Makara wakes me up. Not an alarm, not ambition. A geriatric pup with a bladder that keeps its own schedule and nails that click across the floor somewhere around the time the coffee maker is still thinking about it. Since the move, this has been the deal. She needs out, so I'm up. Most mornings it's still black outside, the stars still hanging over the Bighorns like somebody forgot to turn them off.
There's a voice in my head on those mornings. You know the guy. The one who says, "Why are you up this early?" Every morning I answer him the same way. If you were headed where I'm headed, you'd be up early too.
Where I'm headed: real breakthroughs in medical problems most people have quit on. A family that lives free, with time and money working for them instead of the other way around. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a little more of my own soul figured out along the way. So yes. I've got places to be.
This is a quick post about one piece of how I get there. The lymphatic system, and why looking like a monkey in your kitchen at sunrise might do more for your energy, your recovery, your blood vessels, your marriage, and your bank account than another scoop of pre-workout.
Why a morning lymphatic drainage routine matters more than you think
Here is the part nobody taught me in school. Your blood has a heart. Your lymph does not.
The lymphatic system is the body's drainage network. It collects the fluid that leaks out of your blood vessels into your tissues, filters it through your lymph nodes, and dumps it back into your bloodstream near your collarbone. It carries immune cells. It hauls off waste. By one estimate it returns roughly three liters of fluid to the bloodstream every day, and it does it without a dedicated pump.
So what moves it? You do. Lymph vessels squeeze a little on their own, but most of the push comes from outside forces. Your skeletal muscles contract and compress the vessels, one-way valves keep the fluid from sliding back, and every breath shifts pressure in your chest and belly. Your muscles act as pumps, which is why people call the calves a second heart.
Now think about how most of us spend the eight hours before breakfast. Flat. Still. Shallow breathing. Then we roll out of bed, sit in a car, sit at a desk, and wonder why we feel puffy, slow, and heavy until noon. Nothing is broken. The drain just hasn't been run.
That's the whole case for doing this first thing. The body spent the night parked. Something has to turn the crank by hand.
Atomic Habits, an old dog, and the stack I built after the move
When I moved, I decided to use the disruption. New house, new walls, no old routines baked into the furniture. James Clear's Atomic Habits was the playbook. Three ideas from that book did most of the work.
The first is habit stacking. You don't invent a new time slot. You glue the new thing to something you already do without thinking. My anchor was already built for me, and she has a gray muzzle and opinions about breakfast. After I let Makara out, I step out with her. After I step out, I look east. After the dog comes back in, I move. The dog is the trigger. I just stopped wasting it on my phone.
The second is making it small enough that you can't say no. Clear's two-minute rule says scale a habit down until starting it takes almost nothing. Most days the routine runs ten or fifteen minutes. On bad days it's two. Two minutes of bouncing in socks still counts. It keeps the chain alive, and the chain is the point.
The third, and the one that stuck, is identity. Every small action is a vote for the kind of person you're becoming. I don't need to win the morning. I need to cast the vote. Today's vote: I'm the kind of guy who moves before the world asks anything of him.
I also changed the environment so the easy thing was the right thing. The vibration plate sits where I'd trip over it on the way to the coffee. The red light panel is plugged in and aimed. Shoes by the door. Friction out of the way.
Step one: get the sun in your eyes before your phone
Our primal way of waking up wasn't a buzzing rectangle. It was the sky going from black to blue to gold. For most of human history, light hitting the eyes at dawn was the signal that started the whole day, and the body still runs on that wiring.
Morning light helps set your circadian clock, the internal timer that decides when you feel sharp and when you feel like a sack of feed. Andrew Huberman's advice is to get bright light, ideally sunlight, in your eyes within the first hour after waking. The idea is that it times your natural cortisol rise to the morning, where it belongs, so you get alert early and wind down at night. To be fair, scientists don't fully agree on how directly light drives cortisol, but anchoring your clock with morning light lines up with mainstream circadian research.
