reading

Ultra-endurance I: Going from 5K (3 miles) to 50K (30 miles) in 12 Weeks—Phase I

Ultra-endurance II: Going from 5K (3 miles) to 50K (30 miles) in 12 Weeks—Phase II

If you want real change follow The 4-Hour Body. It will enable you to reach your physical and genetic potential with as little as four hours of effort a month. This landmark book is the result of Timothy Ferriss’ obsessive quest to track down which tiniest changes get the biggest results.

Based on more than a decade of research, the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes and medical doctors, as well as thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation, Ferriss has finally perfected the way to rapid body transformation with minimal effort and maximum results.

IN THIS STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE YOU WILL LEARN (IN LESS THAN 30 MINUTES EACH) HOW TO:

TIMOTHY FERRISS, nominated as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People of 2007”, is the author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been published in 35 languages.

Wired magazine has called Tim “The Superman of Silicon Valley” for his manipulation of the human body. He is a tango world record holder, former national kickboxing champion (Sanshou), guest lecturer at Princeton University, and faculty member at Singularity University, based at NASA Ames Research Center.

He has been featured by more than 100 media outlets, including the New York Times, The Economist, TIME, Forbes, Fortune, CNN and CBS, and his blog is one of Inc. magazine’s “19 Blogs You Should Bookmark Right Now”. When not acting as a human guinea pig, Tim enjoys speaking to organizations ranging from Nike to the Harvard School of Public Health.

“This is a whole new ball game. Highly recommended.” —Dr. Stewart D. Friedman, adviser to Jack Welch and former director of the Work/Life Integration Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

“It’s about time this book was written. It is a long-overdue manifesto for the mobile lifestyle, and Tim Ferriss is the ideal ambassador. This will be huge.” —Jack Canfield, co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul®, 100+ million copies sold

“Stunning and amazing. From mini-retirements to outsourcing your life, it’s all here. Whether you’re a wage slave or a Fortune 500 CEO, this book will change your life!” —Phil Town, New York Times bestselling author of Rule #1

“The 4-Hour Workweek is a new way of solving a very old problem: just how can we work to live and prevent our lives from being all about work? A world of infinite options awaits those who would read this book and be inspired by it!” —Michael E. Gerber, founder and chairman of E-Myth Worldwide and the world’s #1 small business guru

“Timothy has packed more lives into his 29 years than Steve Jobs has in his 51.”—Tom Foremski, journalist and publisher of SiliconValleyWatcher.com

“If you want to live life on your own terms, this is your blueprint.” —Mike Maples, co-founder of Motive Communications (IPO to $260M/£162M market cap) and founding executive of Tivoli (sold to IBM for $750M/£468M)

“Thanks to Tim Ferriss, I have more time in my life to travel, spend time with family, and write book blurbs. This is a dazzling and highly useful work.” —A. J. Jacobs, editor-at-large of Esquire magazine and author of The Know-It-All

“Tim is Indiana Jones for the digital age. I’ve already used his advice to go spearfishing on remote islands and ski the best hidden slopes of Argentina. Simply put, do what he says and you can live like a millionaire.” —Albert Pope, derivatives specialist at UBS World Headquarters

“Reading this book is like putting a few zeros on your income. Tim brings lifestyle to a new level—listen to him!” —Michael D. Kerlin, McKinsey & Company consultant to Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund and a J. William Fulbright Scholar

“Part scientist and part adventure hunter, Tim Ferriss has created a road map for an entirely new world. I devoured this book in one sitting—I have seen nothing like it.” —Charles L. Brock, chairman and CEO of Brock Capital Group; former CFO, COO, and general counsel of Scholastic, Inc.; and former president of the Harvard Law School Association

“Outsourcing is no longer just for Fortune 500 companies. Small and midsized firms, as well as busy professionals, can outsource their work to increase their productivity and free time for more important commitments. It’s time for the world to take advantage of this revolution.” —Vivek Kulkarni, CEO of Brickwork India and former IT secretary of Bangalore; credited as the “techno-bureaucrat” who helped make Bangalore an IT destination in India

“Tim is the master! I should know. I followed his rags to riches path and watched him transform himself from competitive fighter to entrepreneur. He tears apart conventional assumptions until he finds a better way.” —Dan Partland, Emmy Award-winning producer of American High and Welcome to the Dollhouse

