15/08/2026
Collagen is technically a protein. It’s just not the type that does the things that most people are counting protein for.
If a significant share of your daily intake is collagen, your logged protein and your usable protein have diverged, and your tracking app won’t tell you that, because none of them model amino acid profile.
11/08/2026
My last post was about protecting your reserve capacity: becoming more discerning about the unnecessary demands that leave you with less capacity for the challenges that matter.
But protecting capacity and expanding capacity are not quite the same project.
Reserve capacity is not one generic pool of energy. It is the spare functional range available across multiple systems when demand rises.
Your cardiovascular system has reserve. Your mitochondria have respiratory reserve. Your muscles have force-producing reserve. Your thermoregulatory system has additional heat-producing capacity. Even your response to psychological threat can become better calibrated through graded challenge and successful recovery.
The practical implication is specificity.
And adaptation requires a sufficiently specific signal, repeated at a recoverable dose, with enough time and resources to build from it.
Protect your energy.
Then decide what you are protecting it for.
08/08/2026
Whether an ice bath energises you or flattens you is less about gender and more about reserve capacity: your autonomic nervous system’s bank balance.
Every late night, every hard workout, and every deviation from your routine is a withdrawal. When your balance is healthy, hormetic stress like cold exposure is a deposit that compounds into resilience. When you’re already overdrawn, it’s a debt you can’t repay, and you’ll usually feel that debt straight away.
recovery metabolichealth naturopathy nervoussystemhealth stressresilience
08/08/2026