The common guidance is five to ten minutes outside on a clear day, longer when it's overcast. In a Wyoming November that means standing on the porch in a coat with a cup of coffee while the dog sniffs the same fence post she sniffed yesterday. No sunglasses. Don't stare at the sun. Just face the bright part of the sky and let your eyes do their job. If the coffee is doing more of the waking than the sun is, I wrote about that in am I addicted to caffeine.
On the days I'm up long before sunrise, I do the movement first and step back out when the sky lightens. Order doesn't matter much. Getting both does.
Nothing is broken. The drain just hasn't been run.
Step two: be a monkey
Watch a monkey wake up sometime. It doesn't lie there scrolling. It shakes, it swings, it scratches, it bounces off things. It looks ridiculous. It also looks extremely awake.
That's the move. For a few minutes, stop trying to look like a disciplined adult and move like a primate. Here's what my version looks like:
- Heel bounces. Stand tall, feet under hips, and bounce gently on the balls of your feet so your heels kiss the floor. Knees soft. One to two minutes. This is the cheapest calf pump on earth.
- Arm swings and shakes. Let your arms swing loose across your body, then shake out your hands like you just washed them and there's no towel. Shake the legs one at a time.
- A hang, if you've got a bar. Ten to thirty seconds from a pull-up bar or a sturdy door frame setup. Your shoulders will thank you, and you get to feel like your ancestors for a moment.
- Belly breaths. Five slow breaths, hand on the stomach, letting it rise first. The diaphragm is part of the lymph pump, and shallow chest breathing barely uses it.
A note on jumping. You'll see claims online that rebounding on a mini trampoline multiplies lymph flow by some huge number. Most of those figures trace back to a 1980 NASA study that measured exercise efficiency, not lymph. Bounce anyway if you like it. A rebounder is fun and easy on the joints. Just know the reason it works is the boring one: rhythmic muscle contraction plus deeper breathing. Walking briskly does a lot of the same thing. So does dancing in the kitchen. Your call.
Step three: where to massage, and how light to go
Most people get this backwards. They think lymph massage means digging in. It doesn't. Lymph vessels near the surface sit right under the skin, so the pressure is barely more than resting your hand there. Clinical guides describe it as just enough pressure to gently stretch the skin. If your brain says this can't possibly be doing anything, you're probably doing it right.
The other rule: clear the drain before you push water toward it. You start near the collarbones, where the lymph re-enters your blood, and work outward. Here's the order I use, about five slow strokes each:
- Above the collarbones. Lay your fingertips in the hollows just above each collarbone and gently stretch the skin down and in. This is where the system empties.
- Sides of the neck. Flat hands just below the ears, slow strokes down toward the collarbones.
- Armpits. Cup your hand in the armpit and make slow, light pumps up into it. Big cluster of nodes here.
- Belly. Hands flat on the stomach, slow circles, paired with those deep belly breaths.
- Groin crease. Where the thigh meets the hip, light strokes up and in.
- Arms and legs last. Stroke toward the nearest cluster. Forearm toward elbow, upper arm toward the armpit, lower leg toward the knee, thigh toward the groin.
Then the patting. I finish by tapping my body all over with loose open hands, chest to shoulders to arms to thighs, like I'm checking my pockets for keys. I'm not going to pretend there's a randomized trial on pocket-patting. It wakes up the skin, it wakes up my attention, and it makes Makara look at me like I've lost it. That's three wins.
If you have an active infection, a blood clot, heart failure, or you've had lymph nodes removed, talk to your doctor or a certified lymphedema therapist before doing any of this. Lymphedema is a real medical condition with real specialists, and they're worth finding.
When you're too tired: start with a vibration plate
Some mornings the sleep was garbage, the week has been long, and the idea of bouncing like a monkey feels like a personal attack. Those are the mornings I step on the vibration plate.
A whole body vibration plate shakes you fast, many times a second. Your muscles respond by reflexively contracting over and over to keep you balanced. That's the hook. You get rhythmic muscle contraction, the same thing that moves lymph and blood, without having to generate much effort yourself.
