The 4-Hour Body (4HB) is an experimental lifestyle with the goal of finding out what makes your body work best. Self-experimentation has several benefits over conventional science—it’s personalized, fast-paced, multi-disciplinary, and free from corporate agenda.
Author Tim Ferriss has been living this lifestyle for years, and in The 4-Hour Body, he shares what he’s learned about his own body from researching scientific literature, interviewing experts, and self-experimentation. The book’s title comes from a 28-day experiment in which he spent only four hours total in the gym but lost 3 pounds of fat, gained 34 pounds of muscle, and decreased his total cholesterol.
Ferriss covers six topics:
While everyone’s body is different, much of what the author discovered is broadly applicable to most people, so you can use his recommendations as a starting point and inspiration for your own self-experimentation.
(Shortform note: We recommend consulting your doctor before starting any of the book’s programs or self-experimenting.)
An important part of your experimentation will be to find the minimum effective dose (MED), which is the smallest dose that will create a particular result. For example, the MED to boil water is 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Heating water past 212 degrees doesn’t make it any more boiled. Don’t ever exceed the MED required for any program—you’ll waste your time and increase your risk of injury.
To successfully carry out an experiment or stick to a program, you need to change your lifestyle, which can be hard. Fortunately, there are some strategies:
Body composition is a measure of how much of the body is made up of fat vs. muscle. To change your body composition, known as “recomp,” you need to lose fat, gain muscle, or both. You’ll achieve this using diet, exercise, supplements, and temperature manipulation.
The first recomp factor is diet. The Slow-Carb Diet was developed by the author through self-experimentation and works for almost everyone who follows it properly. On this diet, the author lost 20 pounds of fat within a month.
To follow the Slow-Carb Diet:
The second recomp factor is exercise. There are three highly effective exercises for fat loss and recomp:
The Russian kettlebell swing works the posterior chain, which includes your calves, hamstrings, glutes, and back muscles. To do a kettlebell swing:
The myotatic crunch activates multiple abdominal muscles, including those that make up a six-pack. To do the crunch:
The cat vomit exercise is designed to pull your abs in and work your waist muscles. To do the exercise:
The third recomp factor is supplements. The author recommends taking a combination of supplements with the acronym PAGG to aid fat loss:
You should take PAGG six days a week and take a full week off every 60 days. Make sure to take lots of B-complex vitamins while taking the supplements.
The final recomp factor is temperature manipulation. Cooling your body stimulates your body to burn calories as heat. There are four ways to harness this phenomenon:
In this section, we’ll first look at women’s sex lives, focusing on orgasms. Then, we’ll look at men, focusing on testosterone and sperm count.
The author consulted with scientists, experts, and porn stars, and again engaged in experimentation, to figure the best ways to create women’s orgasms. It’s useful to first practice orgasm outside of sex. There are two methods:
To achieve orgasm during sex, there are four tips to keep in mind:
Men’s testosterone levels have a huge impact on their sex appeal and libido. There are two protocols to increase testosterone and have better sex:
Like testosterone, sperm count is an important measure of men’s sexual health. An easy way to increase it is to stop carrying your cell phone in your pocket. Studies have shown that the radio frequency electro-magnetic fields (RF-EMF) produced by cell phones decrease serum testosterone and motile sperm in rats. The author found that the RF-EMF decreased his sperm count too.
There are several techniques for improving your sleep:
The best way to manage injury is “prehab,” which is the opposite of rehab—instead of doing recovery exercises after you’ve been injured, you do exercises in advance of working out to stabilize your body so you don’t become injured in the first place.
Most injuries are caused by imbalances—differences in strength and stability between the left and right sides of the body, or between opposing muscles. You have an imbalance when one side of your body can lift more than 10% more weight than the other side, or perform 10% more reps.
There are three exercises for correcting imbalances:
The chop and lift helps correct imbalances between the left and right sides of the body and between the upper and lower body. Additionally, the exercise helps increase core stability. To perform the chop:
The lift is the opposite of the chop—pull a low cable up.
The author doesn’t describe how to do the TGU; instead, he directs readers to a video. If you’re a beginner, you should aim for five reps with a 4-6 kg weight (women) or 8-12 kg (men).
The deadlift improves the stabilizing ability of the deep hip muscles. There are two types of deadlifts used for prehab: the two-arm (2SDL) and the one-arm (1SDL). Start by learning the two-arm deadlift:
The one-armed deadlift is the same motion but you’re only lifting one weight. Use your free hand to balance.
Sometimes, despite careful preparation, injuries still happen. The author has tested several injury treatments and found the following six most useful. Always try out biomechanical and postural treatments before moving on to manual therapy, drugs, or surgery.
No matter what sport you play, it's helpful to be strong, because being stronger than someone else of equal skill gives you an advantage over them.
When strength training to aid athletic performance, keep the following principles in mind:
The author recommends the following four strategies for living longer, all of which are low-cost, low-risk, and low-misery:
The 4-Hour Body (4HB) is an experimental lifestyle with the goal of finding out what makes your body work best. Author Tim Ferriss has been living this lifestyle for years. In The 4-Hour Body, he shares what he’s learned about his own body from researching scientific literature, interviewing experts, and self-experimentation. The book’s title comes from a 28-day experiment in which he spent only four hours total in the gym but lost three pounds of fat, gained 34 pounds of muscle, and decreased his total cholesterol.
Ferriss covers six topics:
While everyone’s body is different, much of what the author discovered is broadly applicable to most people, so you can use his recommendations as a starting point and inspiration for your own self-experimentation. His suggestions are small, straightforward, and easy to adhere to. You’ll see results so quickly that you won’t need any self-discipline—if a technique is obviously creating results, it’s easy to be motivated to keep doing it.
There are four rules to using the book (or summary):
(Shortform note:
Some scientists endorse self-experimentation. It has several advantages compared to conventional scientific research because it’s:
To start your self-experimentation journey, you’ll want to brush up on the cutting edge of performance science. Unfortunately, “common sense” and published research aren’t always accurate, and you’ll need to learn to distinguish what’s legitimate from what’s propaganda.
Always keep the following in mind when you encounter new information on this topic:
1. The language around health can be misleading. Sometimes, health advertising is full of meaningless terms that cause confusion. Whenever you hear a term, ask yourself if you can measure it, and if you can’t, you should avoid it. (For example, a program that will make you “strong enough to do ten chin-ups” is measurable, while one that promises to make you “strong and healthy” isn’t.) There are two specific types of terms to avoid:
2. Existing recommendations are based on incomplete knowledge. Humanity doesn’t fully understand how the world works. When it comes to food, there are probably nutrients no one has isolated yet, and it’s impossible to identify a deficiency in something unknown. Additionally, taking nutrients in isolation (as supplements, rather than getting them through food) can have unexpected effects.
3. Women and men don’t need to train differently—that’s just a myth invented by marketers. Most of the time, everyone wants the same thing—a little bit more muscle and less fat—and everyone should do the same thing to achieve this. There are two relevant differences between men and women, but neither necessitates a different type of training method:
4. Your genes affect your body, but they don’t rule it. While you might be more likely to be overweight or have a particular type of muscle, you can overcome a predisposition.
5. A “drug” is anything that you ingest that affects your body (except whole foods). Different names and categories for drugs—supplements, over-the-counter, and so on—don’t indicate what’s effective or safe.
6. It’s not always easy to tell what factor is causing a result. Ask yourself three questions:
You might think that scientific research would be free from the biases and inaccuracy of popular belief and marketing, but unfortunately, some studies aren’t legitimate. Additionally, the sources that publicize scientific results (like the media) sometimes have an agenda, and even if the science is solid, the reporting may skew it.
To find out what research actually shows, and if research is flawed, dig deeper when you come across the following:
1. Results that are relative rather than absolute. If a headline or study uses words like “longer” or “more,” or gives percentages rather than numbers, dig deeper. These are techniques to obscure results.
2. Results based on surveys or self-reporting when the reporting takes place after the fact. If a study relies on people remembering their habits, the data the participants provided might be inaccurate, since memory can be flawed. That doesn’t mean the study is completely useless, but it’s more relevant for broad strokes than specifics.
3. Results from observational studies. Observational studies look at groups of people outside a controlled environment, so there are many variables at play that may affect the results. The only thing an observational study can tell you is that two things might exist in one group at the same time, not that they necessarily have any cause or effect on each other (except when the numbers are massive, such as the twentyfold increase in lung cancer risk among smokers compared to non-smokers). Their only value is in helping researchers (or yourself) come up with ideas of what things might be related so that they can do a properly controlled test in a lab.
4. Results of diet studies that claim to have used a control group. It’s very hard to change only one thing in a diet study because food is made up of many different elements. Self-experimentation is more valuable in these cases because the state of your body before you make a change is in your control, and you don’t need to know exactly what you changed to get the result—just that whatever you ate created results.
5. Results that are caused by randomness, not causation. All good scientific studies include a p-value, which indicates how likely it is that the results are simply random. Studies with a p-value of lower than 0.05 have results that are statistically significant—there’s a lower than 5% chance that they’re random. There are three things to keep in mind about p-values:
6. Results funded by organizations with an agenda. Sometimes, organizations that fund studies want a particular result that will benefit them, and to maintain funding, scientists will skew the data to achieve this result. Skewing the data ranges from comparing the drug to a placebo (as the placebo does nothing, the drug is almost guaranteed to have better results than it), only generally and vaguely asking about side effects, or leaving out negative results. To find out who funded a study, read the “conflicts of interest” section, and look for notes about consulting fees.
An important part of your experimentation will be to find the minimum effective dose (MED), which is the smallest dose that will create a particular result. For example, the MED to boil water is 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Heating water past 212 degrees doesn’t make it any more boiled. Further heating just wastes fuel.
Whenever you want to make a change to your body, only do the minimum that’s required to cause the change. This is for two reasons:
Reason #1: Avoiding injury. If you do more than you need to, you’ll actually slow your progress or go backwards because you’ll tire yourself out and overload your body’s healing mechanisms.
Reason #2: Saving time and energy. Pareto’s principle states that in general, 80% of results are caused by 20% of the effort. When it comes to performance science, the ratio is even higher—according to the author, 2.5% of effort is responsible for 95% of results. Doing more than you have to isn’t going to have much effect and is a waste of your time.
There are limits to what you can learn from self-experimentation if your only data-gathering technique is observation. For example, you might notice that after eating bananas, you feel better, but this could be for a variety of reasons—bananas contain important nutrients, so perhaps you were feeling unwell because you were deficient in those nutrients. Or, you could have just been hungry. Either way, you might have felt even better if you ate something else. To learn more about what’s actually going on with your body, you need to have tests done.
There are three rules for testing:
We’ll look at specific tests for specific goals in later chapters, but the author encourages you to get tested every six months (every three if you’re not eating animal products) to make sure your body is working properly. Everyone should test their aspartate aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase (for liver health), total cholesterol (for, among other things, heart health), and follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, estradiol, and prolactin (for sexual health). Men should additionally test their testosterone levels and get their semen analyzed. Women should additionally test their egg supply.
Your insurance might cover your testing, but US doctors often won’t order preventative tests, especially images, because this can open them up to audits by insurance companies. Even if you have to pay for your tests yourself, they’re worth it—they help you detect health problems early.
Often, testing is less expensive in other countries than the US, so consider getting your tests done while you’re traveling, or plan a trip around them. For example, when the author went to Nicaragua on a surf and writing trip, he also had some MRIs and urine and blood testing done. He paid $400 per MRI (they’re $750 in the US) and he saved $640 on urine and blood tests. Altogether, he saved $3,090, which was more than the cost of his trip.
To successfully carry out an experiment (or to stick to a program that your experimentation has revealed is effective), you need to change your lifestyle. This can be hard when the change makes your life uncomfortable or inconvenient. Even though logic might tell us that we need to make changes, logic isn’t enough of a motivator to result in behavioral changes. For example, many people struggle to quit smoking even if their lung health depends on it.
There are two reasons you may not stick with plans:
Fortunately, there are some strategies for mitigating these factors:
Strategy #1: Force an epiphany. Don’t just wish for change—think of it as necessary.
Strategy #2: Measure a variable. Ideally, you’ll measure the variable most responsible for creating results, but if that’s not possible, measure something else—measuring something is better than nothing.
Strategy #3: Oversimplify. It’s a lot of work to track and record changes, and the effort required can be discouraging. To avoid this pitfall, estimate instead of striving for exact numbers. The difference is likely negligible, especially if the numbers are large. As long as you’re close, you’ll see results.
Strategy #4: Accept halfway completion. Even if you can’t finish something, or you can’t do it perfectly, you’ll still reap some benefits from having done part of it.
The 4HB is a lifestyle that involves experimenting with your body to find out what works for you.
How do you feel about your body and its performance right now? (For example, your weight, sleep quality, and so on.)
What’s one body-related goal (losing weight, running a marathon, and so on) you’d like to achieve?
How do you think meeting this goal will benefit your life?
The first of the six topics the author covers in the 4HB is body recomposition. Body composition is a measure of how much of the body is made up of fat versus muscle. To change your body composition, known as “recomp,” you need to lose fat, gain muscle, or both.
In this chapter, we’ll look at three of the biological factors that affect recomp: calories, insulin, and muscle. Understanding these factors and how they affect the body will make it easier to understand the mechanisms behind the strategies in subsequent chapters.
The calorie was invented by Wilbur Olin Atwater in the nineteenth century. He measured calories by incinerating food. However, humans don’t incinerate food when they eat; digestion is a far more complicated chemical process. (For example, eating a piece of firewood isn’t going to release the same amount of energy into your body that would be released into the air if the log were burned.) As a result, the calorie isn’t a particularly useful measure when it comes to body recomposition because it's not an accurate measure of how much energy you’re actually getting from digesting food.
Therefore, when thinking about your calorie intake and outtake, it’s important to keep the following in mind:
Insulin is a hormone that absorbs sugar from the bloodstream and, among other things, transforms this sugar into energy or stores it as fat. Your body naturally releases insulin whenever your blood sugar rises—generally, whenever you eat or drink. The less insulin you release, the less fat your body stores.
Glycemic index (GI) and glycemic load (GL) are measures of how much a food increases blood sugar. (GL corrects for portion size and is calculated by multiplying GI by the number of carbohydrates.) These measurements have two downsides: 1) they don’t take into account different body chemistries and genetics, and 2) they’re all isolated measurements and most people eat food in combination, so the math is challenging.
The author wasn’t satisfied with GI and GL, so he monitored his blood sugar levels using a DexCom, a medical implant usually used by diabetics. He experimented with eating different foods, and different combinations of foods, to see how long it took them to affect his blood sugar and how much the levels changed. The author discovered all of the following about his own body. While everyone is different, others have found his discoveries accurate for themselves:
Discovery #1: Maintaining a constant blood sugar of 100mg/dL is ideal for fat loss. Consuming the following will help keep your blood sugar level flat:
Discovery #2: Vinegar doesn’t reduce the glycemic index of food. While there’s a lot of scientific evidence to support that consuming vinegar with a meal can lower its glycemic index, the author found vinegar had no effect on him. He thought that might have been because he wasn’t consuming enough vinegar, or because it was reacting with something else he was eating.
Discovery #3: The speed at which you eat affects your blood sugar levels. When you eat quickly, your body digests food all at once, which causes a spike in blood sugar. Eat more slowly to flatten the curve—take at least half an hour to eat each meal. To do this, you might:
Discovery #4: Drinking water dilutes digestion. Drink water while you eat, ideally while you’re taking breaks between plate sections. (Shortform note: In fact, drinking water doesn’t dilute digestive juices, but it does aid digestion in other ways such as softening food.)
Discovery #5: It takes a long time for food to increase blood sugar. It usually took 90 to 180 minutes after eating before the author would see his blood sugar spike. Orange juice was faster, at 40 minutes. This meant that if the author needed energy for a workout, he needed to eat between an hour and a half and two hours before going to the gym.
Muscle fibers are made of two pieces:
Both myofibrils and sarcoplasm are important. Some people deprioritize the sarcoplasm because it’s “just water,” but water helps promote protein production and dehydration decreases muscle endurance. Finally, the size of sarcoplasm is important because when the sarcoplasm grows, its potential for energy storage increases as well.
In the previous chapter, you learned about some of the body’s processes and some general tips for influencing them. In this chapter, we'll explore the starting point of basic body recomposition: assessing your current body composition.
Weighing yourself doesn’t give you much information about your body composition because a scale can only tell you your total body weight, not how much of that weight is fat versus muscle. (For example, when the author’s father was trying to lose weight, he lost the least amount of weight during the time he gained the most muscle.) To avoid doubting yourself or becoming discouraged, measure body composition in addition to total weight.
There are multiple ways to measure body fat. The author’s top three are:
Other options are:
No matter what tool (or tools) you use, don’t compare numbers measured by different tools. Each of the tools measures a little bit differently, so track relative changes, not absolute values.
In addition to measuring your body fat percentage, it’s also useful to measure your circumference, because as you recomp, different parts of your body will change size. Measure circumference by wrapping a tape measure around the following four parts of your body:
Add up all these numbers to get your total inches (TI). As you recomp, your TI measurement should shrink.
To calculate your lean body weight (weight from everything besides fat), simply multiply your total weight by your body fat percentage to get the percentage of your weight that comes from fat. Then, subtract the weight of your fat from your total body weight.
For example, if you weigh 100 pounds and your body fat percentage is 10%, then your weight from fat is 10 pounds. Subtract ten pounds from 100 to get 90 pounds of lean body weight.
No matter how much fat you want to ultimately lose or muscle you want to ultimately gain, start with a smaller recomposition goal. If you’re under 120 pounds, your goal is 10 pounds of recomposition. If you’re over 120 pounds, your goal is 20 pounds.
If you prefer body fat goals to weight goals:
There are several ways to measure body fat.
What body fat measuring tools are available in your area? (Do an online search for gyms, health clubs, and medical facilities that offer DEXA, BodPod, or ultrasound.)
You should always use the same tool to measure body fat. Which tool would you prefer to use? Why?
Now that you’ve taken baseline measurements and chosen some goals, it's time to start the recomp process. You’ll use a combination of diet, exercise, drugs, and temperature manipulation to achieve your recomp. First, we’ll look at diet, which will have the greatest effect on your recomp, likely accounting for 60% of results. This chapter will focus on the Slow-Carb Diet.
Now that we’ve learned how to stick to a diet, it’s time to look at some specific diet options. Popular diets work to some extent, but they’re not going to be enough to totally transform your body. The Slow-Carb Diet, on the other hand, was developed by the author through self-experimentation and works for almost everyone who follows it properly. On this diet, the author lost 20 pounds of fat (which corresponds to two clothing sizes) within a month.
(The Slow-Carb Diet involves eating a lot of protein, which you might be skeptical of if you have existing gout or kidney problems, but the author says there is no good scientific evidence to support the claim that protein is bad for your kidneys.)
Rule #1: Stop eating white-colored carbohydrates, or any carbohydrates that come in white-colored varieties (rice comes in white, brown, pink, black—don’t eat any rice). Avoiding white-colored food will also help you avoid diabetes-causing chemicals created by bleaching flour.
Rule #2: Repeat the same 3-4 meals regularly. This allows you to avoid foods that will make you gain fat and ensure you get enough protein (at least 20 grams per meal). Each meal should contain one item from each of the following categories:
Rule #3: Eat two to three times what you used to. You’re probably used to small portion sizes if you’ve been eating things like pasta, which isn’t very physically large but contains a lot of calories. Slow-carb foods don’t have as many calories by volume, so you need to eat a larger quantity. However, don’t overeat nuts or chickpeas—you’ll gain fat.
Rule #4: Eat at prescribed times:
Rule #5: Drink beverages according to the following rules:
Rule #6: Avoid fruit, except for tomatoes and avocados in moderation. Fruit contains the sugar fructose, which will make you gain fat. Fructose can also increase the uptake of trace elements such as iron, and iron can be toxic in large quantities.
Rule #7: Don’t eat dairy, except for cottage cheese. Even though dairy products have a low glycemic index, they produce a large insulin release, which will make your body store fat.
Follow the Slow-Carb Diet rules only six days per week. The seventh day is a built-in cheat day—eat and drink whatever you want, all the no-nos included.
Though it sounds counterintuitive, cheat day provides many benefits:
You won’t gain any permanent weight from cheat day as long as you adjust your body chemistry so that what you eat either passes through you or is absorbed into muscle tissue (rather than fat tissue). To do this:
1. Keep your blood sugar levels consistent so your body won’t release as much insulin. To manipulate blood sugar levels:
2. Increase the speed of food passing through you by eating or drinking 100-200 milligrams of caffeine at each meal. If food passes through your body fast enough, there isn’t time for your body to absorb all of it.
3. Encourage the storage of calories in muscles instead of fat. The glucose transporter type 4 (GLUT-4) is a “gate” on both muscles and fat that allows calories to enter. You can stimulate GLUT-4 on the surface of muscles by doing 60-90 seconds of muscular contractions just before you eat and then again 90 minutes after eating. Try squats, push-ups against the wall, or chest flys with a resistance band.
It’s normal to gain weight immediately after cheat day and that’s not a problem—you’ll lose the weight again over the next two days. Remember that circumference measurements are a better measure of fat loss than weight.
Men can often replace cheat day with a single cheat meal. Some women can’t because the diet decreases leptin (a hormone that regulates fat storage), and low leptin levels can inhibit menstruation.
Following any diet is challenging. Here are some of the common problems people encounter with the Slow-Carb Diet and how to fix them:
Problem #1: You feel the diet is too strict. If you think the diet is too hard to commit to upfront, try:
Problem #2: You don’t like some of the diet’s specific requirements. You can tweak the diet as follows:
Problem #3: You think repeating meals is boring. Remember that the results are worth a little boredom. Also, reflect on how you used to eat—probably, you often repeated meals anyway. Most people eat the same few breakfasts.
Problem #4: You have concerns about cooked vs. raw food. While there have been studies that show raw food is healthier than cooked food, the most-oft cited study was conducted on cats, who have two important biological distinctions from humans: 1) humans are omnivores and cats are carnivores, and 2) cats become unhealthy when they eat cooked food because heat deactivates taurine, an amino acid that helps digestion. Humans, on the other hand, can produce their own taurine so it’s not dangerous to eat cooked food. It’s fine to eat cooked kidney beans, carrots, and kale, among many other things.
Problem #5: You’re not getting enough electrolytes. (Symptoms of this include feeling weak or experiencing spasms.) As you lose excess water on the diet, you lose electrolytes—such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium—as well. Calcium and magnesium are easiest to take as pills, though you can get them from food if you prefer. A high source of calcium is salmon with bones, and there’s a lot of magnesium in pumpkin seeds. You can get potassium from potassium-enriched salt, avocados, or pills.
Problem #6: You get hungry (or hunger creates low-blood sugar symptoms such as headaches). If you’re hungry, eat more legumes and protein at each meal. If you’re really hungry, eat an extra meal. If hunger keeps you up at night, have some protein before bed, such as a tablespoon of almond butter.
Problem #7: You want snacks. Since you should never be hungry on the diet, you likely want snacks for a psychological reason such as using them to procrastinate. If you have to snack, eat carrots.
Problem #8: You like eating out, or you’re traveling and have less control over what you eat. When you eat out, choose Mexican or Thai cuisine, which typically have a lot of the characteristics of the slow-food diet and are inexpensive. At any restaurant, ask for substitutions to get the food closer to your ideal meal (for example, sub in a salad for rice). If you don’t have a lot of options, eat walnuts or almonds. Likewise, you can find a chicken salad almost anywhere.
Problem #9: Menstruation (if applicable) is affecting your weight. Ignore your weight in the 10 days before you menstruate because you retain water during this time, which will skew the numbers. Start paying attention to weight again the day after your period ends.
Problem #10: You hit a plateau. Over time, your pace of fat loss will slow. Once this happens, you can introduce exercise. We’ll look more at exercise in Chapter 6.
The Slow-Carb Diet allows for some personalization.
Which part of the Slow-Carb Diet seems easiest to you? Why?
Which part of the diet seems hardest to you? Why?
How can you personalize the diet to maximize the easy things and mitigate the hard ones? (For example, if you love lentils but hate beans, you could replace beans with lentils in all your legume portions.)
After following the Slow-Carb Diet for 3-4 months, the author recommends two weeks on a primarily plant-based diet (PPBD), a diet in which at least 70% of the volume of food comes from plants. This is for three reasons:
(Shortform note: Read our summary of The China Study for more on the benefits of a plant-based diet.)
When moving to a PPBD, it’s best to transition slowly to avoid the following problems:
There are five steps to achieving a 100% PPBD, but you can stop at an earlier step if you think the later steps are unsustainable for you.
There are several common questions and problems associated with moving to a PPBD:
Problem #1: You don’t know where to get your protein. Eat whole foods that contain a lot of protein, such as nuts, or plant-based protein powder, such as rice or pea protein. Avoid soy, because while it’s a source of protein, it can cause thyroid problems, and it contains estrogen, which in large amounts can cause sterility. Also, avoid dairy—in large quantities, it can cause health problems because store-bought products often contain antibiotics and hormones, which are bad for you.
Problem #2: You’re not getting enough nutrients. If you’re eating a PPBD, you won’t get the same nutrients as if you were eating animal products. In particular, make sure you get the USRDA recommended doses of vitamins D, B-12, and K, and biotin, lysine, and iodine by either using supplements or carefully planning what you eat. If you’re planning to get all your nutrients from food, consider consulting a nutritionist.
Problem #3: You like eating out, or you’re traveling and have less control over what you eat. Just like the Slow-Carb Diet, eat Mexican and Thai cuisine because both include veggies and beans. You can also eat raw nuts, which are available in most airports and will keep you full for a long time.
John Berardi is a scientist who studies nutrient biochemistry and exercise. He advises high-level athletes on their nutrition and decided to do a 28-day experiment during which he ate vegan and tried to gain muscle mass. He was successful—he gained around 5 pounds of muscle and 2 pounds of fat.
Berardi has some tips on going vegan from his experiment and his scientific background:
The author doesn’t permanently eat a 100% PPBD for two reasons:
Reason #1: Evolutionary biology and anthropology suggest humans should eat meat:
Reason #2: Empirical evidence suggests health problems arise from not eating animal products:
The author doesn’t know exactly why avoiding animal products causes health problems, but he thinks it’s either because vegetarian staples, like soy, are responsible, or because animal products are critical to hormone production.
No matter which diet you use, you have to stick with it to see recomp changes. However, humans are inherently bad at making permanent lifestyle changes. Fortunately, there are five strategies to help you stay on track:
Strategy #1: Prioritize. The first strategy is to pick and choose between the four strategies below. You only need to change the minimum amount that will create results. Choose two of the four strategies marked with an asterisk (*) to get started.
Strategy #2: Be aware of your behavior as it happens. It’s less useful to become aware of actions after they’ve occurred because there’s no way to change them. For example, reflect on what you’re eating before you eat it. Specifically:
Strategy #3: *Motivate yourself by taking measurements. Measure and track your body fat percentage, total inches, and any additional measurements you’re interested in. Once you hit five entries, you’re likely to become hooked.
Strategy #4: Harness the power of competition. Adding an element of game or competition to your diet motivates you to change your behavior so you can “win” the game. Interestingly, humans are more motivated by failure than success—scientists have discovered that people are more distraught about losing $50 than winning $50—so use negative stakes in particular, such as humiliation, for motivation. Specifically:
Strategy #5: Don’t try to change multiple lifestyle factors all at the same time because you’ll get overwhelmed.
Exercise is the second of three ingredients of body recomp. Note that exercise is different from physical recreation (such as sports)—physical recreation is for fun. Exercise is goal-based and will be responsible for about 30% of your recomp results.
There are three recomp exercises: one that works the posterior chain (the muscles along the back of your body), and two that work your abs.
The Russian kettlebell swing works the posterior chain, which includes your calves, hamstrings, glutes, and back muscles. This exercise is highly effective for fat loss, posture improvement, strength gain, and increased sex appeal. (According to the author, men find women who have a waist-to-hip ratio of 7:10 most attractive because this ratio is associated with fertility, and women find men with a ratio of 8:10 or 9:10 for waist-to-hip most attractive. Kettlebell swings help achieve these ratios.)
There are four steps to learning the kettlebell swing:
Step #1: Get into position.
Step #2: Learn the touch-and-go deadlift.
Step #3: Progress the touch-and-go deadlift.
Step #4: Do the full swing.
Kettlebells come in different weights. In general, men should start with a 20-24-kg bell and women with a 16-20-kg bell. You should be able to do 20 swings with good form with the weight you choose.
The kettlebell swing will make most of your body look better, but to get six-pack abs, you’ll need to do two additional exercises: the myotatic crunch and the cat vomit exercise. Until the author started doing these two exercises, he’d never had a visible six-pack, even when his body fat was lower than 12% (which is necessary for visible abs). This is because conventional ab exercises, such as crunches or sit-ups on the floor, don’t use the full range of motion of the abs. Using the two exercises, he had visible abs in three weeks.
The myotatic crunch is effective because it puts your body in a stretched position—when a muscle is stretched, the body automatically contracts to resist the stretch, and this contraction builds strength. Additionally, this crunch activates multiple abdominal muscles, not just the six-pack (rectus abdominis) muscles.
To do the myotatic crunch:
Do ten repetitions twice a week. When you can do ten, add weight by holding a book. (Note: If you’re a woman and you want to maintain an hourglass figure, don’t add more than ten pounds of weight. Using extra weight can give you a square-shaped waist.)
The cat vomit exercise is designed to pull your abs in. The six-pack muscles (rectus abdominis) run vertically, so they have no effect on how far your abs stick out. The muscles that do have an effect are the “corset muscles” (transverse abdominis), which are the muscles that run around your middle and work when you cough or laugh.
To do the cat vomit exercise:
Do ten repetitions twice a week.
Supplements and temperature manipulation are the last of the three building blocks for recomp. We’ll look at supplements first. Consult with your doctor before taking any supplements—the supplements the author recommends can react badly with other medications and health conditions. Make sure to take lots of B-complex vitamins while taking the supplements.
The author discusses three families of supplements:
The author recommends taking a combination of supplements with the acronym PAGG to reduce the amount of insulin your body releases and aid fat loss:
You should take the supplements six days a week and take a full week off every 60 days.
Before discovering PAGG, the author took a combination of supplements known as the ECA stack (ephedrine hydrochloride, caffeine, and aspirin). While many studies agree that the cocktail is effective, and the author saw results, it produces some serious side effects including adrenal fatigue and withdrawal pains. He doesn’t recommend the ECA stack.
There are two types of gut bacteria related to fat absorption: Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. Obese people have a higher ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes. As they lose weight, the ratio includes more Bacteroidetes. Scientists don’t know exactly how Firmicutes and obesity are related yet.
You can influence your gut bacteria populations by taking probiotics and prebiotics. Probiotics are bacteria, and prebiotics are substances that promote the growth of bacteria.
Additionally, to keep your gut healthy:
A healthy gut comes with some additional benefits besides fat loss—95% of the body’s serotonin, a hormone related to mood, is produced in the gut. Therefore, a healthy gut contributes to better mental health.
In addition to taking supplements, you can influence your fat loss by cooling your body. This is because one type of fat, brown adipose tissue (BAT), helps burn calories as heat. Cold temperatures stimulate BAT and might also contribute to the creation of more BAT, which will help you burn other types of fat.
To harness the power of temperature in your weight-loss journey, use these four strategies:
1. Ice the back of your neck or upper back. (BAT is mainly found in the upper chest and neck.) Leave the ice on for 20-30 minutes.
2. Drink at least half a liter of ice water as soon as you wake up. This will increase the rate your body uses energy when it's at rest (resting metabolic rate).
3. Take cold showers. Use hot water for the first 1-2 minutes, then step out of the water and put soap in your hair and face. Turn the water to cold and rinse just your head. Get fully under the water, facing away from the stream so the water hits your upper back and neck. Stay there for 1-3 minutes as you finish your soaping routine, and then rinse. Take this kind of shower before bed and/or before breakfast.
4. Take 20-minute ice baths that are cold enough to make you shiver. To make an ice bath, pour two or three bags of ice into a bath half full of cold water. When the ice is 80% melted, get in. If you’re a beginner, immerse only your lower body for five minutes, and then the rest of your body minus your hands for the next five minutes. To increase the fat-loss effect, have 10-20 grams of protein and 200-450 milligrams of cayenne half an hour before the bath.
In the previous part, we looked at some basic strategies for moderate recomp. Now, we’ll look at some advanced strategies to create significant change. Like basic recomp, advanced recomp involves a combination of diet, exercise, and supplements, but often one is prioritized, depending on your goals.
First, we’ll look at significant fat loss. Then we’ll tackle significant muscle gain.
Once your body fat percentage is low enough that you only need to lose a final 5-10 pounds, you can employ some of the strategies bodybuilders use to get their body fat percentage below 10%.
Diet is the most important factor when it comes to losing your last few pounds. Move from the Slow-Carb Diet to the following diet. Eat one of the following five meals every three hours. You have to eat your first meal within an hour of waking and your last meal within the hour before sleeping. You can’t skip any.
At each meal, you can also eat as much as you want of broccoli, collards, asparagus, spinach, kale, and Brussels sprouts. You can have a cheat meal every week or so.
If you weigh 160 pounds or less, eat the following quantities:
If you’re heavier than 160 pounds, adjust the portions:
(Shortform note: The author doesn’t give the calculations for all portion adjustments. We’ve come up with the numbers based on his two examples.)
Some bodybuilders use drugs, such as steroids, to get their body fat as low as 4%. The author doesn’t think steroids are as dangerous as the media hypes them up to be—they work for certain medical conditions—but he doesn’t recommend anyone experiment with drugs without medical supervision.
To gain significant muscle and a bodybuilder-like build, you’ll use a combination of exercise and diet that the author developed called Occam’s Protocol, with the option of additionally using supplements. The protocol has impressive results:
As usual, the protocol will make use of the MED and requires fewer than four hours in the gym per week. All you need to do is hit the threshold to start muscular growth and then manipulate your diet so that energy from food goes toward growing your muscles instead of being stored as fat.
(Note: The goal of Occam’s Protocol is to improve your appearance, not to become stronger. While you will become stronger because you’re building muscle, if your goal is functional strength, see Part 6 for some sports-specific strength tips.)
Exercise is the first element of Occam’s Protocol, and the workouts are based on a routine developed by Mike Mentzer, a successful competitive bodybuilder. The program is designed to be as safe as possible and the author has never hurt himself.
First, we’ll go over the workouts in detail. Then we’ll look at some general rules for both workouts, how to choose appropriate weights, and how to schedule your training.
The protocol contains only two workouts. They can both be done with either machines or free weights. The author recommends machines for most people, but if you train at different gyms, free weights are easier to standardize. (Shortform note: If the author doesn’t describe how to do the exercise, we’ve included a link to a video of the generic exercise.)
Workout #1
Machine Version
Do one set of the following:
Free Weight Version
Do one set of the following:
Workout #2
Machine Version
Do one set of the following:
Free Weight Version
Do one set of the following:
To figure out which weight to start the program with:
After testing, only change the weight in between workouts, not during. Increase the weight whenever you can complete the minimum number of reps for all non-optional sets, and increase by 10% or 10 pounds, whichever is larger. If the new weight still feels easy after a few reps, pause for five minutes. Then add another 5-10 pounds.
The general principle behind scheduling your workouts is that the stronger and bigger you get, the more time you need to rest. Muscles grow faster than they recover. Expert Dr. Doug McGuff found that most people get the most benefit from training less than once a week (putting aside benefits like sports being fun).
Before starting Occam’s Protocol, stop any training that damages your muscles (resistance training) for a week. Then, schedule your workouts as follows:
As far as workout time, studies have shown that people’s muscles are strongest between 4 pm and 6 pm. Pain tolerance for some conditions, such as arthritis, is highest between 4 pm and 5 pm. However, according to the author, most of these studies don’t take wake-up time into account. The author has found that for him, strength and pain tolerance are highest 8-10 hours after waking up (4 pm to 6 pm is 8-10 hours after a typical wake-up time of 8 am).
Regardless of when your ideal training time is, you should work out at around the same time every day so that you can accurately gauge your progress.
While working out according to Occam’s Protocol, follow the Slow-Carb Diet but include the following additions:
If you’re not gaining at least 2.5 pounds of muscle a week, you probably need to eat more. You need to eat 20 calories for every pound of your lean body weight plus an extra 200 calories per day. Count calories for one day to make sure you’re not accidentally undereating.
If you have trouble eating enough, soldier on—your body just needs some time to adjust to the changes. If the problem is that you have trouble eating a lot at once, eat smaller portions more often instead. Or, try liquid food instead of solid, such as shakes, which is especially helpful for those who have trouble with breakfast.
As part of your quest to eat a lot, make sure you eat a lot of protein. To build muscle, you should eat 1.35 grams of protein for every pound of lean body weight. For example, if you weigh 120 pounds and your body fat percentage is 15%, 18 pounds of your body is fat. Subtract 18 pounds from 120 to get 102 pounds: your lean body weight. Multiply 102 by 1.35 to get 127.5 grams of protein.
While popular belief says the human body can’t process more than 30 grams of protein in a single sitting, this is untrue. It’s fine to either eat protein throughout the day or eat it all once. Researchers in France found that for 26-year-old women, it didn’t matter if the protein was consumed all in one sitting or throughout the day; the body handled either method just fine. Older subjects actually retained the protein better if they ate it all at once.
You don’t have to take supplements with Occam’s Protocol—it works fine on its own—but if you’d like to, the author has four recommendations:
Like any program, there are challenges with following Occam’s Protocol. Here are some of the common problems people encounter and how to fix them:
Problem #1: You miss a workout because of travel. If you have to miss a workout, take the time as a rest day rather than trying to do a partial or adjusted workout. If you travel a lot, consider using free weights instead of machines because most gyms have standardized versions.
Problem #2: You miss the minimum number of reps. Failing to complete reps happens for two reasons: You didn’t eat or rest enough, or you stopped too early and didn’t push yourself to total failure. If you miss by more than one rep on the first exercise, stop and take a rest day before trying again—don’t change the weight or make an adjustment. Take an extra rest day between all future workouts.
Problem #3: You feel the 5/5 cadence makes you slower in other athletic pursuits. There’s no evidence to suggest that using a slower cadence will make you slow in general. In fact, there’s evidence to the contrary: In 1973, a high school weightlifting team trained by doing slow negatives and were very successful at Olympic weightlifting, which requires a lot of speed. As long as you don’t let weightlifting get in the way of your other training, you’ll be fine.
Problem #4: You want to change the protocol. This program is designed to help you gain 10 or more pounds of muscle in a month. If you have a different goal, choose a different program.
Problem #5: You want to train less often. Some trainers suggest training only once or twice a month. This technique is more helpful for strength gain than size gain. To gain size, you need to eat a lot and use exercise to encourage insulin to deliver glucose to muscles rather than fat. If you only train once or twice a month, you can’t eat as much.
The second of the six topics the author covers in the 4HB is how to improve your sex life. In this chapter, we’ll look at improving women’s sex lives, and in the next chapter, improving men’s.
First, we’ll take a brief look at women’s anatomy. Then, we’ll look at how to create an orgasm.
The clitoris is the part of the woman’s body most associated with orgasm. It’s an upside-down V shape, with the head of the clitoris at the top of the V. The arms of the V are behind the labia minora (lip-like folds of skin around the vagina).
To find the most sensitive part of the clitoris , imagine a clock over the pubic bone, with 12 o’clock pointing toward the top of the clitoris (toward the belly button) and 6 o’clock toward the toes. The sensitive spot is at 1 o’clock.
Men, even male scientists, have been skeptical of the clitoris’s existence and function throughout history. In 1559, Realdo Colombo “discovered” the clitoris (Hippocrates had brought it up thousands of years before), but other male scientists wouldn’t acknowledge its existence. This is probably because if the mechanism for female pleasure is framed as unpredictable, it’s not the man’s fault when he doesn’t bring her to orgasm.
According to researchers, 50% of women in the US can’t orgasm, and 70% can’t orgasm from intercourse. The author consulted with scientists, experts, and porn stars, and again engaged in experimentation, to figure the best ways to create women’s orgasms, which he defines as a state in which there’s no emotional or physical resistance to a finger touching the clitoris. This resistance-less state produces flushing and involuntary contractions.
First, we’ll look at achieving orgasms outside of sex—women need focus to reach orgasm, and sometimes there’s so much going on during sex that they become distracted. Later, we’ll look at how to achieve orgasm during sex.
The author covers two ways to practice orgasm without sex: self-exploration, and a partner-based technique developed by OneTaste, a sex research business.
Self-exploration is the first way to practice orgasm and involves a combination of self-reflection, soul-searching, and practicing masturbating. Here are some specific recommendations:
Recommendation #1: Reflect on your experiences by asking yourself the following questions:
Recommendation #2: Watch “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm.”
Recommendation #3: Learn what arouses you. Read erotica by women and explore fantasies.
Recommendation #4: Practice masturbating. Porn star Nina Hartley recommends practicing for five minutes a time, right before going to sleep or after waking up. If you feel shame or guilt, read When the Earth Moves, and/or keep in mind that these feelings will fade with practice.
Recommendation #5: Up your masturbating game by purchasing a vibrator that has different speed settings. Try holding off on the vibrator until you’re close to orgasm.
Recommendation #6: Work your pubococcygeus (pelvic floor) muscle. A strong pubococcygeus muscle makes it easier to orgasm. Strengthen it by using vaginal barbells, which are small weights inserted into the vagina. Contract to hold the barbells in while you try to pull them out with your fingers.
The OneTaste technique is the second method for practicing orgasm. The author studied with OneTaste practitioners to learn their techniques and believes their 15-minutes-to-orgasm session is very effective for two reasons: There are no goals (and therefore no pressure), and it separates orgasm from sex.
The technique is practiced for a timed, 15-minute session. Here are the steps:
Step #1: Talk to your partner to make sure you both understand that there’s no goal for the session—all the man is going to do is practice one stroke. Particularly make it clear:
Step #2: Set up in position. The directions below differ slightly from the OneTaste method because the author found the following version more comfortable for right-handers.
Step #3: Start the 15-minute timer. From this point on, the woman doesn’t have to do anything and the following directions are for the man.
Step #4: Find the spot that will be stroked.
Step #5: Start stroking.
Step #6: After the timer goes, close the session by “grounding”—overlap the hands and push upward on the woman’s pubic bone. The woman chooses the amount of pressure and most women will prefer hard pressure. Grounding is important because it’s guaranteed closure—grounding will happen no matter what (while something like orgasm isn’t guaranteed).
Once you and your partner have completed five sessions, you can add the following to your 15-minute practice:
Now that we’ve learned how to create women’s orgasm in two different isolated contexts, it’s time to try to introduce orgasm to sex. Here are four tips:
Tip #1: Women create the orgasm. Men can help, but the woman is in charge, and a good general rule is that the man provides the pressure and the woman takes charge of the movement.
Tip #2: Adjust positions to create better angles. For maximum pleasure, the penis should touch the g-spot, which is on the top side of the vagina, 1-2 inches in. The man can find it by turning his hand palm up and inserting his index finger as deep as his second knuckle. If he bends his finger, he’ll find a spongy spot.
For example, to get the best angle in the missionary position (man on top):
Tip #3: Adjust positions to create better pressure. For maximum pleasure, the point of friction should be between the man’s pelvic bone and the woman’s clitoris, not the penis and vagina. The man can try moving his hips side to side, in circles, or rocking back and forth.
Tip #4: Experiment with penetration depth and rhythm. It’s uncomfortable for women when the penis hits the cervix. To avoid this, the man can aim his penis at ten or two o’clock. Experiment with the depth and rhythm, but the author suggests nine half-length penetrations, followed by one long penetration, is a good place to start.
In the last chapter, we learned how to make sex more pleasurable for women. Now, it’s time to look at how to improve things for men. First, we’ll look at men’s anatomy and biology. Then, we’ll look at how to influence biochemistry to improve sex and sperm.
Men’s testosterone levels have a huge impact on their libido and sex appeal (testosterone affects pheromone production). However, improving your sex life isn’t as simple as just injecting your body with external testosterone.
There are two major hormones related to testosterone production:
To increase your bioavailable (usable) testosterone levels, you’ll increase LH and decrease SHBG.
Through self-experimentation, the author developed two protocols to increase testosterone levels, leading to higher libido. While he was experimenting, he increased his total testosterone from 245 to 653 ng/dL and his bioavailable (non-inert) testosterone from 150 to 294 ng/dL. One night when he was on a dinner date, all the women in a restaurant were interested in him, and he had great sex with his date later.
The first protocol is for maintenance and the second is for a boost right before sex. (Shortform note: The protocols are covered in two of the book’s chapters and the dosages vary between chapters. We’ve included the range given by both chapters.)
Protocol #1 involves diet, using supplements, and temperature manipulation.
To keep your testosterone levels high, before bed and every morning, eat the following:
1. 3,000-5,000 IU of Vitamin D3. Vitamin D helps build muscle, which makes you stronger and improves your performance. Once your blood contains 50-55ng/mL (after approximately four weeks) maintain it at that level. Increasing it further may be dangerous—more than 150ng/mL is toxic.
2. Two capsules of fermented cod liver oil. Cod liver oil contains, among other things, vitamin A, which increases testosterone production.
3. Vitamin K(2) via butter fat (cook your eggs in it) and/or lacto-fermented foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Vitamin K(2) helps prevent vitamin D toxicity and strengthens the effects of vitamins A and D.
4. Three Brazil nuts (only if you’re deficient in selenium). Selenium increases the quantity and quality of sperm (up to a point—if you get more than 400 mg a day, it actually harms sperm, and, according to the author’s experiences, causes acne). You might be deficient in selenium if:
In addition to using diet and supplements, take two 10-minute cold showers or ice baths a day, one before bed and one after waking. The author believes this is effective because the area of the brain that’s stimulated by cold exposure is the same area that produces most of the body’s GnRH, a hormone that triggers the release of LH.
Protocol #2 is purely diet- and supplement-related. The day before you plan to have sex, consume one of the following:
Four hours before sex, eat the following:
The protocols involve eating a lot of cholesterol and protein, which the author thought might cause side effects because:
After following Protocol #1 for four months and eating a lot of red meat and additional protein for another experiment, the author got tested. To his surprise, he found that his diet hadn’t caused any problems:
In addition to testosterone levels, sperm count is an important measure of men’s sexual health. Sperm count is judged on three factors:
All three factors are important—for example, if the number of sperm is high but none of them can swim, fertility is decreased.
Low sperm count is a problem for many men, including at one point, the author, and the solution is simple—stop carrying your cell phone in your pocket. Studies have shown that the radio frequency electro-magnetic fields (RF-EMF) produced by cell phones decrease serum testosterone and motile sperm in rats. The author found that the RF-EMF was affecting his sperm too.
The author started carrying his phone in an armband, so it would be further from his sperm, and only put it in his pocket when it was off. After 11 weeks, his motile sperm count had increased by a factor of three. (He was also doing some other body experiments at the same time, such as cold treatments and eating Brazil nuts for selenium, but he suspects that moving his cell phone was the major factor.)
Even if you stop carrying your cell phone in your pocket, there are still good reasons to store sperm. The author recommends it for several reasons:
There are six steps to storing sperm:
The third of the six topics the author covers in the 4HB is how to improve your sleep. First, we’ll look at some solutions for insomnia and tips for getting a good night’s sleep. Then, we’ll look at ways to spend less time sleeping but still be functional.
The author had chronic onset insomnia (taking a long time to fall asleep) and self-experimented to find solutions. Self-experimentation is particularly useful for sleep because, in a formal setting like a sleep lab, you’re in an unfamiliar location with wires attached to you, which makes it even more difficult to fall asleep.
The author measured his sleep patterns using a variety of at-home gadgets, the most useful of which was the Zeo, a headband that measures brain activity. (He found that devices that use motion-sensing technology to determine whether you’re asleep or not—such as the FitBit or WakeMate—aren’t always accurate because this technology can’t always tell the difference between sleep and being awake but motionless.)
Using data from the Zeo and his other devices such as his glucose monitor, the author discovered the following qualities of good sleep:
The author found that the following activities helped him fall asleep and wake up feeling good:
Most would consider staying asleep for eight hours straight a good sleep. However, it’s also possible to feel well-rested by dividing your sleep into chunks, which is called polyphasic sleep. As long as you time your chunks properly, it’s possible to feel fine with only two hours of sleep a night.
Polyphasic sleep works because the most useful phase of sleep is REM, which most people only experience for 1-2 hours a night. The hours of light sleep (6-7, if you’re sleeping eight hours a night) don’t have that much benefit, so if you can force your body to spend every unconscious moment in REM sleep, you can spend less time unconscious. To do this, you can either:
There are three common schedules for polyphasic sleep, all of which include the tricks for forcing yourself into REM sleep:
The more naps you have, the more strictly you must adhere to the schedule. In the Uberman method, you can’t miss a nap by more than half an hour or oversleep, or you’ll be tired for days.
(Shortform note: For more information on how to get better sleep, read our summary of Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep.)
There are several ways to learn more about your sleeping habits so you can improve them.
Do you think you have good- or bad-quality sleep? Why?
To confirm your hypotheses above, you’ll need to measure your sleeping patterns. Which sleep-measuring gadget (Fitbit, Zeno, and so on) most appeals to you? Why?
Of the sleep-inducing environmental factors (changing the ambient temperature, humidity, and so on), which one would you experiment with first? Why?
Of the sleep-inducing physical techniques (exercising before sleep, sleeping the military crawl, and so on), which one would you experiment with first? Why?
The fourth of the six topics the author covers in the 4HB is how to manage injuries. In this chapter, we’ll look at how to avoid getting injured, and in the next chapter, we’ll look at treatment.
Prehab is the opposite of rehab—instead of doing recovery exercises after you’ve been injured, you do exercises in advance of working out to stabilize your body so you don’t become injured in the first place. Most injuries are caused by imbalances—differences in strength and stability between the left and right sides of the body, or between opposing muscles.
The author spoke with Gray Cook, an injury-prevention specialist who works with high-level athletes as well as special forces agents, for tips on how to correct imbalances. Cook invented the Functional Movement Screen (FMS), which is an assessment that identifies imbalances and prescribes corrections. FMS is a very effective way to prevent injury—for example, before adopting FMS in 2008, seven members of the Atlanta Falcons football teams were injured so badly they couldn’t finish the season. After adopting FMS, only one person suffered a minor injury.
You have an imbalance when one side of your body can lift more than 10% more weight than the other side, or perform 10% more reps. The full FMS program contains many exercises for correcting imbalances, but the MED is to practice only three. First, we’ll learn the exercises and how to test for imbalances. Then, we’ll look at scheduling.
The chop and lift consists of two exercises. First, we’ll explain how to do the movements. Then, we’ll explain how to test for imbalances.
The chop and lift helps correct imbalances between the left and right sides of the body and between the upper and lower body. Additionally, the exercise helps increase core stability. To perform the chop:
The lift is the opposite of the chop—instead of pulling down, you’ll be pulling up. To perform the lift:
To test imbalances, chop down towards your left knee as many times as you can (ideally somewhere between 6-12 reps) before your movement gets jerky or your form starts to deteriorate—for example, you can no longer maintain your tall posture. Write down how many reps you managed. Then, do the same for the chop towards your right knee, and the lift on both sides. If you can perform 10% more reps on one side or the other, you have an imbalance.
The Turkish get-up (TGU) consists of nine movements. If you find the exercise difficult, you can stop at step 5, the arm post.
The author doesn’t describe how to do the TGU. Instead, he directs readers to a video. If you’re a beginner, you should start with 4-6 kg of weight (women) or 8-12 kg (men).
To test for imbalances, attempt to perform 5 TGUs on each side. Compare how many you manage on each side.
The deadlift improves the stabilizing ability of the deep hip muscles. There are two types of deadlifts used for prehab: the two-arm (2SDL) and the one-arm (1SDL). For either, you first need to get a sense of your single-leg flexibility to set up your positioning correctly.
To test your leg flexibility:
Start by learning the two-arm deadlift:
The one-armed deadlift is similar but you’ll only have a weight in one hand. To perform:
To test for imbalances, perform 5 reps per leg of both the two-arm and one-arm versions. Compare how many you manage on each side.
On the Tuesday of the week you start FMS, teach yourself how to perform all movements and practice them for 30-45 minutes using no weight at first, and then a light weight as you get more comfortable. On Thursday and Saturday, spend 45-60 minutes testing yourself to find your imbalances. (Testing twice ensures that you’ve correctly identified your weak areas.) Test using the methods described above, and additionally perform 10 unweighted full-range (bum to heels) squats.
For the next two to six weeks, do the following on Mondays and Fridays: If you were capable of doing the full-range squats, do the chop and lift, TGU, and one-arm deadlifts. If you couldn’t manage the squats, do an additional set of chop and lifts but with both knees down. Do seven sets of 3-5 reps of each exercise on the following sides: strong, weak, strong, weak, weak, weak, weak. Rest 60 seconds in between sets. Use a 1/4 or 2/4 cadence.
After six weeks, your imbalances should be corrected. If you like, you can continue doing 30-45-minute sessions on Mondays and Fridays. In these workouts, do two sets of 3-5 reps on each side of the following: TGU, both knees down for the chop and lift, two-armed deadlift, regular chop and lift, one-armed deadlift.
The author retests himself every 4-6 weeks for any new imbalances that might have cropped up.
In the previous chapter, we looked at some injury prevention strategies. Sometimes, despite careful preparation, injuries still happen.
By the time he was thirty, the author had racked up an impressive list of injuries ranging from sprains to dislocations to broken bones. He tried many injury treatments, many of which didn’t work, and some of which caused new problems. However, some of the treatments produced good results. We’ll cover the six whose results lasted longer than two days.
The treatments below apply to a variety of aches and pains. When seeking a particular treatment, make sure to find a good practitioner. Bad practitioners can create new problems or give good treatments a bad vibe (for example, the author didn’t try the Egoscue method for years because some practitioners marketed in a way that made it appear cult-like).
Wearing shoes with heels forces the body to assume an uncomfortable posture to stay balanced. Bad posture can lead to a host of health problems including, among others, back pain, headaches, and poor circulation. The fix is simple—wear flat shoes most of the time and wear heels only sparingly.
For example, when the author switched to wearing flatter shoes (Vibram Five Fingers and Terra Plana Barefoot Vivo shoes), the low back pain he’d been experiencing for ten years disappeared.
The Egoscue Method is a series of exercises designed to improve posture. To fix bad posture caused by working at a desk, do the following exercises 1-3 times after every 2-3 hours of sitting, and do all six exercises at least once every seven days.
Exercise #1: Static back.
Exercise #2: Static extension.
Exercise #3: Static shoulder bridge.
Exercise #4: Active shoulder bridge.
Exercise #5: Supine groin progressive. (Shortform note: There are two versions of this exercise. One requires specialized equipment, and one can be done at home. We’ve combined the instructions for a more robust at-home version.)
Exercise #6: Wall sit.
Advanced muscle-integration therapy (AMIT) focuses on the parts of the nervous system that control the firing of muscles.
When a part of the body is overstressed, one of two things happens: The connective tissue or muscle becomes injured, or the nervous system turns off the muscle. The body then uses a different muscle to perform the approximate function of the turned-off muscle. These compensations continue to happen and the body can get to the point where the compensating muscle (and pain) is nowhere near the turned-off muscle. To turn the muscle back on, the practitioner pushes one finger into each end of the turned-off muscle.
For example, when the author saw Dr. Buhler about one of his rotator cuff muscles, it was shut off. Before the session, the author could lift 6 pounds. After, he could lift 28.
If you can’t find an AMIT practitioner (Dr. Buhler is the only one mentioned in the book), you can consider seeing a muscle-activation technique (MAT) practitioner.
Active-release therapy (ART) was invented by a doctor who had a background in engineering and structural mechanics and applied this knowledge to the human body. ART involves shortening a particular tissue, putting tension on it, and then lengthening it to break up scar tissue. Scar tissue limits mobility and can create pain and stiffness. ART works for about 70% of people.
For example, Frank Shamrock, a UFC champion, sought out ART after he hurt his lower back so badly that he couldn’t walk. After 4 ART sessions, all his scar tissue was gone and he was healthy enough to fight three weeks later.
Biopuncture consists of shallow injections of diluted substances including lymphomyosot (used for drainage in swollen tissue) and Traumeel (used for inflammation). These injections stimulate the body’s natural healing methods.
For example, after the author’s first treatment of 40-60 injections for his infraspinatus (shoulder) muscles, his pain disappeared.
Prolotherapy is a treatment that involves injecting joints, ligaments, and tendons with irritants such as sugar or salt water. These irritants create inflammation, which stimulates healing (the irritants aren’t very dangerous and the risk of infection from injection is low).
Prolotherapy is most effective on the sacroiliac (lower back), ankle, knee, and elbow joints and is low-risk. For example, after the author’s first session, which included 12 injections, pain caused by sports injuries in his right wrist and left knee disappeared.
You should always try treatments in the following order, and only move onto the next step if the previous stages don’t work:
There are several options for treating injuries.
What’s one of your slow-healing or persistent injuries? What treatments have you tried for it so far, if anything?
Which treatment outlined in the previous chapter do you think would be the most effective next step, and why?
How will you pursue this treatment? (For example, you might buy some flat shoes or research ART practitioners in your region.)
The fifth of the six topics the author covers in the 4HB is how to improve sports-specific skills. No matter what sport you play, it's helpful to be strong, because being stronger than someone else of equal skill gives you an advantage over them. In this chapter, we’ll first look at some tips for strength training for any sport. Then, we’ll look specifically at how to train for running, the first of five sports the author has tips for.
There are some principles to keep in mind when strength training:
Principle #1: Train your sport-specific skills six days a week, do sports-related training (such as conditioning) three days a week, and do strength training three days a week on the days you’re not doing sports-related training. (In Part 2, we learned that training less frequently is effective for building strength, but as athletes have more complicated goals than simply getting stronger, they should train more than once a week.)
Principle #2: Sets should only contain two or three reps. Total reps should number around 10, whether that’s five sets of two or three sets of three.
Principle #3: Do only a few exercises that target most of the bodies’ muscle groups, such as the bench press or deadlift.
Principle #4: Spend five minutes resting in between all sets.
Principle #5: Don’t push to failure (being so fatigued you can’t do any more reps).
Principle #6: You should feel stronger after lifting than when you started.
Principle #7: Do the Janda sit-up to strengthen your abs. According to scientific theories, Janda sit-ups are effective because they force you to contract your hamstrings, which turns off your hip flexors and forces your abs to do all the work (people often cheat at abs by recruiting their hip flexors for help). To do the exercise:
All of the above principles are based around the idea that you should lift heavy weights but not do anything too hard. While strength training is important for athletes for a variety of reasons, developing strength is never the priority: skill development is. Therefore, your strength training should never interfere with the practice of your sport, for example, by making you too sore to practice.
You might find it counterintuitive that training just a few exercises for short periods is effective, but there’s plenty of evidence to show that working harder for a shorter period creates the same or better results than working less hard for longer.
For example, in 2005, Martin Gibala, a researcher at McMaster University, publicized the results of a study that indicated that doing six minutes of high-intensity exercise three times weekly was just as good as doing an hour a day of moderate exercise. In his study, one group did 30-second stationary bike sprints four to sevens times, with four minutes of rest in between. They did this workout three times weekly for two weeks, while a control group did an hour of moderate exercise a day. The sprint group almost doubled their endurance capacity and their leg muscles developed more endurance enzymes. When the test was repeated with similar workouts the results were the same.
Now that we understand the value of strength training for athletes, it’s time to look at training for specific sports. First, we’ll look at sprinting. The author spoke with two different experts about how to increase sprinting prowess: Barry Ross, who coaches track athletes, and Joe DeFranco, who teaches football players how to ace the physical tests in the NFL Combine, part of the tryout and drafting process.
Barry Ross is the expert coach who trained Olympian Allyson Felix. He spends a lot of time developing his athletes' strength—most of his trainees can lift more than double their body weight, and they achieved these results in fewer than 15 minutes of lifting time a week. In sprinting, strength is important because athletes slow down when their muscle fibers aren’t strong enough to maintain tension during impact, such as when a runner’s foot hits the ground. (Previously, coaches believed that athletes slowed down because muscles ran out of fuel.)
Ross uses a three-step process to train his athletes, and you can use the process too:
You need to be able to run a 100-meter dash in less than 23.8 seconds before you can start training to compete. To get to this baseline, walk 7.5 minutes in one direction and then walk back to your starting point in another 7.5 minutes. Walk as fast as you can—it should feel inefficient and you should want to switch to jogging (but don’t). Do this three times a week, and each time, walk farther. It will take about four weeks to get in shape and be capable of running the 100-meter in the required time.
Once you’re in shape, to build strength, follow this program three times a week (an earlier version of which Allyson Felix used):
Exercise #1: 6-7 reps of over-under dynamic stretching. Using two power racks, set one bar at waist height and the other at 30-32 inches off the ground. Squat and step sideways under the lower bar and then step over the second one. If you don’t have access to a power rack, use benches or ropes. This exercise should take less than five minutes.
Exercise #2: Do either 10-12 push-ups OR the following bench press sequence:
Exercise #3: Deadlifts sequence. To deadlift, use a sumo stance. Keep your back straight and keep your shoulders in the locked position. After lifting to knee height, drop the weight instead of lowering it to avoid hamstring injuries (if you’re not also training sprinting, which involves a lot of hamstrings, it’s fine to lower the weight). You shouldn’t spend more than 10 seconds under tension—spending any longer leads to lactic acid production, which creates muscle soreness. Do the following sequence:
Exercise #4: 3 sets of 3 reps of the torture twist. Sit on a bench and tuck your feet under a bar or another bench. Keep your body parallel to the ground. Turn to your left and stay there for three seconds. Then turn to your right and stay there for three seconds. That’s one rep. After each set, sit up and take a 30-second rest. As you improve, you can increase to 5 reps and increase your holding time to 15 seconds.
You can lift and then go directly to running practice, but don’t run and then lift—you might injure yourself.
To increase your sprinting speed:
This is a departure from conventional sprint training, which usually suggests you run the distance you’ll be racing multiple times at different percentages of your maximum speed. This technique isn’t effective because no one knows the exact percentage of effort or speed they’re using.
Conventional running training also recommends running longer than you’ll have to in a race to improve your endurance, but Ross doesn’t recommend this. None of his athletes who compete at 400m or less ever run a training distance of more than 70 meters, and this doesn’t hurt their performance at all—his athletes do very well. For example, using the training, one of his 100-meter sprinters reduced her time from 13.35 seconds to 12.75 seconds.
Like Ross, DeFranco has his athletes run shorter distances than they’ll ultimately need to run. In football, as part of NFL tryouts, hopefuls have to sprint a 40-yard dash. Joe DeFranco has his athletes spend 80% of their training time on 10-yard dashes. In addition to Ross’s reasons, DeFranco finds that practicing shorter distances is effective because it gives athletes more opportunity to practice their starting stance and experiment with posture and stride.
DeFranco’s method is effective—for example, Dallas Cowboys’ Miles Austin ran a time of 4.67 seconds in the 40-yard dash even though he’d only practiced that distance three times, and had practiced the 10-yard distance over 100 times.
With the help of DeFranco, the author improved his 40-yard speed from 5.94 seconds to 5.61 seconds using the following tips:
1. Wear cleats.
2. Warm up properly, using exercises that include the same postures and techniques required for a sprint:
3. Use an effective starting position. If you’re right-handed, set up behind the line with your left foot a foot behind the line, and your right foot right behind your left heel. Your feet should be hip-width apart. Put the thumb, index, and middle finger of your right hand on the line. Put your weight on your right arm so that your shoulder is forward of your hand. Bend your left elbow at a 90-degree angle. Look at a spot on the ground three feet in front of your left foot and keep your head down. (If you’re left-handed, do everything opposite.)
4. Start with good technique. Your right arm shoots backward. Your first step is with your left leg and it should land on the spot you focused your gaze on in the previous step. Your knee should be forward of your toes when you land.
5. Maintain good form as you sprint. As you run, your upper body should always be forward of your lower body and your chin should be down (if it’s up, your feet hit the ground heel-first, which can injure the hamstrings). Use as few steps as possible.
Hamstring injuries are common in sprinting. There are some prehab exercises you can do to reduce your chance of injury:
If your hamstrings start to feel tight while training, they’re close to tearing, so stop your workout and rest. Don’t stretch (the muscle is already overstretched). Instead, ice the muscle and apply arnica montana.
Running long distances requires different training and technique than sprinting short distances. The author trained with and learned from Brian MacKenzie, who’s well-known for training long-distance runners by having them run short distances for short periods. For example, one of his trainees, “Rookie,” had never run more than four miles. After 11 weeks, he was able to run a 50-kilometer ultramarathon.
There are three steps to learning endurance running:
The first step to endurance running is learning the Pose method, which was developed by Dr. Nicholas Romanov and is Brian MacKenzie’s preferred technique.
To run in the Pose method:
One way to learn this technique is to take photos of yourself running with a high-speed camera that takes 30 frames a second. Ideally, you want to see the following in a single stride:
While the Pose method has some great benefits, such as improving running speed, making it possible to run on ice, and saving the knees, it has a downside: potential calf and Achilles tendon injuries. Learn the Pose technique gradually, and if you experience pain during any of the steps, skip them.
Brian MacKenzie has some additional tips about running form:
Every time your feet hit the ground, your tendons, ligaments, and muscles are stretched and contracted, and experience impact. In a 50-kilometer race, your feet might strike the ground between 20,000-25,000 times, and you need to prepare your body for that kind of stress.
Get in shape by doing the following movement exercises:
Exercise #1: Stretch the hip flexors and quads. You can hit both with one stretch: Kneel on one knee, like you’re proposing, in front of a couch. Put the shin of your back leg against the couch. Tense your abs to keep your back straight. You should feel a stretch in the front of your back leg, and the hip of your front leg. Hold each side for 90 seconds.
Exercise #2: Stretch the glutes. There are two stretches and you should do both:
Exercise #3: Reposition the hips. Get into a crawling position. Put your weight on your hands and one knee, so that the other knee has no weight on it. Hold for 90-120 seconds. Then, put the weightless knee on top of the other ankle and let the foot turn out. Hold for 90-120 seconds.
Exercise #4: Activate your glutes.
Exercise #5: Build up ankle and foot strength. Three days a week, jog for half an hour on grass, barefoot, using good running technique.
In addition to doing the exercises, you can see an ART practitioner if you have particularly tight muscles.
Aerobic means that the body is producing energy using oxygen. When using oxygen, the body, among other things:
Anaerobic means the opposite—the body is producing energy without oxygen. When your body runs out of oxygen (you’re moving so fast that it takes too long to get the oxygen you’re breathing to your systems), it:
The goal of MacKenzie’s training is to increase your body’s capacity to run aerobically rather than anaerobically. First, we’ll look at the different parts of the program. Then, we’ll look at how to schedule them.
The program includes:
There are two options for scheduling training sessions:
If you ever hit a point where you’ve been resting for three minutes (in the first four weeks) or two minutes (following weeks) and your heart rate is above 120, end the workout.
A weak runner will need to follow this program for six to eight weeks.
In the week before your race, you’ll taper (reduce) your training time. For example, if your race is on a Saturday, you might:
Powerlifting is the second of five sports that the author self-experimented with. He trained with Marty Gallagher, an elite powerlifting coach, to add 100 pounds to his bench press in 12 weeks. You can use the same program to improve your bench press too.
There are two steps to the program:
You’ll use Mark Bell’s form to bench press. Mark is 275 pounds and can press 854 pounds. His form is safe for beginners and intermediates. To press:
There are two rules for the bench pressing program:
There are two components to phase I:
Component #1: Gain Muscle Mass Every Week
If you weigh fewer than 200 pounds, you need to gain one pound of muscle mass a week; if you’re heavier, gain two pounds. Eat 200 or more grams of protein every day and as many calories as you need to gain the weight.
Component #2: Work Out Once a Week
In weeks 1-4, every workout, you’ll do:
In weeks 5-8, every workout, you’ll do:
In weeks 9-10, every workout, you’ll do:
In week 11, do the same as weeks 9-10 except only do 2 reps in the power grip set.
In week 12, do only 1 set of 1 rep using the power grip of 130% of your 1RM.
In phase II, you’re going to take a break from bench pressing to let your body adjust to the gains you’ve made. For example, the hypothalamus gland, which controls body weight and fatigue (among other things), needs to recalibrate. Phase II has two components:
Component #1: Maintain Your Body Weight
Since you’re letting your body adjust, you don’t want to gain or lose any weight during this period.
Component #2: Work Out Once a Week
In this phase, you’ll do two versions of the paused dumbbell press: flat and inclined. You’ll always do the inclined version at 10% less weight of what you use for the flat, except where noted below. (Shortform note: The author doesn’t describe either of these movements or provide photos. You can view a video of the generic flat press here. To do the inclined version, adjust the bench so you’re sitting up slightly instead of flat on your back.)
In weeks 1-2, do 3 sets of 10 reps of both the dumbbell bench flat and dumbbell bench inclined. Do the flat at 60% of your 1RM and increase by 5% each week.
In weeks 3-4, do 2 sets of 6 reps of both the dumbbell bench flat and dumbbell bench inclined. Do the flat at 80% of your 1RM and increase by 5% each week.
In week 5, do 2 sets of 4 reps of both the dumbbell bench flat and dumbbell bench inclined. Do the flat at 95% of your 1RM and the inclined at 80%.
In week 6, do 1 set of 4 reps of both the dumbbell bench flat and dumbbell bench inclined. Do the flat at 100% of your 1RM and the incline at 85%.
In phase III, you’ll go back to bench pressing and gaining weight, just like phase I.
Component #1: Gain Muscle Mass Every Week
Gain 1-2 pounds a week, depending on your starting weight.
Component #2: Work Out Once a Week
In weeks 1-4, every workout, you’ll do:
In weeks 5-8, every workout, you’ll do:
In week 9, do only 1 set of 1 rep using the power grip of 150% of your 1RM.
The final sport-specific skills the author experimented with are jumping, swimming, and hitting baseballs.
To learn to jump higher, the author once again trained with Joe DeFranco. One of the tests in NFL tryouts is the vertical jump, which is a measure of how high someone can jump from a standstill. The height is measured using a Vertec, which is a pole with sticks. When an athlete hits a stick, it rotates, marking how high they’ve jumped. Jump height is measured from the tips of the fingers when the arms are stretched over the head so people of different heights can be fairly compared.
With the help of DeFranco, the author improved his jump height three inches in a single 20-minute session using the following protocol:
1. A warm up consisting of:
2. Correct squat position. To squat properly before jumping, your feet should be placed at just slightly less than hip-width. As you squat, you need to maintain a flat back, and you need to be watching the Vertec sticks throughout the squat, except at the very bottom.
3. Good shoulder drive. Shoulders give you up to 20% of your jump. To best use them, start with hands over your head. As you squat, swing your arms down as fast as you can and then swing them back up just as fast as you rise from the squat and jump.
4. Well-timed contact with sticks. You need to hit the sticks at the top of your jump, so your arm should be retracted as you’re going up (like you’re hitting a volleyball). Extend your arm only once you’ve reached the top.
5. Turned-off hip flexors. The hip flexors restrict leg extension. To shut them off, stretch each hip flexor, starting with the non-dominant side (left side if you’re right-handed), for 30 seconds, 30 seconds to two minutes before you attempt your jump. (Note: Static stretching—holding a stretch for more than 10 seconds—before training can increase the risk of injury because it lengthens muscles and tissues, which decreases strength. The hip flexors are the only muscles DeFranco recommends stretching statically because the goal is to weaken them to increase jump height.)
To learn to swim, the author didn’t work with a coach. Instead, he learned Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion swimming technique from a book and DVD. Before learning the method, he could only swim two lengths of a pool before becoming exhausted. After practicing Total Immersion for only two months, he swam a mile in the open ocean.
You too can learn the Total Immersion method for swimming freestyle. Here are eight tips from the author:
The author has a few additional tips to make swimming more pleasant:
After tackling jumping and swimming, the author trained with Jaime Cevallos, a Major League Baseball coach, to improve his baseball swing. Among others, Cevallos trained Ben Zobrist, who started out unremarkable by hitting three home runs out of around 300 plate appearances. After training with Cevallos, Zobrist hit 17 home runs out of his next 300 plate appearances.
There are three important positions involved with the Cevallos swing:
Position #1: The cushion is the position after taking a step but before swinging. The toes and knees of the front foot should turn out 60 degrees. The angle between the hips and shoulders should be 25 degrees. This angle creates torque and helps the batter maintain form if swinging at slower pitches.
Position #2: The slot is the position just before swinging in which the batter’s back is still straight but her back elbow drops. This position allows the batter to use her legs and hips to whip the bat as she swings. The angle between the tip of the bat and the elbows should be as small as possible to increase bat speed. To help keep the back straight, think about keeping distance between the shoulders and ears.
Position #3: The impact is the position from which the batter hits the ball. The angle of the elbow should be 80 degrees or smaller and the angle between the wrist and the bat should be 180 degrees or larger. To create the most speed, straighten the front leg, which will drive the back hip forward.
Using these positions, particularly the impact position, has three benefits:
To practice these concepts:
The final of the six topics the author covers in the 4HB is how to live longer. There are plenty of effective methods for increasing your lifespan, but some of them will make you miserable. For example, in a study of nematodes (worms), those who mated died sooner. Scientists think the same applies to humans—people who abstain from producing sperm (and therefore sex) probably live longer. However, celibacy would make most people unhappy. The goal of this chapter is to explore some low-cost, low-bother, low-risk strategies for extending your lifespan without making yourself miserable.
The author avoids global therapies (treatments that affect multiple body systems) that haven’t been extensively tested, such as Alzheimer’s vaccines or stem cell therapies, because the side effects are unknown.
The author does use the following strategies:
Strategy #1: Taking creatine monohydrate. Take 5-10 grams of this daily for two weeks every two months. It can help prevent or mitigate the development of Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s diseases. However, it can cause kidney problems, so keep an eye on the kidney markers in your blood tests to make sure nothing’s going awry.
Strategy #2: Intermittent fasting (alternate periods of fasting with periods of eating normally). A study of monkeys revealed that caloric restriction can extend lifespan. This is because when the body is missing essential chemicals, it triggers autophagy, which is the process of clearing out cells of old, built-up proteins. These old proteins contribute to aging, so if you can prompt your body to clear them out, you might live longer. There are two ways to fast intermittently:
Strategy #3: Protein cycling. Protein cycling is a more specific form of caloric restriction. One day a week, only eat food that’s made up of no more than 5% protein.
Strategy #4: Getting rid of excess iron. Iron is a building block of free radicals—molecules that contribute to aging—and studies have shown that high concentrations of iron are related to heart attacks. To get rid of excess iron, which is stored in blood, simply donate blood. To get rid of toxins stored in fat at the same time, donate plasma and drink caffeinated coffee an hour before the donation. (Donated blood always contains toxins and iron, so you’re not doing the person who receives your blood any harm.)