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Forging Capable Men

I'm an author, strength coach, and physical therapist — also a father, husband, and hack golfer. Every Saturday I send The Saturday Standard: research worth knowing, a thought worth keeping, an action worth taking, a book worth reading, and a note from me. Five things, five minutes, one coffee. This and other blog posts are available for free every week — join below.

The Honest Truth About Cigars and Pipes
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The Honest Truth About Cigars and Pipes

Blame Tolkien and Lewis. I became an avid reader in graduate school, and the deeper I went, the more I kept landing at the same table. A group of friends in Oxford — Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, a handful of others — who called themselves the Inklings, and who met in a pub they nicknamed the Bird and Baby with their pipes lit, arguing for hours about myth, faith, language, and what makes a story true. Tolkien loved his pipe so much he wrote it straight into Middle-earth: the hobbits and their...

VOL. 15 — SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2026 The Research Is more better when it comes to training? When it comes to guidelines for training, they can be laid out simply. This is your floor: two lifting sessions a week, total body, and 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic activity. Those numbers come from the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The current version is the second edition, released in 2018 — the first came out...

VOL. 14 — SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 2026 Coffee first, and let's talk a little bit about magnesium. The Research Magnesium: should you be taking it? Magnesium is absolutely having a moment in fitness and health circles. It's become a popular conversation among podcasts and influencers, and if you're a guy who's having trouble sleeping, big brother is definitely going to find a way to put magnesium in front of you. Instagram knows. YouTube knows. That ad found you for a reason. So let's break this...

Vol. 13 · August 1, 2026 Coffee first lads, then time to talk about peptides again. The Research I get asked about peptides more than just about anything else right now. Ipamorelin and BPC-157 are the big names most of you have heard about. Be it from your brother-in-law, some guy at the gym, or Jimmy in accounting who won't shut up about his bodybuilding split and how excellent his recovery has been. His Whoop band told him so. So let's have an honest conversation about it, because once you...

VOL. 12 · JULY 25, 2026 Coffee first lads. And it's time to stop being afraid of the imaging you get. THE RESEARCH — Your Scan Found Something. That Doesn't Mean It's the Problem. Two things are guaranteed in this world: 1) The Cowboys will have an elite season and blow it in the playoffs (which is BEAUTIFUL to see). Go Pats. 2) Men will have back pain, get some kind of imaging, usually an X-ray or an MRI, and get a report stuffed with frightening words they can barely pronounce:...

VOL. 11 · JULY 18, 2026 Coffee first. Then we're diving into the most important number you'll probably never feel. THE RESEARCH — The silent killer Blood pressure is two numbers. The top (systolic) is the push when your heart beats; the bottom (diastolic) is the pressure between beats. High blood pressure — hypertension — is one of the leading modifiable causes of heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure on earth. Before we go further, here's where your number actually falls. These are the...

VOL. 10 · JULY 11, 2026 Happy Saturday, fellas. Time to talk about the new GLP-1 medications and what you ACTUALLY need to know about them — not what those incredibly annoying, repetitive commercials keep spitting in your face while you're only trying to watch the US blow it in the World Cup. THE RESEARCH — The Strongest Weight-Loss Drugs Ever Made, and the Catch on the Scale First off — what these drugs are doing is incredible. There's no soft way to put it. In the SURMOUNT-1 study,...

VOL. 9 · JULY 4, 2026 Happy 250th, America. Coffee first, bourbon later. THE RESEARCH — They Had Good Enough. They Threw It in the Harbor Anyway. Today we're pivoting away from men's health to reflect on America. Two hundred and fifty years of an experiment that has faced a lot of ups and downs — and still, we persevere. As we celebrate our republic, we owe it to ourselves to reflect on the people who made any of this possible. And remember something: the colonists were not "desperate." By...

VOL. 8 · JUNE 27, 2026 Last Saturday of June. Time to close the month out clean. Coffee first — five things. THE RESEARCH — The Sauna Habit Linked to Far Fewer Deaths Researchers in eastern Finland followed 2,315 middle-aged men for two decades (Laukkanen et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015), sorting them by how often they used a sauna. The men who went 4 to 7 times a week had roughly 40% lower all-cause mortality than the once-a-week crowd — and more than 60% lower risk of sudden cardiac...

VOL. 7 · JUNE 20, 2026 Father's Day weekend. This one's for the men who made us — and the ones we're becoming. Coffee first. THE RESEARCH — Most of the Job Is Just Being There For more than a decade, researchers wrestled with an uncomfortable question: when kids fall apart after a father leaves, is the absence itself doing the damage — or just the poverty and chaos that tend to ride along with it? In 2013, a Princeton-led team reviewed the most rigorous studies ever run on it (McLanahan, Tach...