Strength training to solve back pain, and meaning - The Next, #76

Originally by Justin Mares — read at the source

Hi there, and welcome to The Next - my take on health, wellness, and company building.

I previously started leading bone broth brand Kettle & Fire, learned more about our how our food and healthcare systems incentivize illness, and wanted to make a dent on this problem. I’m now working onTruemed, which allows qualified individuals to use HSA/FSA funds on lifestyle interventions that can treat, reverse, or prevent chronic disease. Previously, I worked in tech and had no experience in CPG, DTC, or any other 3-letter industries.

If you missed past episodes, I recommend checking outThe Great American Poisoning, my take on the chronic disease crisis. Otherwise, let’s dive in!

🆕 What’s new

I’ve often joked that the reward for ambition is getting your midlife crisis a decade early.

As an ambitious guy, I “unlocked” mine in my early 30s, ahead of schedule 👊🎉. Nor am I alone: a huge number of my ambitious friends have hit the same wall, the one where more money, more success, more notoriety stops being the obvious answer.

Of course, I like being happy. But happiness is mostly about getting what you want. As far as I can tell, meaning is different. It comes from giving, or focusing on something that matters outside of yourself. It’s surprisingly easy to build a happy life that feels somewhat empty. And it’s also possible to have a life drowning in meaning that is, moment to moment, kind of miserable.

I recently had my 1st kid. Post-baby, I’ve realized just how bad the marketing is around this whole parenting thing. Everyone can relate to being busier, having less sleep, having more stress. I’ll tell people I had a baby recently, and people will laugh and ask how I’m sleeping, if the baby is fussy, if they’re struggling to sleep, on and on and on.

To be fair, the answer to all of this is yes. I am sleeping less, I am more tired, my life is definitely different than pre-baby. I get why the whole ordeal sounds fairly rough to an outsider. But it’s easily been one of the best things in my life.

I’m very conscious of being the guy who has 1 child and has figured life out 🧘. But in my experience, parenting so far has been both a huge happiness and meaning unlock. I find myself laughing more during my regular day than I was before. Suddenly, watching another creature eat a blueberry, sneeze and smile, or laugh at something is just the best thing in the world.

For me, I spent the first 30ish years of my life getting very good at wanting things. Now I feel like I’m beginning to want less and appreciate more. Having a baby has helped tremendously with that.

💪 Health stuff

Millions and millions of Americans struggle with chronic pain. It’s estimated that Americans spend $130B+ on back pain each year, and globally 619M people experienced back pain in 2020.

If you account for all chronic pain, those numbers get even worse! Something like 20% of all adults have chronic pain, and nearly 10% of them have debilitating chronic issues. The cost to all of this is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention a lot more sad faces wincing around the world 😞.

I’ve recently been diving into what I think may be the single most underrated thing in health. It’s called Functional Range Conditioning (FRC), and it’s essentially strength training, but for your joints.

Last year, my younger brother tweaked his back while doing jiu jitsu. A few days later, he woke up, totally unable to move. Embarrassingly, he even had to call older bro (aka me) to send someone to the house with advil, while his face flooded with tears.

He’d had some light back pain for months, but nothing he thought too much about (he was 21). And yet, after his injury, he was looking at a fairly long recovery time, PT, the whole bit. It all sounded terrible.

I sent him to literally one session with my FRC guy Brian, and after an hour (and a week or so of consistently doing Brian’s stretches), my brother is fine. Any time his back flares up, he does a few days of FRC stretches and is back to normal.

I had a similar experience with some light low back pain from too much computer use that became a consistent nagging. And after a few weeks of consistent FRC practice, it was gone again.

I suspect a lot of people are walking around with some version of chronic pain. Maybe it’s a hip that pinches during a squat or a lower back that gets cranky after a flight. It’s not agonizing enough to fix, so we just quietly accept it as the tax for being in our 30s or 40s. We are getting older after all.

The philosophy behind FRC comes from Andreo Spina (nominative determinism alert 🚨), a Canadian chiropractor. The core central insight is fairly simple: every joint has two ranges. There’s the passive range - how far a joint goes when something else (gravity, your hand) pushes it - and the active range, which is how far you can move it under your own power.

It’s easy to see what this means. Try pulling your knee to your chest, then let go and try to keep it there. Almost certainly, it will drop some amount. That gap between where you can put it and where you can hold it is where most joint issues live. Practitioners call this the difference between flexibility (passive) and mobility (active control).

The gap between your active and passive range is driven by your nervous system. Your brain won’t let you go somewhere it can’t control because it increases risk of injury… so it prevents you from going there!

It’s the fundamental principle of biology: use it or lose it. If you never train near your end range of motion, the brain goes “okay, well I guess we don’t need this range of motion”. After prolonged inactivity, your brain “believes” you no longer need to access that range of motion and your range of motion shrink. Yes, stretching can help some, but won’t fundamentally change how your brain thinks you can move. That’s what FRC is all about.

Now a question I’m sure some of you are asking - does this stuff have any research behind it?

The answer is “sort of”. To be clear, no one has run a massive trial on “FRC” as a whole system. But what studies do exist hold up fairly well. A 2023 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine found that resistance training increases range of motion about as well as stretching does. There’s also some evidence that loading a muscle in a lengthened position can actually change its structure. Meanwhile, a 2025 review suggested that static stretching mostly just increases your tolerance for the stretch, with no real proof it changes muscle length. Which is a bit depressing given how many hours I’ve spent stretching my hamstrings.

If you’re interested in FRC, I’d try ten minutes of CARs a day for your hips, shoulders, and spine (exercises like this or this). There are tons of free videos out there. Go slow enough that it’s boring, but hard enough that it isn’t. Or if you want to work with someone directly, you can find some, or look for a provider here.

My back pain is mostly gone, for what it’s worth. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the FRC training, and hope it can help some of you out there!

😌 Dope stuff on the internet

Some of my favorite things since the last newsletter (note: I don’t get paid to recommend anything here):

• 📰 Article - I’ve long been a staunch proponent (and fairly poor practitioner) of meditation. I found this article very much worth the read, on choosing a meditation path.

This portion especially really stuck with me: Leaving aside the supernatural framework, it’s worth noting that you can also take these realms as straightforward descriptors of what these practices do for you in your lifetime. Being a good, generous person makes you feel happy and abundant. Doing formless jhanas gets you formless bliss. Heaven and hell are already here and you are their creator.

In November, I’ll be attending my first extended meditation retreat, a Jhourney retreat in Tahoe. Really excited to share my experience afterwards!

• 📚 Book rec - Not a book, but I just finished Dan Carlin’s 12 hour podcast series on the fall of the Roman republic (titled Death Throes of the Republic) and enjoyed the hell out of it. Dan Carlin and his content are a gift, and he goes into the details of the fall of the Roman Empire in absolutely gripping detail. I finished most of it between the hours of 5-9am as I was driving to the airport in Italy, and it successfully kept me awake enough to make the drive. Strongly recommend.
• ⌚ Cool product - There’s some interesting evidence that looking at strong red lights can strengthen your vision. 3 years post Lasik, I’ve been feeling my eyesight start to get a bit weaker, so bought this red light panel which I’m going to start testing to see if it makes a difference. Already my colleagues at the office are making fun of me, so that’s a big win.
• 🎵 Music - This Marsh set was fantastic. Marsh continues to move up my coveted power rankings as one of the best out there right now.
• 🏀 Random - It was extremely cool to see a non-profit I started (Inflection Grants) raise nearly $1M by auctioning off Jensen’s iconic Tom Ford jacket last month! I’m extremely grateful to the team at Edge City (who now run the grant program) and Long Journey Ventures (who sourced the jacket and have been supporting Inflection for many years now) that made this all happen. Such a cool thing, and now nearly $1M for young builders - hell yeah!
• 🔥Hot take - I have a lot of trepidation about being a guy that gives parenting advice when I only have one child under a year old. But so far, I will say - having a kid is the best thing ever. I think the marketing around having kids is so bad: anyone can related to the lack of sleep, dealing with a fussy little human, the freedom points you trade in in order to care for this little blob.

But what I didn’t appreciate before having a kid was just how much fun it’d be. I feel like I’m laughing more, and doing things with her is just a blast. So far, it’s been a 10/10 experience, and one I already wish I hadn’t delayed until I was in my mid-30s.

• 🙋‍♂️ Ask - If you know anyone looking to improve their heart health, I’d hugely appreciate if you’d mention Toku to them (disclosure: I’m an investor). The team is currently running a program where you can get 50% off if you share your labs pre and post with them. Personally, I have several friends who have been on it and seen ApoB and LDL drops between 10-30%, which is great!

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That’s all I got this month. Be sure to get outside, enjoy the last days of summer, and let me know if there are other topics you’d like me to cover. Until then, I’ll be inside, sweating away at this keyboard to churn out more human-created content at no cost to you.

See you next month!

• Justin

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Source: The Next