere, in technologies designed to help people manage disease, recognise risk earlier and give clinicians and patients information that might actually change what happens next.
More data is not necessarily better health technology. Better information, delivered when it can make a difference, might be.
That is the part we will be watching.
PRACTICE
"Find movement you want to come back to."
There is a strange assumption in fitness culture that exercise only really counts when we have had to force ourselves through it.
Discipline matters. There will always be mornings when staying in bed sounds better than getting up to train, runs that feel harder than expected and sessions we complete because we said we would rather than because we particularly wanted to.
But movement does not have to be something we spend our entire lives enduring for our own good.
For one person it might be tennis. For another, dancing, swimming, football, strength training, walking, cycling, Pilates or running with friends. Some people love the gym. Others may never love it, and there is no particular virtue in pretending otherwise.
The most sophisticated training programme in the world has limited value if you dislike it enough to abandon it.
There is also something worth preserving in movement that has nothing to do with calories, body composition or longevity. Movement can be play. It can give us competition, friendship, skill, confidence, time outdoors and the simple pleasure of discovering what our bodies can do.
So rather than asking only what exercise you should be doing, try another question.
What kind of movement makes you want to come back?
There may be something useful in the answer.
PLACE
"The court."
For our first Place, we could have chosen a spa, a beautiful hotel or somewhere that announces itself as a wellness destination.
Instead, we kept coming back to the court.
There is something about recreational sport that brings several parts of living better together without needing to call any of them wellness. You move, learn, compete and concentrate. You spend time outside. You meet people and laugh with them. Sometimes you win. Frequently, someone humbles you.
And then you come back.
You can see something interesting taking shape across Lagos. Tennis is part of it, but so are running, padel and the communities forming around them. Shight Running Club has built a community around running, connection and consistency, while Wimly has been creating more opportunities for people to meet around tennis through clinics and doubles events. Alongside long-established institutions such as Lagos Lawn Tennis Club, they point to something larger than any single sport or venue.
Movement is becoming social infrastructure.
The court, track or running route can be part training ground, part meeting place and part escape from the rest of the day. You may arrive because you want to get fitter and discover that what keeps bringing you back is also the people, the competition, the ritual or simply having somewhere to be.
That is what interests us.
Not whether Lagos has enough places carrying the word wellness, but whether the city is developing more ways for people to move, connect and build healthier lives as part of ordinary life.
For this week, our Place is Lagos Lawn Tennis Club in Onikan. But our eye is really on the culture growing around it.
Sometimes the places that help us live better don't look like wellness spaces at all.
PERSON
"Marc Roig is interested in what movement can do for the brain."
The sleep study brought us to Marc Roig, a professor at McGill University's School of Physical and Occupational Therapy and senior author of the research.
What interested us was not simply the finding. It was the question behind it.
What happens when the obvious health advice, getting more sleep, is temporarily impossible?
For people working long shifts in healthcare, transportation, emergency response and other demanding environments, fatigue is not always something that can be solved by recommending better sleep hygiene. Roig and his colleagues are investigating whether something as accessible as a short period of exercise could help preserve cognitive function when sleep has already been lost.
It is early work, and the answer is not yet a prescription.
But we like research that begins with the reality of how people actually live.
Marc Roig is someone we will be watching.
WORTH READING
"The physical activity paradox is worth understanding."
Of everything we read this week, the new research examining physical activity and dementia left us with one of the most interesting questions.
We have spent years hearing that every movement counts. Broadly, that remains a useful message, particularly in a world where many people spend much of their day sitting.
But the emerging research around the so-called physical activity paradox asks us to consider something more nuanced. Is physical activity chosen for recreation equivalent to physical activity demanded by work? And if the outcomes differ, what else about those circumstances might explain why?
The new analysis cannot answer all of those questions. It does, however, make them harder to ignore.
For us, that is enough reason to keep reading.
ONE QUESTION
"What would you like more of this week?"
Not what you need to fix. Not what habit you have failed to maintain. Not what metric needs improving.
Just this.
What would you genuinely like more of?
Perhaps it is more energy, more sleep, more movement, more time, more focus, more people, more quiet, more play, more purpose or simply more room to think. Perhaps it is something entirely different.
There is no correct answer, and it may change next week.
But occasionally asking what we want more of can tell us something useful about the life we are trying to build.
See you next Sunday.
63°
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