Welcome back to The 94 Method.
Four sections. Four minutes. Every Sunday.
This week: why grip strength says more about your health than you'd expect, a breakfast habit to run all week, and a mindset shift for anyone stuck at the starting line.
Let's get into it.
The Practice.
Protein at breakfast.
Most mornings start with carbs. Cereal, toast, a bagel. Fast, easy, and a crash by 10am.
This week, aim for 20 to 30 grams of protein in your first meal. Eggs, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, a shake if you're rushing.
That's it. That's the target.
Switch to protein first and the 10am snack urge disappears. Energy holds steady instead of spiking and crashing.
Protein digests more slowly. It helps keep your blood sugar steady. It keeps you full longer than you'd expect.
Try it this week. Every morning, same target. Two eggs and yogurt one day, a shake with a banana the next. Just hit the number every day and notice how you feel by Friday.
Let us know how you do and what feels different!
Worth Knowing.
Doctors used to check blood pressure and call it a day. Now researchers are looking at something simpler.
Grip Strength.
Grip strength turns out to be one of the best predictors of how long you'll live and how well you'll move while you're doing it. Studies have tracked it against heart disease, cognitive decline, even overall mortality. A weak grip in your 50s and 60s correlates with worse outcomes decades later, independent of age or activity level.
Here's why it matters more than it sounds like it should. Grip strength isn't really about your hands. It's a proxy for total body strength and nervous system function. Your forearms are packed with muscle, and squeezing hard requires coordination between your brain, your nerves, and dozens of muscle fibers firing together. When that system starts to decline, grip is often one of the first places it shows up. It's an early warning light for muscle loss happening everywhere else in your body too.
The ones who can still open a stuck jar lid, carry both sets of groceries in one trip, or hang from a bar for a few seconds are almost always the ones aging the best in every other way. Strength doesn't show up in one place. It shows up everywhere or it fades everywhere.
The good news is grip strength is trainable at any age, and it doesn't take much.
Dead hangs. Grab a pull-up bar or sturdy overhead beam and just hang. Start with 10 to 15 seconds. Build up from there.
Farmer's carries. Pick up a heavy dumbbell or kettlebell in each hand and walk. Thirty to forty steps. Your grip gives out before your legs do, and that's the point.
Squeeze a stress ball or grip trainer. Sounds small. Ten squeezes per hand, a few times a day, adds up fast.
If you want it to feel like play instead of exercise, choose something that requires working with your hands. This builds grip strength without you thinking about it.
The standard is simple. Men should aim to generate around 90 to 100 pounds of grip force. Women should aim for around 60 to 70.
You don't need a fancy dynamometer to know if you're weak here. If jars are hard to open, if your hands tire fast during yard work, if you can't hang from a bar for even a few seconds, that's your signal.
Start small this week. Pick one movement. Dead hangs are the easiest place to begin.
Your grip is a window into how well the rest of you is aging. Strengthen it, and you strengthen everything connected to it.
What’s Moving in Wellness.
Josh Allen expands his Natrol partnership beyond sleep into energy. The Bills quarterback has worked with the sleep supplement brand since last year, crediting it with helping him sleep. Now, after welcoming his first child in April, Allen is adding Natrol Ultra Energy, a blend of B12, B-Complex, Vitamin D, and CoQ10, alongside Ultra Sleep. He says fatherhood has reshaped how he thinks about recovery, calling sleep "the foundation for everything."
CrossFit is officially off the market. New CEO Bruce Edwards confirmed that Berkshire Partners, which has owned CrossFit since 2020, is no longer seeking a buyer, ending a sale process that ran since March 2025. Edwards returned as CEO in May after previously serving as CrossFit's COO. He says the company's biggest challenge isn't demand but perception, as the brand faces growing competition from newer entrants like Hyrox.
U.S. organic produce sales hit $10.6 billion in 2025. That's growth five times faster than conventional produce over the same period. The category is holding steady even as household budgets tighten elsewhere in the grocery aisle, a sign organic produce is becoming less of a splurge and more of a habit.
Two hours of weekly strength training may lower cardiovascular risk in women. A study found that women who did at least two hours of resistance training a week had up to a 45% lower risk of heart attack than women who did none. The benefit grew with volume, and pairing strength work with regular cardio brought the biggest reduction in risk.
Mindset Moment.
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.”
The hardest part of any goal isn't the goal itself. It's the moment right before you start.
That's where most people get stuck. Not in the difficulty of the work, but in the deciding. The overthinking. The waiting for the right time, the right mood, or the right conditions that never actually arrive.
Earhart knew something most of us forget. Once you decide, the rest is just showing up again and again. Not easy. Not glamorous. Just tenacity, one day after another.
You don't need certainty to start. You don't need to feel ready. You just need to make the decision and let the doing carry you the rest of the way.
What goal have you been deciding on instead of acting on?
Move better. Feel better. Live better.
The 94 Method.
-SW