Why Too Much Rest Can Slow A Healing Muscle

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Today’s Health Upgrade

Mindset
How To Retain More Information

You read articles, listen to podcasts, and subscribe to a few newsletters (like this one). You genuinely enjoy most of what you consume, but you struggle to recall most of it. 

The problem usually isn't your focus, or even how much you take in. It's how you approach learning and retention. 

The learning methods that feel most productive, like rereading and highlighting, are usually the weakest options.

Consuming information isn't the same as producing or processing it. Memory builds when you pull the information back out and rebuild it, which takes effort. That’s the exact effort rereading lets you skip. 

Researchers call it desirable difficulty, and if you want more of what you consume to stick, three methods can help.

Retrieval practice is testing yourself. Close the source and try to say what it said. It has the deepest research behind it, and one finding flips how most people learn. Instead of just going over the information, it’s about testing the relevance and understanding of the new information.

Elaboration is asking why. Rather than accept that something's true, explain the reasoning to yourself and connect it to what you already know. In one review, that one habit worked about as well as a private tutor.

Generation is the smallest and easiest approach. After you hear or read something new, create a question about it and answer it yourself, even if it's rough. This helps you start to build the wiring in your brain that makes info stick.

A good self-quiz is retrieval and generation at once. Explain your answer afterward, and you've added elaboration. Space those quizzes across days instead of one sitting, and you get the strongest version of all.

The next time you read or listen to something you don’t want to forget, take a little extra time after. Processing, questioning, and applying information make it most valuable. That’s how you become smarter and take knowledge with you. 

Together with Shortform
The Right Reps For Greater Intelligence

You don't keep what you read. You keep what you rebuild.

Every idea you own got there the same way. You find something interesting, read, listen, or watch, and then hope it sticks when you’re focused. But, as you just learned, that’s not how memory works. 

If you want to get smarter, wiser, or more analytical, and become better at turning information into wisdom, you need an extra step or support to retain more. 

Articles, books, and podcasts give you ideas and move on. Retrieving, questioning, and explaining are left to you, and most of the time, it never happens.

That's why we use Shortform.

Shortform makes in-depth guides to books, articles, and podcasts. Real people write them, chapter by chapter, with commentary that connects each book's ideas to others you've read. That cross-linking is elaboration, the science suggests is where the magic happens, and it’s built into the Shortform experience.

And Shortform offers interactive exercises to support the process that makes information stick. 

After each set of ideas, the guide has you reflect, apply, and answer in your own words. That's retrieval and generation at once, the two moves that make information stick. You're learning it, not just consuming it.

There's a 1-page summary for a quick pass and a full guide when you want to go deep, so you can space it across days the way the science suggests.

APC readers can try it for free here.

You already invest your time in learning. This is how more of it stays with you.

Fact Or Fiction
Hurt a Muscle? Resting It Might Be the Slow Way Back

Earlier this week, we wrote about collagen and how it doesn't appear to help you recover from muscle strains.

Many of you asked whether rest is the best approach.

After a muscle strain, waiting until the pain disappears before doing anything might feel sensible.

But studies suggest that waiting may lengthen recovery, and the fastest way to recover includes movement.

In a randomized trial, researchers studied recreational athletes with severe strains. Everyone completed the same 12-week rehab program, beginning with gentle stretching, then isometrics (contracting the muscle without moving the joint, like pressing your heel into the floor and holding it), and progressing to heavier loads. 

The experiment was simple: Half started two days after the injury. The others started nine days after.

That extra week of rest slowed recovery and added roughly three weeks to the return timeline.

The early group returned to sports pain-free after about 63 days, compared with 83 days for those who waited. The faster return didn't suggest greater reinjury risk either, although the study was too small to settle that question on its own. 

While you don't want to overextend an injury, the researchers suspect that the connective tissue surrounding an injured muscle loses capacity quickly during inactivity and takes longer to rebuild.

And it's not just one study. In two randomized trials of elite athletes with hamstring strains, rehab programs that began loading the injured muscle within about five days, focusing on exercises that strengthen it as it lengthens, got soccer players back in 28 days instead of 51 and sprinters and jumpers back in 49 days instead of 86. 

More recent trials found that loading the muscle early didn't increase reinjury risk, whether that meant adding harder exercises on day one of rehab (Vermeulen, 2022) or working through mild discomfort instead of waiting for it to disappear.

These were serious strains in athletes, so don't assume every pulled hamstring will heal three weeks faster. The point is that when you're hurt, you should seek help because complete rest may delay recovery, while carefully loading the muscle within a few days can help it regain strength sooner.

And there is an important difference. A strained muscle is one thing, but something like a torn tendon requires a different approach, which is why an assessment (rather than rest or ignoring the issue) is the best way to help you get out of pain and back to your normal activities.

Adam’s Corner 
The Trouble With Living In The Moment

Picture your future.

Go further out than next week. It could be five years, ten, or even twenty.

What do you see?

Many will picture a dream scenario. The forever home. Your kids, grown and happy, calling because they want to, not because they have to. The job that made all those early mornings worth it. A relaxing retirement in your favorite city.

Those are good things to picture.

But most of the future isn't the dream. It's the stuff you already know is coming. The birthday dinners and the holiday table. The first day of school, and eventually the last one. The traditions that show up on schedule whether you plan for them or not.