The evidence on blood flow is decent. One study found leg blood flow increased systematically as vibration frequency went up. In a small study of people with spinal cord injury, 20 Hz increased peak blood velocity after two to three minutes, while 10 Hz did not. The evidence on lymph specifically is thinner. Most of it comes from animal models and small or manufacturer-linked studies. The mechanism makes sense: vibration drives muscle contraction, muscle contraction drives fluid. I'd call it promising, not proven, and I use it anyway because on a bad day it's the difference between doing something and doing nothing.
How I use it:
- Five to ten minutes, low to moderate setting. Start lower than you think.
- Knees bent, not locked. Keeping at least 20 degrees of knee bend dampens the vibration reaching your head, which keeps your brain from feeling like a snow globe.
- Slow squats, calf raises, or just standing and breathing. On the worst mornings I stand on it with a coffee in hand. Don't tell anyone.
- Finish with two minutes of the self-massage above.
Who should skip it or ask first: pregnancy, pacemakers or implanted devices, blood clots or DVT, recent surgery or fractures, severe osteoporosis, epilepsy, serious heart conditions, and recent eye surgery. ACE's research roundup lists several of these, and every reputable manufacturer does too.
If you want to look at plates, the range runs from the LifePro budget models up to the Power Plate machines you see in clinics. Start cheap. You can always upgrade the thing you actually use.
Red light in the morning: what it can and can't do
While I'm on the plate, a red light panel is usually glowing at me from the counter. Here's my honest take.
Red and near-infrared light therapy, called photobiomodulation in the research, works on the idea that certain wavelengths are absorbed by an enzyme in your mitochondria called cytochrome c oxidase, which nudges cellular energy production. That mechanism has solid support in cell and animal work. In humans the picture is mixed. A 2026 narrative review of athletes found the mitochondrial story consistent in the lab but clinical results inconsistent and dependent on dose and settings. At least one recent small human trial found it did not raise mitochondrial respiration in muscle or skin.
So why do I use it? It's warm, it's quiet, it pairs with the plate, and the recovery and skin research is interesting enough that I'll spend ten minutes on it. What I won't do is pretend it replaces the sun. Red light is a different signal. For setting your clock, you still need bright daylight in your eyes. Think of the panel as a side dish, not the steak.
If you're shopping, Mito Red Light and Joovv are two of the bigger names. Look for published wavelengths around 630 to 660 nm red and 810 to 850 nm near-infrared, and protect your eyes.
Every small action is a vote. I don't need to win the morning. I need to cast the vote.
Why I measure: Whoop and blood work
I'm an operator. If I can't measure it, I don't trust it, and that includes my own body.
I wear a Whoop to track sleep, heart rate variability, and recovery. The morning routine isn't magic, and the data proves that both ways. Some mornings my recovery is in the red and I go straight to the vibration plate. Some weeks the numbers climb and I know the stack is doing its job. It keeps me honest. If you want one, my link gets you a free WHOOP and a month free.
For the inside of the machine, I use Rythm. It's an at-home blood test that shows up monthly, you collect a small sample yourself, ship it back, and results come back within about two days of the lab getting it. It covers 25-plus biomarkers across hormones, thyroid, heart, metabolism, blood count, and kidney and liver. I like trends more than snapshots. One blood test a year tells you where you were. Monthly tells you which way you're moving. If you want to try it, here's my link.
Blood work is also where this stops being a wellness hobby for me and starts being personal.
Blood vessels, CADASIL, and why this isn't vanity
CADASIL entered my reality through my family. If you haven't heard of it, you're not alone. It's a genetic condition tied to the NOTCH3 gene that damages the small blood vessels, especially in the brain. Over time that means less blood flow and poorer regulation of blood flow, and it's one of the most common genetic causes of stroke and vascular dementia. Research in a CADASIL mouse model showed the brain arteries lose some of their ability to open up when they need to.
There's no cure and no specific treatment yet. What the guidance says, from the clinicians who work on this, is to keep the rest of the vascular system as healthy as possible: don't smoke, cut the sugar, exercise. None of that is a breakthrough. Call it homework, and it's homework I can do every morning before the dog finishes breakfast.
I'm careful not to oversell what a morning routine does for something like CADASIL. It doesn't fix a gene. What I know is that blood vessels respond to how you treat them. Movement improves the lining of your arteries, the endothelium, and helps it produce nitric oxide, the molecule that tells vessels to relax and open. That's true for everyone, and it matters more for the people I love.
That's a big part of why the Goodyear Foundation exists. Chronic illness and the people living next to it deserve more than a pamphlet and a shrug. If this part of the post hit home for you, that's where to go next.
The marriage section (yes, really)
Let's talk about the plumbing nobody puts in a wellness post.
The same nitric oxide and the same healthy endothelium that keep your brain's blood vessels flexible are what make things work in the bedroom. Erections are a blood flow event. Full stop. A 2023 meta-analysis in The Journal of Sexual Medicine pooled 11 randomized trials with more than a thousand men and found aerobic exercise improved erectile function scores by an average of 2.8 points over controls. The pills work on the same pathway, downstream. Exercise works on it upstream.
So when I tell Ali I'm going outside at dawn to bounce like a monkey and pat myself down in the yard, I'm not just doing it for me. I'm doing it for us. She hasn't fully bought that argument. I'm working on her.
The mood part is less of a joke. Move first thing and you get a little rush of feel-good chemistry, endorphins and the rest of the cocktail, before anyone has asked you for anything. I'm a better husband at 7 a.m. after ten minutes of moving than after ten minutes of email. Patience lives in the body too. A guy whose blood is moving is a lot harder to rattle over the dishwasher.
Health is wealth (and also, apparently, wealth)
Now the money. You knew it was coming.
An economist at Cleveland State named Vasilios Kosteas went through national survey data and found that regular exercise was linked to a 6 to 10 percent wage increase, with frequent exercise linked to even more. Is that because exercise makes you richer, or because disciplined people do both? Probably some of each. He tried to control for that. Either way, I'll take it.
Here's how I see it as an operator. My business runs on my decisions. Bad sleep and a sluggish body make worse decisions: shorter fuse with a vendor, a lazy yes on a deal that needed a no, a two-hour afternoon slump where nothing gets built. Every one of those has a price tag. A morning routine that costs ten minutes and keeps me sharp until dinner might be the best-returning asset I own. Cheaper than a consultant. Shows up every day. Never asks for equity.
Health is wealth. Learn to earn. And the first thing worth learning is how to run your own machine.
The whole routine on one page
For the guy who skipped to the bottom. I see you. Here's the stack.
- Trigger: the dog goes out, or whatever you already do every morning without fail.
- Light: five to ten minutes facing the bright sky. Longer if it's cloudy.
- Monkey: one to two minutes of heel bounces, arm swings, shaking, and five belly breaths. A hang if you've got a bar.
- Massage: collarbones, neck, armpits, belly, groin crease, then limbs. Feather-light, five strokes each.
- Pat down: thirty seconds, top to bottom.
- Too tired: five to ten minutes on the vibration plate instead, knees bent, red light on if you have it.
- Measure: check recovery, test blood on a rhythm you can keep.
None of this is medical advice. I'm a guy in Wyoming with a dog and a vibration plate, not your doctor. If you have a heart condition, a clotting history, or anything on the lists above, talk to someone who's licensed to look at you.
Go move
This morning it was dark again when Makara's nails started clicking. Cold enough to see my breath on the porch. She did her slow lap of the yard, stopped at the fence post, and looked back at me like she does every day, like she's checking that I'm still coming.
I bounced. I shook out my hands. I stood there and watched a thin line of light come up behind the mountains while the old girl took her sweet time. Ten minutes, maybe less. Nobody saw it, and it wasn't pretty.
But I went back inside with my blood moving, my head clear, and a vote already cast for who I'm trying to be. That's the trade. The guy in your head who asks why you're up so early isn't going where you're going. He doesn't have to understand it.
You don't need a new house or a geriatric dog to start. You need one thing you already do every morning and the willingness to look a little ridiculous right after it.
Be a monkey. Go move.
If you want more of these notes as they come, the Notes signup is on the homepage. And if the CADASIL piece of this landed close to home, the Goodyear Foundation is where that work lives.
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