Biohacking Physical Exercise

Teemu Arina (FIN) Biohacker & Technology Entrepreneur, Founder @ Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland, Author @Biohacker’s Handbook Teemu Arina has a professional career of over 15 years as a technology entrepreneur, author and speaker. He is one of the forefront thinkers on the intersection of the human and the machine, social media, digital work and online learning. He is a Leonardo Award laureate under the patronage of European Parliament for "Humanity in Digitization". Mr. Arina is the founder of three award winning technology companies, ambassador for Rockstart Digital Health accelerator, co-founder of Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland and co-author of the Biohacker’s Handbook for optimizing health and wellbeing with technological and biological tools. Mr. Arina is a popular keynote speaker who has presented internationally in countries such as USA, UK, Japan, Hongkong, Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany. MD Olli Sovijärvi (FIN) Licensed General Practitioner, Helsinki Antioxidant Clinic, Author @ Biohacker’s Handbook Olli Sovijärvi is a Licensed General Practitioner at Helsinki Antioxidant Clinic and co-author of the Biohacker’s Handbook. He is one of the pioneers in holistic medicine in Finland and the only finnish medical doctor with a psychologic-philosophical Integral Theory degree from John F. Kennedy University. Sovijärvi graduated 2006 as a licensed physician from University of Helsinki. He has pioneered health podcasts in Finland with Helsinki Paleo Podcast and Biohacker’s Podcast. Sovijärvi has also consulted many natural health brands and organizations. Jaakko Halmetoja (FIN) Nutrition Specialist, Independent Wellness Entrepreneur, Author @ Biohacker’s Handbook Jaakko Halmetoja is a nutrition expert, author and professional speaker. Jaakko has managed multiple special caféterias in Tampere and works as a product developer for food growth companies. Halmetoja has been popularizing health benefits and unique uses of e.g. chaga mushroom, chocolate, wild foods, various berries and medicinal herbs. Halmetoja maintains a non-profit website loydalahde.com, a database for finding local springs around Finland and hosts weekly talk show – InspiRadio Podcast. He has also written a book on chaga mushroom as well as co-authored the Biohacker’s Handbook. Halmetoja is a popular lecturer with over 500 public lectures and performances.

This talk, presented by the authors of the Biohackers Handbook

Movement is medicine. When you stop playing, that is when cognitive decline starts. We need to move for the sake of moving because it is fun. Movement is life.

Summary

- Focus on movement and play rather than just gym performance to prevent cognitive decline and improve neuroplasticity across multiple dimensions. - Incorporate "greasing the groove" by adding micro-movements like squats or push-ups to daily routines and office meetings to maintain consistent physical activity. - Use breathing techniques like box breathing to influence the autonomous nervous system, improve respiratory capacity, and manage stress levels throughout the day. - Prioritize grip strength as a key metric for longevity and use whole-body exercises like kettlebell swings to activate the nervous system and improve metabolic health. - Balance intense physical activity with recovery methods like cold exposure and saunas, using biometric data and heart rate variability to monitor readiness.

Article

Biohacking Physical Exercise

At Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, Three Finnish Evangelists Of Human Performance Reframed Exercise As A Daily Practice Of Resilience, Play And Recovery

It began with a joke and a touch of provocation.

On 19 May 2017, at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm in Sweden, Teemu Arina, MD Olli Sovijärvi and Jaakko Halmetoja took the stage as what they laughingly called “the Three Stooges of Finnish biohacking”. Yet beneath the banter lay a serious thesis, one that ran against the polished vanity of mainstream fitness culture. Exercise, they argued, was not merely about aesthetics, brute force or gym rituals. It was about survival, cognition, nervous system complexity and the ancient biological art of becoming harder to break.

Their presentation, “Biohacking Physical Exercise: Optimizing Movement, Performance & Recovery”, cast movement not as punishment, but as medicine. In their telling, the body was not a machine to be sculpted for display. It was an adaptive ecosystem, one that responded to challenge, stagnated in confinement and flourished when stress was balanced by recovery.

Movement As Medicine, Not Performance

The trio returned repeatedly to a simple but radical proposition: life was movement, and health began when movement ceased to be confined to workouts.

Drawing on both classical thinking and contemporary performance science, the speakers described exercise as a hormetic stressor, a controlled form of biological adversity that made the body more resilient over time. As Teemu Arina put it: “Exercise is a hormetic stressor that makes you more resilient and more capable of doing physical work in the future.”

That idea carried implications far beyond the gym floor. Physical exertion, they said, trained not only muscle, but immunity, cardiovascular efficiency, respiratory function and even the lymphatic system. Avoiding stress altogether did not preserve the organism. It weakened it.

Yet they were careful to challenge the language of “exercise” itself. Jaakko Halmetoja in particular leaned toward a broader vocabulary: movement, play, natural action. The distinction mattered. Formal training could become narrow, repetitive and ego-driven. Play widened the body’s possibilities. It restored spontaneity and complexity. It also, they suggested, protected the brain.

The Brain Needed More Than Repetition

One of the most striking themes of the session was the insistence that movement should be understood neurologically, not merely physically.

The speakers argued that modern people often trained in only a few directions, forward, linear, constrained, and in doing so limited the brain’s adaptability. To move in richer patterns, to balance, crawl, rotate, climb, dance or move backward, was to teach the nervous system greater freedom.

“It is important to think about movement as a way to teach our brain more freedom and more possibilities by training our nervous system for more complexity,” the speakers said.

This was not abstract philosophy. They linked the idea to neuroplasticity, neurogenesis and the role of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a key molecule associated with learning and brain health. They also pointed to the growing body of evidence connecting movement complexity with reduced cognitive decline, invoking conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease as reminders that a motionless life often became a narrowing life.

Their warning was quietly devastating. Cognitive decline, they suggested, did not begin in old age. It began when play stopped.

The Case For Bare Feet, Trees And Daily Friction

From there, the presentation moved outward, into a critique of the modern built environment.

Cities, shoes, office routines and sedentary work had all conspired to strip movement of its richness. The body, once shaped by climbing, balancing, carrying and uneven terrain, had become over-cushioned and under-challenged. Barefoot movement, they argued, restored sensory intelligence to the feet and retrained proprioception. A wider, more naturally functioning foot was not a cosmetic detail but a marker of function, balance and adaptability.

Stories from the Amazon gave the point unusual force. The speakers described indigenous movement patterns not as exotic spectacle but as evidence of what human efficiency looked like when it had not been dulled by modern convenience. The lesson was less romantic than practical: the body learned economy through use, and lost it through disuse.

Their prescription was not expensive. Walk more. Stand more. Climb when possible. Add movement cues to daily life. Turn phone calls into walks. Insert squats, push-ups or pull-ups into office routines. Practice what strength circles call “greasing the groove”, accumulating micro-movements across the day rather than quarantining all exertion into a single hour.

Rebounding, Lymph And The Hidden Systems Of Health

Among the more unconventional recommendations was the rebounder, the small trampoline often dismissed as a novelty. The speakers treated it instead as a highly effective tool for waking the body’s less visible systems.

Because the lymphatic system lacked its own mechanical pump, movement and rhythmic bouncing could help circulate lymph, support drainage and stimulate recovery. They also claimed rebounding significantly increased oxygen intake, framing it as both playful and physiologically potent.

The larger point was characteristic of the entire talk: many of the body’s most important systems were overlooked precisely because they did not announce themselves dramatically. Microcirculation, lymphatic movement, respiratory reserve, cardiac recovery, these were the hidden layers of vitality, and neglecting them was often a greater error than skipping a biceps workout.

Breath As The Lever Of The Nervous System

If movement was the body’s language, breath was its command line.

In one of the session’s most memorable passages, the speakers described breathing as the rare access point into the autonomous nervous system. Through it, they said, it was possible to influence heart rate, internal state and stress response in real time. They guided the audience through box breathing, inhaling, holding, exhaling and holding again in equal measure, and used the exercise to make a larger point about control.

“The mind is the kite and our breathing is the thread that controls the mind,” they said. “Whenever we come more into our bodies through breathing, we get more resolution to what is happening in our mind.”

Then came an even more austere formulation: “The slower we breathe, the longer we live. Through breathing, you can influence your autonomous nervous system and take control of your heart rate and internal state.”

This was not presented as mysticism. It was practical physiology. Better breathing expanded respiratory capacity, improved stress tolerance and deepened physical efficiency. It also shaped cold exposure, which the speakers praised as both a recovery tool and a training ground for composure. In the shower, in ice water, in discomfort, the breath became the difference between panic and adaptation.

Strength, Metrics And The New Quantified Body

For all their appeal to natural movement, the speakers were also unmistakably children of the quantified age. Data, sensors and genetic interpretation formed a second spine of the talk.

Heart rate variability was presented as a key measure of readiness and recovery. Blood pressure, oxygen saturation, sitting time and sleep quality were all tracked through increasingly discreet devices. Teemu Arina referenced tools such as the Oura ring as examples of how wearables were moving beyond step counts toward more meaningful signals about nervous system restoration and physiological strain.

Grip strength received special emphasis. The trio described it as one of the most important markers of overall strength and longevity, a compressed signal of whole-body nervous system activation. Kettlebell swings, squats, deadlifts and carries were praised not simply for building visible muscle, but for recruiting large chains of tissue and sharpening metabolic function.

They also touched on ACTN3 genetics, slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscle fibres, and the emerging possibility of tailoring training to inherited strengths and injury profiles. A future of personalized exercise, they implied, would not ask everyone to train the same way. It would ask what kind of body had been given, and how best to work with it.

Kettlebells, Isometrics And The Return Of Whole-Body Training

If there was a hero implement in the room, it was the kettlebell.

The speakers singled out the kettlebell swing as perhaps the closest thing to a “silver bullet” movement, a whole-body exercise that elevated heart rate, activated the posterior chain and jolted the brain back into alertness. They also discussed isometric holds, planks, vibration plates and electrical muscle stimulation as methods for increasing muscular demand while reducing joint strain or fitting training into sedentary office life.

These were not presented as gimmicks so much as tactical tools, useful precisely because modern life had become so physically impoverished. When work kept people seated for long stretches, movement had to be smuggled back in through whatever openings were available.

Recovery Was Not Optional

Still, the most mature note in the talk may have been its suspicion of intensity without restoration.

“To exercise properly, you must also recover properly,” the speakers said. “Do not just focus on one aspect of fitness; instead, look at the whole picture to ensure your system stays resilient.”

This was the line that anchored everything else. The body did not improve during effort alone. It improved when stress met repair. Infrared saunas, cold exposure, measured breathing and data-informed recovery were all framed as necessary counterparts to hard training. Even the heart, they warned, had limits. Use mattered, but overuse without recovery carried a cost.

In that sense, the talk resisted the macho seductions that often accompany both fitness culture and biohacking culture alike. More was not always better. Smarter was better. More integrated was better. Sustainable resilience was better.

A Wider Definition Of Fitness

What Teemu Arina, Olli Sovijärvi and Jaakko Halmetoja offered at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm was not merely a catalogue of hacks. It was a wider definition of fitness itself.

Fitness, in their account, was not the ability to punish the body into compliance. It was the ability to remain adaptable, playful, metabolically alive and neurologically flexible across the span of a life. It lived in the feet as much as in the chest, in the breath as much as in the muscles, in recovery as much as in strain.

That message, delivered with humour and technical fluency, landed as something rarer than performance advice. It was an argument against fragmentation. Sleep, food, movement, focus, stress, breath, genes, play, all belonged to the same human system.

And if there was one lasting image from the session, it was not of elite athleticism, but of something almost childlike: a body in motion because motion itself was life, and because staying alive, in the fullest sense, meant never entirely forgetting how to play.

Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm