The Compound #26: Most people have no idea how good they COULD feel

A conversation I had in Seattle has been sitting in my head ever since I got back from America.

It started with someone asking me a very simple question.

Why are you so obsessed with your health?

An industry friend of mine… Greg, helps me with something slightly unusual whenever I’m in Seattle.

I work with a US company called Ways2Well for my blood work and health optimisation. Because I live in the UK, I normally line my testing up with work trips to America. Accelerate is particularly useful because I can land, wake up fasted the following morning, get my blood taken and sort anything I need while I’m there.

Greg has also become part of the logistics operation. Medication gets delivered to his place, one of his colleagues keeps hold of it and at some point during the conference I wander over to their stand and collect my little bag of health optimisation contraband.

Very professional.

A few days after I'd already collected everything, I bumped into Greg.

He told me he'd been reading this newsletter and said he found the health stuff particularly interesting. He's got an 11 month old daughter and said that as he gets older he's becoming much more conscious that he needs to look after himself properly.

Then he asked where all of this started for me.

I couldn't immediately answer.

Then I realised it started with my grandpa.

He's 87 now and he still goes to the gym.

He's obviously nowhere near as strong as he used to be, but every few months we'll train together and I still find what he can do ridiculously impressive.

He's mobile. He walks. He drives. He gets himself in and out of a chair. He's mentally completely switched on.

When I was 14, he started taking me to the gym.

By 15 or 16 I'd dragged my friends into it as well.

Did we train chest three times a week?

Maybe.

We were 15. Give us a break.

What I remember more clearly is that it took me until I was about 16 before I could beat my grandpa in a sprint.

At the time I just thought that was so cool.

Looking back, I think watching him probably shaped my relationship with fitness much more than I realised.

My parents gave me a very good upbringing. They encouraged me into sports and pushed me in plenty of good directions. But fitness wasn't something they personally lived and breathed.

My grandpa did.

He didn't need to explain the importance of staying strong as you age.

He just showed me.

And now I've got Cody, I think about that a lot.

For a long time, the motivation was much simpler.

I wanted to look good.

At 18/19, at university I realised I could train, get stronger and look better at the same time.

Excellent arrangement.

That was basically enough to keep me lifting for years.

Then I got into my early thirties and my priorities changed.

Toucan was growing quickly. I was thinking about starting a family. I wanted more energy for work. I wanted to perform better physically rather than just look like I did.

And my body had also started sending me some fairly unsubtle messages.

I've slipped discs three times.

The first time was when I was 21 after an incident involving a trampoline.

Then it happened twice more in my thirties.

I constantly seemed to have something wrong. Tight neck. Lower back pain. Little injuries. Little niggles. Nothing catastrophic most of the time, just enough to make me realise the way I'd trained for years probably wasn't going to serve me particularly well for the next 50.

So the goal changed.

Strength stayed.

Muscle stayed.

Looking good still matters. I'm not going to pretend I've achieved spiritual enlightenment.

But I started caring a lot more about running, heart/lung health, mobility, recovery, sleep, blood markers and being capable.

That eventually led me towards hybrid training and Hyrox.

More importantly, it changed why I was doing any of it.

I don't just want to be in good shape at 36.

I want to still be doing things at 50, 60, 70 and, hopefully…87.

“I’m not trying to live forever. I’m trying to make sure my body lets me properly live for as long as possible.”

That is a very different motivation from wanting abs on holiday (which is still very much a primary goal).

I've been doing fairly extensive blood work for probably five or six years now.

And I find it fascinating.

The reason I originally chose Ways2Well was because the approach felt different to what I'd found in the UK.

This isn't me saying the NHS is bad.

If I get hit by a car tomorrow, please take me to an NHS hospital rather than sending me a link to a longevity podcast.

Modern medicine is unbelievable when something is clearly wrong.

But I think there is a big difference between treating illness and optimising someone who is already healthy.

For years my blood work has looked pretty good.

My total testosterone, for example, has generally been healthy for my age.

Great.

Except when we looked deeper, my free testosterone wasn't where we wanted it.

The testosterone was there. My body just wasn't making enough of it available.

So we started digging in.

Food. Sleep. Training. Supplementation.

I’m talking super granular…even down to things like the type of magnesium I was taking and when I was taking it. We added things like boron based on the blood work and kept testing.

No testosterone injections.

No instant leap towards the most aggressive intervention available.

Eventually we'd optimised most of the obvious levers and my numbers had improved, but there was still room to move.

Under medical supervision, I eventually started HCG, enclomiphene and DHEA.

Within around six months my free testosterone had more than doubled.

And I felt the difference.

More energy. Stronger in the gym. Better recovery.

I've also experimented with peptides over the years, including BPC 157 during the back issues and Ipamorelin as part of my recovery protocol.

I am deliberately not turning this into a protocol.

Please don't read this, order a load of things online and tell your doctor James from a newsletter said it was fine.

That is completely missing the point.

Everything I do is based around MY blood work, repeated testing and conversations with clinicians. I also use AI heavily to understand what I'm being told and challenge my own thinking, but not as a replacement for medical advice.

The interesting part isn't the drugs or supplements.

It's knowing your baseline.

Because I think millions of people wake up every morning and feel like themselves without ever asking whether the way they feel is actually good.

Slightly tired. A bit foggy. Poor sleep. Low energy. Carrying more body fat than they'd like. Drinking a couple of nights a week. Training occasionally.

And after long enough, that becomes normal.

You don't know there might be another version of you because you've got nothing to compare it against.

That idea has probably driven more of my health obsession than anything else.

The third time I slipped a disc was horrific.

I couldn't straighten my left leg properly. I couldn't drive. At points I was basically confined to the sofa and in ridiculous pain.

I went through my private medical insurance, saw specialists and eventually had steroid injections under anaesthetic.

They didn't fix it.

The next proposed step was fusion surgery.

At 32.

I remember thinking…I really, really don't want to do this yet.

That doesn't mean the surgeon was wrong. There are obviously people for whom spinal fusion is absolutely the right intervention.

But permanently altering my spine in my mid thirties felt huge.

So I said no.

Not never. Just not yet.

I wanted to exhaust what I could do myself first.

I rehabbed it. I strengthened properly. I changed how I trained. I stopped treating fitness as purely lifting weights and moved towards the hybrid approach I follow now.

My back today is in an incredibly good place.

I'm running half marathons. Racing Hyrox Pro. Lifting heavier than ever. Doing things that, lying on that sofa, I wasn't completely sure I'd comfortably do again.

Maybe surgery would also have worked brilliantly.

I'll never know.

What I do know is that I'm very glad I asked whether there was another route before doing something irreversible.

And that probably sums up my entire approach to health.

I'm not anti-medicine.

I'm aggressively pro-understanding what is happening in my own body before blindly accepting the first answer.

A back specialist knows a lot about backs. A GP is a generalist. I need to be the one piecing every piece together holistically. No one will do that for me.

There will probably come a point where I use testosterone replacement therapy.

If my blood work eventually says it's appropriate, Ways2Well agree and I'm at the right stage from a fertility perspective, I'm completely open to it.

But I'm not in a rush to get there.

The objective isn't to take more things.

The objective is to need as little intervention as possible while feeling and performing as well as I reasonably can.

And strangely, after talking to Greg, I've realised the reason for all of this is much simpler than testosterone, peptides, sleep scores or blood markers.

My grandad took me to the gym when I was 14.

Thirty years from now, I want Cody to have his own version of that story.

I want him to remember that his dad trained.

That I ran races.

That I ate properly most of the time.

That I looked after myself.

And hopefully, when I'm an old man, he still has to work reasonably hard to beat me in a sprint.

That would be a pretty good result.

I've worked with Ways2Well for years. Nobody has paid me to write this issue.

I’ve asked them for a referral link, which I'll share with anyone that wants it. I genuinely don't know whether I make anything from it and I'm not particularly bothered either way.

I'm sharing it because whenever I talk about this stuff people ask who I use.

If you're in the US, or regularly travel there like I do, they're the people I trust with my blood work and health optimisation.

That's this week's issue.

Grandpa is 87. I'm 36. Cody is 2.

I've got a decent example to follow and a pretty good reason to keep going.

James

Founder, Toucan Agency · Co-owner, Twenty One Beauty · UK