“The 4-Hour Workweek is an absolute necessity for those adventurous souls who want to live life to its fullest. Buy it and read it before you sacrifice any more!” —John Lusk, group product manager at Microsoft World Headquarters

“If you want to live your dreams now, and not in 20 or 30 years, buy this book!” —Laura Roden, chairman of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and a lecturer in Corporate Finance at San Jose State University

“With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal workweek.” —Tim Draper, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, financiers to innovators including Hotmail, Skype and Overture.com

“Tim has done what most people only dream of doing. I can’t believe he is going to let his secrets out of the bag. This book is a must read!” —Stephen Key, top inventor and team designer of Teddy Ruxpin and Lazer Tag and a consultant to the television show American Inventor

For my parents, who taught a little troublemaker that marching to a different drummer was a good thing. I love you both and owe you everything. Mum, sorry about all the crazy experiments.

Support good science—10% of all author royalties are donated to cure-driven research, including the excellent work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Please don’t be stupid and kill yourself. It would make us both quite unhappy. Consult a doctor before doing anything in this book.

The material in this book is for informational purposes only. As each individual situation is unique, you should use proper discretion, in consultation with a health care practitioner, before undertaking the diet, exercises and techniques described in this book. The author and publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information contained in this book.

If you find anything amazing in this book, it’s thanks to the brilliant minds who helped as resources, critics, contributors, proofreaders and references. If you find anything ridiculous in this book, it’s because I didn’t heed their advice.

Though indebted to hundreds of people, I wish to thank a few of them upfront, here listed in alphabetical order (still more in the acknowledgements):

More than 20,000 people had turned out at northern California’s largest music venue to hear Nine Inch Nails, loud and in charge, on what was expected to be their last tour.

“Dude, I go into the stall to take care of business, and I look over and see the top of Tim’s head popping above the divider. He was doing f*cking air squats in the men’s room in complete silence.”

Glenn, a videographer and friend, burst out laughing as he reenacted my technique. To be honest, he needed to get his thighs closer to parallel.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, one of the top-500 most popular websites in the world, joined in the laughter and raised a beer to toast the incident. I, on the other hand, was eager to move on to the main event.

In the next 45 minutes, I consumed almost two full-size barbecue chicken pizzas and three handfuls of mixed nuts, for a cumulative total of about 4,400 calories. It was my fourth meal of the day, breakfast having consisted of two glasses of grapefruit juice, a large cup of coffee with cinnamon, two chocolate croissants and two doughnuts.

The more interesting portion of the story started well after Trent Reznor left the stage.

Roughly 72 hours later, I tested my body fat percentage with an ultrasound analyser designed by a physicist out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Charting the progress on my latest experiment, I’d dropped from 11.9% to 10.2% body fat, a 14% reduction of the total fat on my body, in 14 days.

The process wasn’t punishing. It wasn’t hard. Tiny changes were all it took. Tiny changes that, while small in isolation, produced enormous changes when used in combination.

Want to extend the fat-burning half-life of caffeine? Naringenin, a useful little molecule in grapefruit juice, does just the trick.

Need to increase insulin sensitivity before bingeing once per week? Just add some cinnamon to your pastries on Saturday morning, and you can get the job done.

Want to blunt your blood glucose for 60 minutes while you eat a high-carb meal guilt-free? There are a half-dozen options.

But 2% body fat in two weeks? How can that be possible if many general practitioners claim that it’s impossible to lose more than 2lb (900g) of fat per week? Here’s the sad truth: most of the one-size-fits-all rules, this being one example, haven’t been field-tested for exceptions.

Calories in and calories out? It’s incomplete at best. I’ve lost fat while grossly overfeeding. Cheesecake be praised.

My first book, after being turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers, had just hit the New York Times bestseller list and seemed headed for Number 1 on the business list, where it landed several months later. No one was more dumbfounded than me.

One particularly beautiful morning in San Jose, I had my first major media phone interview with Clive Thompson of Wired magazine. During our pre-interview small chat, I apologized if I sounded buzzed. I was. I had just finished a 10-minute workout following a double espresso on an empty stomach. It was a new experiment that would take me to single-digit body fat with two such sessions per week.

Clive wanted to talk to me about e-mail and websites like Twitter. Before we got started, and as a segue from the workout comment, I joked that the major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat. Clive laughed and agreed. Then we moved on.

The interview went well, but it was this offhand joke that stuck with me. I retold it to dozens of people over the subsequent month, and the response was always the same: agreement and nodding.

The wider world thinks I’m obsessed with time management, but they haven’t seen the other—much more legitimate, much more ridiculous—obsession.

I’ve recorded almost every workout I’ve done since age 18. I’ve had more than 1,000 blood tests¹ performed since 2004, sometimes as often as every two weeks, tracking everything from complete lipid panels, insulin and haemoglobin A1c, to IGF-1 and free testosterone. I’ve had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse “permanent” injuries, and I’ve flown to rural tea farmers in China to discuss Pu-Erh tea’s effects on fat loss. All said and done, I’ve spent more than $250,000 (£156,000) on testing and tweaking over the last decade.

Just as some people have avant-garde furniture or artwork to decorate their homes, I have pulse oximeters, ultrasound machines and medical devices for measuring everything from galvanic skin response to REM sleep. The kitchen and bathroom look like an A&E department.

If you think that’s craziness, you’re right. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a guinea pig to benefit from one.

Hundreds of men and women have tested the techniques in The 4-Hour Body (4HB) over the last two years, and I’ve tracked and graphed hundreds of their results (194 people in this book). Many have lost more than 20lb (9kg) of fat in the first month of experimentation, and for the vast majority, it’s the first time they’ve ever been able to do so.

Because the changes are either small or simple, and often both. There is zero room for misunderstanding, and visible results compel you to continue. If results are fast and measurable,² self-discipline isn’t needed.

We won’t be covering any of this. Not because it doesn’t work—it does … up to a point. But it’s not the type of advice that will make friends greet you with “What the #$%& have you been doing?!”, whether in the dressing room or on the playing field.

Let’s be clear: I’m neither a doctor nor a PhD. I am a meticulous data cruncher with access to many of the world’s best athletes and scientists.

I’m able to pull from disciplines and subcultures that rarely touch one another, and I’m able to test hypotheses using the kind of self-experimentation mainstream practitioners can’t condone (though their help behind the scenes is critical). By challenging basic assumptions, it’s possible to stumble upon simple and unusual solutions to long-standing problems.

This book includes the findings of more than 100 PhDs, NASA scientists, medical doctors, Olympic athletes, professional sports trainers (from the NFL to MLB), world-record holders, Super Bowl rehabilitation specialists, and even former Eastern Bloc coaches. You’ll meet some of the most incredible specimens, including before-and-after transformations, you’ve ever seen.

I don’t have a publish-or-perish academic career to preserve, and this is a good thing. As one MD from a well-known American Ivy League university said to me over lunch:

We’re trained for 20 years to be risk-averse. I’d like to do the experimentation, but I’d risk everything I’ve built over two decades of schooling and training by doing so. I’d need an immunity necklace. The university would never tolerate it.

It’s a strange label, but he was right. Not just because I have no prestige to lose. I’m also a former industry insider.

From 2001 to 2009, I was CEO of a sports nutrition company with distribution in more than a dozen countries, and while we followed the rules, it became clear that many others didn’t. It wasn’t the most profitable option. I have witnessed blatant lies on nutritional fact panels, marketing executives budgeting for FTC fines in anticipation of lawsuits, and much worse from some of the best-known brands in the business.³ I understand how and where consumers are deceived. The darker tricks of the trade in supplements and sports nutrition—clouding results of “clinical trials” and creative labelling as just two examples—are nearly the same as in biotech and Big Pharma.

I will teach you to spot bad science, and therefore bad advice and bad products.⁴

Late one evening in the autumn of 2009, I sat eating cassoulet and duck legs with Dr. Lee Wolfer in the clouds of fog known as San Francisco. The wine was flowing, and I told her of my fantasies to return to a Berkeley or Stanford and pursue a doctorate in the biological sciences. I was briefly a neuroscience major at Princeton University and dreamed of a PhD at the end of my name. Lee is regularly published in peer-reviewed journals and has been trained at some of the finest programmes in the world, including the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) (MD), Berkeley (MS), Harvard Medical School (residency), the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (fellowship) and Spinal Diagnostics in Daly City, California (fellowship).

Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness … thus the yeoman work in any science … is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.

—Michio Kaku (Hyperspace), theoretical physicist and co-creator of string field theory

Most breakthroughs in performance (and appearance) enhancement start with animals and go through the following adoption curve:

Racehorses → AIDS patients (because of muscle wasting) and body builders → elite athletes → rich people → the rest of us

The last jump from the rich to the general public can take 10–20 years, if it happens at all. It often doesn’t.

I’m not suggesting that you start injecting yourself with odd substances never before tested on humans. I am suggesting, however, that government agencies (the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration) are at least 10 years behind current research, and at least 20 years behind compelling evidence in the field.

More than a decade ago, a close friend named Paul was in a car accident and suffered brain damage that lowered his testosterone production. Even with supplemental testosterone treatments (creams, gels, short-acting injectables) and after visiting scores of top endocrinologists, he still suffered from the symptoms of low testosterone. Everything changed—literally overnight—once he switched to testosterone enanthate, a variation seldom seen in the medical profession in the United States. Who made the suggestion? An advanced body builder who knew his biochemistry. It shouldn’t have made a difference, yet it did.

Do doctors normally take advantage of the 50+ years of experience that professional body builders have testing, even synthesizing, esters of testosterone? No. Most doctors view body builders as cavalier amateurs, and body builders view doctors as too risk-averse to do anything innovative.

Handing your medical care over to the biggest man-gorilla in your gym is a bad idea, but it’s important to look for discoveries outside of the usual suspects. Those closest to a problem are often the least capable of seeing it with fresh eyes.

Despite the incredible progress in some areas of medicine in the last 100 years, a 60-year-old in 2009 can expect to live an average of only 6 years longer than a 60-year-old in 1900.

Me? I plan on living to 120 while eating the best rib-eye steaks I can find. More on that later.

In our current world, even if proper trials are funded for obesity studies as just one example, it might take 10–20 years for the results. Are you prepared to wait?

“Kaiser can’t talk to UCSF, who can’t talk to Blue Shield. You are the arbiter of your health information.” Those are the words of a leading surgeon at UCSF, who encouraged me to take my papers with me before hospital records claimed them as their property.

Now the good news: with a little help, it’s never been easier to collect a few data points (at little cost), track them (without training), and make small changes that produce incredible results.

Type 2 diabetics going off medication 48 hours after starting a dietary intervention? Wheelchair-bound seniors walking again after 14 weeks of training? This is not science fiction. It’s being done today. As William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace”, has said:

This book is designed to give you the most important 2.5% of the tools you need for body recomposition and increased performance. Some short history can explain this odd 2.5%.

Vilfredo Pareto was a controversial economist-cum-sociologist who lived from 1848 to 1923. His seminal work, Cours d’économie politique, included a then little explored “law” of income distribution that would later bear his name: “Pareto’s Law”, or “the Pareto Distribution”. It is more popularly known as “the 80/20 Principle”.

Pareto demonstrated a grossly uneven but predictable distribution of wealth in society—80 per cent of the wealth and income is produced and possessed by 20 per cent of the population. He also showed that this 80/20 principle could be found almost everywhere, not just in economics. Eighty per cent of Pareto’s garden peas were produced by 20% of the pea pods he had planted, for example.

To be perceived as fluent in conversational Spanish, for example, you need an active vocabulary of approximately 2,500 high-frequency words. This will allow you to comprehend more than 95% of all conversation. To get to 98% comprehension would require at least five years of practice instead of five months. Doing the maths, 2,500 words is a mere 2.5% of the estimated 100,000 words in the Spanish language.

This incredibly valuable 2.5% is the key, the Archimedes lever, for those who want the best results in the least time. The trick is finding that 2.5%.⁵

This book is not intended as a comprehensive treatise on all things related to the human body. My goal is to share what I have found to be the 2.5% that delivers 95% of the results in rapid body redesign and performance enhancement. If you are already at 5% body fat or bench-pressing 181kg (400lb), you are in the top 1% of humans and now in the world of incremental gains. This book is for the other 99% who can experience near-unbelievable gains in short periods of time.

It is important that you follow five rules with this book. Ignore them at your peril.

Most people won’t need more than 150 pages to reinvent themselves. Browse the table of contents, pick the chapters that are most relevant and discard the rest … for now. Pick one appearance goal and one performance goal to start.

The only mandatory sections are “Fundamentals” and “Ground Zero”. Here are some popular goals, along with the corresponding chapters to read in the order listed:

Then, once you’ve committed to a plan of action, dip back into the book at your leisure and explore. Immediately practical advice is contained in every chapter, so don’t discount something based on the title. Even if you are a meat-eater (as I am), for example, you will benefit from “The Meatless Machine”.

For the geeks and the curious, however, I’ve included a lot of cool details. These details can often enhance your results but are not required reading. Such sections are labelled “Geek’s Advantage” with a “GA” symbol.

Even if you’ve been intimidated by science in the past, I encourage you to browse some of these GA sections—at least a few will offer some fun “holy sh*t!” moments and improve results 10% or so.

If you ever feel overwhelmed, though, skip them, as they’re not mandatory for the results you’re after.

As the legendary Timothy Noakes PhD, author or co-author of more than 400 published research papers, is fond of saying: “Fifty per cent of what we know is wrong. The problem is that we do not know which 50% it is.” Everything in this book works, but I have surely got some of the mechanisms completely wrong. In other words, I believe the how-to is 100% reliable, but some of the why-to will end up on the chopping block as we learn more.

As the good Dr. Noakes also said to me about one Olympic training regimen: “This [approach] could be totally wrong, but it’s a hypothesis worth disproving.”

Science starts with educated (read: wild-ass) guesses. Then it’s all trial and error. Sometimes you predict correctly from the outset. More often, you make mistakes and stumble across unexpected findings, which lead to new questions. If you want to sit on the sidelines and play full-time sceptic, suspending action until a scientific consensus is reached, that’s your choice. Just realize that science is, alas, often as political as a dinner party with die-hard Democrats and Republicans. Consensus comes late at best.

Don’t use scepticism as a thinly veiled excuse for inaction or remaining in your comfort zone. Be sceptical, but for the right reason: because you’re looking for the most promising option to test in real life.

Let me know if you make a cool discovery or prove me wrong. This book will evolve through your feedback and help.

I’ve included a lot of odd experiences and screw-ups just for simple entertainment value. All fact and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Much of the content is intended to be read as the diary of a madman. Enjoy it. More than anything, I’d like to impart the joy of exploration and discovery. Remember: this isn’t a homework assignment. Take it at your own pace.

Richard Branson leant back and thought for a second. The tropical sounds of his private oasis, Necker Island, murmured in the background. Twenty people sat around him at rapt attention, wondering what a billionaire’s answer would be to one of the big questions—perhaps the biggest question—of business. The group had been assembled by marketing impresario Joe Polish to brainstorm growth options for Richard’s philanthropic Virgin Unite. It was one of his many new ambitious projects. Virgin Group already had more than 300 companies, more than 50,000 employees, and $25 billion (£16 billion) per year in revenue. In other words, Branson had personally built an empire larger than the GDP of some developing countries. Then he broke the silence:

He was serious and elaborated: working out gave him at least four additional hours of productive time every day.

I view 4HB as a manifesto, a call to arms for a new mental model of living: the experimental lifestyle. It’s up to you—not your doctor, not the newspaper—to learn what you best respond to. The benefits go far beyond the physical.

If you understand politics well enough to vote for a president, or if you have ever filed taxes, you can learn the few most important scientific rules for redesigning your body. These rules will become your friends, 100% reliable and trusted.

It is my sincere hope, if you’ve suffered from dissatisfaction with your body, or confusion regarding diet and exercise, that your life will be divided into before-4HB and after-4HB. It can help you do what most people would consider superhuman, whether losing 100lb (45kg) of fat or running 100 miles. It all works.

FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE

Getting Tested

There are dozens of tests mentioned throughout this book. If you ever ask yourself “How do I get that tested?” or wonder where to start, the “Getting Tested” list here is your step-by-step guide.

Quick Reference

Not sure how much a gram is, or what the hell 4 ounces is? Just flip to the common measurements here and unleash your inner Julia Child.

Endnotes and Citations

This book is very well researched.

It’s also big enough to club a baby seal. If you really want to make your eyes glaze over, more than 30 scientific citations can be found at www.fourhourbody.com/endnotes, divided by chapter and with relevant sentences included.