We almost take those moments for granted. They feel inevitable, so they feel safe.

And if you know a moment is coming, it can feel like you have a rare kind of power over it.

But I recently saw my future from a different perspective. And I realized maybe there are certain things destined for the future that you shouldn't wait for.

“All in good time” isn’t bad advice. And patience is a virtue.

But sometimes, the wrong timing is the right move.

The Comfort of Later

"Later" is one of the most comforting words in the dictionary. It feels like control. nd it creates an inevitability we like to believe, even if it’s an illusion.

When you say “later,” you aren't saying no. You're telling yourself you'll decide on your own terms, once conditions improve and the calendar opens up. It lets you keep the thing without paying for it yet.

For years, my best defense against bad decisions and bold risks was a simple question.

What's the worst that can happen?

I've borrowed heavily from Tim Ferriss's fear-setting exercise, where you write the worst-case scenario out in detail, then figure out how you'd prevent it or repair the damage. I've used it before big business decisions and in plenty of moments when the best answer is to bet on myself, but the risk isn’t just table stakes.

It works because most fear is an illusion. Once you write the monster down, it usually shrinks to something you can handle.

But over the past few months, I've noticed a blind spot, and it lives in me more than in the framework.

Fear-setting isn’t wrong, bad, or useless. Just the opposite. It does what it’s supposed to do.

But the limitation is that it’s easy not to apply fear-setting to some of the most important “later” moments.

Because the “what’s the worst that can happen?” question tends to show up when something feels scary.

However, the moments you expect are ordinary, so they don’t trigger deeper thought. A tradition that happens every year doesn't set off an alarm. Neither does a milestone that's been on the calendar since the day your kid was born.

Fear is a great alarm for risk. It's not the best for the assumptions.

Even When I Could See The Future, I Missed The Present

I've written about my dad's final years before, and I'm not going to retell them again. But I didn’t realize something important until two weeks ago.

When my dad was fighting cancer, I was obsessed with being present. I wanted every visit to count. I worried about what I'd say and do while he was still here, and whether I'd asked the questions I would regret skipping.

I was all in on now. And I thought focusing on the moment would help with the sadness and emptiness when he was gone.

But, surprisingly, it left me vulnerable because I could’ve done a better job planning for the moments that come later.

Two weeks ago, I was at synagogue celebrating the Jewish high holidays with my family. My sons were next to me on each side, both playing with my tallit, the prayer shawl earned when you become a Bar Mitzvah around age 13.

My grandfather took me to buy mine, as he did my three other brothers. It’s a family tradition, and you keep the garment through adolescence and into adulthood.

When I put on my tallit, I still remember shopping for it in Chicago and choosing the black-and-gold one because of my lifelong love of the University of Colorado.

In a couple of years, my oldest will have his Bar Mitzvah, and a couple of years later his brother will follow. It’ll be another decade before my daughter has her Bat Mitzvah.

But it's been on the calendar, in a sense, since the day each of them was born.

My dad won’t get to continue that tradition. And in that moment, I realized I didn’t need to wait until my boys turned 13. I could’ve created that moment and saved it for the future.

He could have chosen something with each child, knowing he wouldn't be there to see them wear it. But he would have the memory. And so would my children.

It's the kind of gift that outlives the giver on purpose.

That never happened because, as much as it pains me to admit it, I didn’t think through that scenario.

I was so focused on what to say when we were together that I didn’t think enough about the rooms and moments he would no longer fill.

Now, he'll never get that moment. Neither will I. And most importantly, neither will my kids.

I understand it’s impossible to anticipate every moment. And that’s not the goal. But I think I took my presence a little too far.

I know we'll create something else to honor my dad. I'll find a way to bring him into that day. But I wish I'd done it with him.

The Someday List

There's an easy, dumbed-down version of this lesson that can miss the bigger opportunity. 

This is not another “Life is short, book the trip, let the kids stay up, stop being so responsible.”

Not because it’s never true. But because this line of thinking could easily cause you to question too much.

Do we take the big vacation this year, or wait until our daughter is old enough to remember it? Do I let the boys stay up on a school night because something is happening that won't happen again?

Being present and being reckless are different. 

Being present does not mean YOLO at every moment. Bedtimes still matter. Budgets still matter. Some things really should wait, and a well-timed no is often the most loving thing a parent can offer.

The problem isn't later. The problem is later on autopilot.

It made me add a second question next to the one I already trust.

“What's the worst that can happen?” protects me from fear.

“Who is this for, and will they still be here when later arrives?” protects me from comfort.

I hope it helps me see more of the future I shouldn’t take for granted.

Some moments have a person attached, and people don't hold their place in line. Parents get older. Kids outgrow wanting you in the doorway. The version of your life where that’s possible has an expiration date, and nobody prints it on the box.

I've started looking at my own someday list differently. I don't audit the whole thing. I don’t need to overthink or over-engineer life. I want it to happen.

And I look for the moments with a name next to them, and I wonder if I can move those up and make them happen now, rather than assuming they will happen later.

Everyone has some version of this. And it doesn’t require a big occasion, either. The occasion is the excuse to do something you were allowed to do all along.

Some of the best moments of your life haven't happened yet, and that’s part of the gift of aging. But a few of them don’t need to wait for the future. -AB

-Adam Bornstein is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Arnold’s Pump Club

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell