12 Secrets To A Healthier Life.

You've probably already watched a ton of videos about how to get in shape in 2026, but they all probably left you feeling pretty overwhelmed. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the 12 non-negotiables that truly matter if you want to look back at this year and see real progress. Over my career, I've tried some pretty wild stuff, from getting the blood sucked out of my body and passed through a filter and then back in, to young human donor plasma, to follistatin gene therapy, you name it. But after being a guinea pig for over 20 years and trying just about everything you can do to the human body, I can tell you this: the basics are what still matter most. And stick around to the end because I've got one simple tool I want to share with you that can make putting some of this into practice a whole lot easier. So let's get into it. Walk 10,000 to 20,000 steps per day, a lot more than a lot of people get, or at least think they're getting, on as many days of the week as you possibly can. Walking helps your brain, your circulation, and your blood sugar. Walking lowers stress and cortisol. Walking gives your eyes a break from screens. It strengthens tendons and ligaments. Forward motion can help calm the brain during stress. Now walking outside in nature is best. Walking is easy to pair with breath, sunlight, heat, cold, and even some quiet spiritual time. Get your body a little bit uncomfortably hot, preferably 3 to 5 days a week, such as in a sauna. Now, you don't need much. You can get away with 15 to 30 minutes. Regular sweating or a sauna practice can improve endurance, stress resilience, the production of heat shock proteins, blood sugar management, and brain health. Sauna can actually help to support overall longevity and lower disease risk. Especially from things like dementia and Alzheimer's. It's one of the best ways to help the body sweat out toxins. It's easy to stack with something like breathwork and even better when followed by cold exposure, which leads me to my next point. Woo, yeah, that's cold. Whether it's a cold shower, cold bath, cold plunge, cryotherapy chamber, or any other method, try to be uncomfortably cold for at least a few minutes a day. Even 30 seconds can do the trick. Cold is a healthy stressor that builds resilience and supports your immune system. In some people, it may also help with fat loss, especially when done fasted in the morning. It's a trick I've used for a long time to stay lean. Cold exposure can also improve sleep, hormone balance, and recovery. You don't need fancy equipment. Cold shower works. I recommend you try to get uncomfortably cold just for a brief period of time every single day. I call this thermal stress, especially when paired with heat. Next is strength. Or lifting heavy stuff. Doing a full body strength training workout 2 to 3 times per week is fundamental in my own protocol. I push my muscles pretty close to failure, whether I'm using a heavyweight, a lightweight, or just my body weight. Lifting heavy or lifting in general helps nearly every system in your body. Strength training is one of the best things you can do for healthy aging. It helps fight muscle loss as you get older, helps support your energy metabolism of things like glucose, and overall longevity. It makes you, as I like to say, harder to kill. Breathwork is the next fundamental practice in my own protocol. You can focus on your breath during meditation, breathwork, prayer, sauna practice, but I like to get some form of targeted breathwork for anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes in the morning. And occasionally I'll do a longer breathwork practice like 15, 20, 30 minutes, or Every once in a while, I'll even do a 60 to 90-minute breathwork session. This can help with energy, sleep, stress, oxygenation, and overall well-being. Breathing through your nose is also a strategy that you can use, especially during exercise or a walk, to help with things like nitric oxide and carbon dioxide balance. Breathwork is pretty much free, requires no fancy equipment. It can be done anywhere. It pairs pretty well with spiritual practices like prayer, meditation, and also movements. Like walking or workouts, I recommend you do some type of breathwork practice or dial in some kind of connection to your breath at least once every single day. And while you're breathing, you might as well focus on the quality of your air. The quality of the air that you breathe matters a lot. Bad air has been shown to affect cognitive performance, your lung health, your cardiovascular health, and overall risk of mortality. Clean indoor air is especially important since most people spend so much time inside. Now, this is simple to do. You can look into something like a standalone or a built-in HEPA air filtration, such as in your HVAC system, low toxin cleaning products, and checking occasionally in your home or your office space for mold. Now, outdoor air matters too, but you should still get outside and move. And as a matter of fact, the benefits of moving and exercise outweigh any of the detrimental effects of something like air pollution. But if you want to start simple, just get a good standalone HEPA air filtration wherever you spend the most time, or in areas where air quality is especially important, such as the kitchen or the bedroom. Next up is your light exposure. Now, sunlight is a master regulator of sleep and circadian rhythmicity— how your body acts during the day, the hormones it produces, your wakefulness. Your sleep quality at night, a lot of that is due to good quality light during the day. In contrast, too much LED light, artificial light, backlit screens can all throw off your circadian rhythm, lead to a little bit of eye fatigue, retinal irritation, and that can lead to things like poor sleep, brain fog, and a lot of other health issues. So getting outside in natural light and also lighting your rooms with as much natural light and open curtains as possible helps to reset your body clock. Morning light is particularly important. I personally try to get a minimum of 30 to 60 minutes of outdoor sunlight each day, early in the day, and on as many days as possible, a lot more than that, while simultaneously reducing the amount of artificial indoor light that I use. Not all electricity is bad, and I don't think you got to be a Luddite and move to a pristine Himalayan mountaintop. But when it comes to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, wearables, devices, smart homes, we are surrounded by constant bombarding from EMF and electrical exposure from a lot of different modern devices that are close to our bodies and close to our heads. I believe that too much of this can affect your sleep, your energy, your mood, and your overall health. So I'm pretty careful in my own personal environment. Turn off the Wi-Fi when I don't need it on my computer, my phone, or even in my home. Pretty careful with excessive use of things like Bluetooth earbuds. I'm constantly paying attention to whether or not I need to have a device on or need to have electromagnetic radiation near my body. Now, if you're intentional with your use of phones, wearables, your Wi-Fi router, and other smart devices, you can at least turn things off when you don't need to be using them. Hardwiring is best. At the very least, make your bedroom a dark, quiet, cold cave that's as EMF-free as possible, because sleep is a perfect time for your nervous system to repair and recover from the electrical soup that we live in all day long. Next up is your water quality. Now, drinking filtered water is important, and also the water container that you're drinking out of is important. So what I'm talking about is a strategy such as reverse osmosis filtration or carbon block filtration. You can do this as a whole home system. You can do it as a countertop or an under-the-sink system. When you're traveling or when you're on the go, you can use a stainless steel water bottle or a glass water bottle instead of a plastic bottle. So what I like to do is whole house home filtration. When I travel, glass or stainless steel. And if you're just starting from scratch, simple countertop filtration system that's reverse osmosis, or easy, pretty inexpensive under-the-sink filtration is a good start to make sure that you're not getting a lot of the nasty stuff that you find in water and the plastics and other endocrine disrupting chemicals that you get from the average store-bought plastic water. Middle fret 2, ring fret 3, and pinky. Now this kind of flies under the radar, but our bodies are tuned to interact with sound. This means that listening to good, positive, uplifting music, playing a musical instrument like a drum, a guitar, a piano, looking into things like sound healing, vibrational frequencies, tuning forks, and a lot of the things that you might consider to be a little bit woo, but that in fact interact with the body in a really interesting way, is low-hanging fruit for improving overall health. I personally play my guitar in the evening for about 10 to 20 minutes each day. I often listen to a positive uplifting song when I wake up. I use vibrational and acoustic therapy devices on everything from sore muscles to a fatigued brain. If you haven't looked into the power of sound, then start to investigate things like binaural beats, sound healing tools, and playing a musical instrument. This can really help round out a lot of the other important fundamentals that I've talked about so far in this video. Of course, no discussion of health will be complete without discussing what you're fueling your body with. You should definitely audit your kitchen, your refrigerator to limit as many packaged foods as possible. When you open your refrigerator or walk into your pantry, you should recognize a lot of the same things that your great-grandparents would have used as food. Uh, when you're shopping at the grocery store, you can shop around the perimeter of the grocery store where there are a lot of the real foods like fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, dairy, etc. Whereas when you duck down the aisles, that's where you start to get into a lot of the packaged, processed, and ultra-processed stuff. So eat simple, eat clean, eat close to earth, and eat as naturally as you can, and your body will thank you. You don't have to follow a special trendy diet, but you can also throw in things like fasting, being grateful for a meal, and mindful eating, which is just basically paying attention to how you're eating, how fast you're eating, and what you're eating. Finally, it's interesting that Harvard's longest-running study on overall longevity revealed that the quality of the relationships and love in your life is what really matters most. And I consider this to be deeply tied to a spiritual practice. Your connection to God and your connection to others are what truly matters if you consider the fact that our body is going to fade, but the soul inside of us is what can keep on shining for a really long time. I personally, when I wake up in the morning, prioritize my relationship with God, prayer, through reading or listening to scripture, and then later on by connecting to my family using a lot of these same tools. So for you, whether it's a meditation practice, a gratitude practice, prayer, working on your relationships, or anything else that enhances your spiritual connection, overall spiritual health is the most important thing that you can focus on and definitely the icing on the cake for everything else that I've talked about in this video. So we've covered a lot of essentials in this video. I'm proud to say this video is actually brought to you by another essential tool that's a staple in my own routine. It's called IMA. IMA is a daily essential supplement that's jam-packed with everything that your body needs in one fell swoop. We're talking about resveratrol, quercetin, prebiotics, postbiotics, probiotics, and a host of of over 90 other vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and micronutrients that your body relies upon for health throughout the entire year. So of everything that I've talked about, you can take IMA, stack it on top of all of this stuff, and have the confidence that your nutritional bases are well covered every single day. Simple powder, you pour it into water, that's it. Tastes incredible. So you can start your stack today at IMA's website. All right, now it's your turn. Drop a comment below and let me know what you think the most important fundamental essential is in your own health and longevity practice, whether something that I've already talked about or something that I may have missed. I want to hear your thoughts. I read them all.