Resources

To spare you the headache of typing out paragraph-long URLs, all long website addresses have been replaced with a short www.fourhourbody.com address that will send you to the right place.

Got it? Good. Let’s move on to the mischief.

1. Multiple tests are often performed from single blood draws of 10–12 vials.

2. Not just noticeable.

3. There are, of course, some outstanding companies with solid R&D and uncompromising ethics, but they are few and far between.

4. I have absolutely no financial interest in any of the supplements I recommend in this book. If you purchase any supplement from a link in this book, an affiliate commission is sent directly to the non-profit DonorsChoose.org, which helps public schools in the United States.

5. Philosopher Nassim N. Taleb noted an important difference between language and biology that I’d like to underscore: the former is largely known and the latter is largely unknown. Thus, our 2.5% is not 2.5% of a perfect finite body of knowledge, but the most empirically valuable 2.5% of what we know now.

FUNDAMENTALS—FIRST AND FOREMOST

THE MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE

From Microwaves to Fat-Loss

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

ARTHUR JONES WAS A precocious young child and particularly fond of crocodiles.

He read his father’s entire medical library before he was 12. The home environment might have had something to do with it, seeing as his parents, grandfather, great-grandfather, half-brother and half-sister were all doctors.

From humble beginnings in Oklahoma, he would mature into one of the most influential figures in the exercise science world. He would also become, in the words of more than a few, a particularly “angry genius”.

One of Jones’s protégés, Ellington Darden PhD, shares a prototypical Jones anecdote:

In 1970, Arthur invited Arnold [Schwarzenegger] and Franco Colombu to visit him in Lake Helen, Florida, right after the 1970 Mr. Olympia. Arthur picked them up at the airport in his Cadillac, with Arnold in the passenger seat and Franco in the back. There are probably 12 stoplights in between the airport and the Interstate, so it was a lot of stop-and-go driving.

Now, you have to know that Arthur was a man who talked loud and dominated every conversation. But he couldn’t get Arnold to shut up. He was just blabbing in his German or whatever and Arthur was having a hard time understanding what he was saying. So Arthur was getting annoyed and told him to quiet down, but Arnold just kept talking and talking.

By the time they got onto the Interstate, Arthur had had enough. So he pulled over to the side of the road, got out, walked around, opened Arnold’s door, grabbed him by the shirt collar, yanked him out, and said something to the effect of, “Listen here, you son of a bitch. If you don’t shut the hell up, a man twice your age is going to whip your ass right out here in front of I-4 traffic. Just dare me.”

Within five seconds Arnold had apologized, got back in the car, and was a perfect gentlemen for the next three or four days.

Jones was more frequently pissed off than anything else.

He was infuriated by what he considered stupidity in every corner of the exercise science world, and he channelled this anger into defying the odds. This included putting 4.5st (28.67kg) on champion body builder Casey Viator in 28 days and putting himself on the Forbes 400 list by founding and selling exercise equipment manufacturer Nautilus, which was estimated to have grossed $300 million (£187 million) per year at its zenith.

He had no patience for fuzzy thinking in fields that depended on scientific clarity. In response to researchers who drew conclusions about muscular function using electromyography (EMG), Arthur attached their machines to a cadaver and moved its limbs to record similar “activity”. Internal friction, that is.

Jones lamented his fleeting time: “My age being what it is, universal acceptance of what we are now doing may not come within my lifetime; but it will come, because what we are doing is clearly established by simple laws of basic physics that cannot be denied forever.” He passed away on 28 August 2007, of natural causes, 80 years old and as ornery as ever.

Jones left a number of important legacies, one of which will be the cornerstone of everything we’ll discuss: the minimum effective dose.

The Minimum Effective Dose

The minimum effective dose (MED) is defined simply: the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome.

Jones referred to this critical point as the “minimum effective load”, as he was concerned exclusively with weight-bearing exercise, but we will look at precise “dosing” of both exercise and anything you ingest.¹

Anything beyond the MED is wasteful.

To boil water, the MED is 100°C (212°F) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it “more boiled”. Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive.

If you need 15 minutes in the sun to trigger a melanin response, 15 minutes is your MED for tanning. More than 15 minutes is redundant and will just result in burning and a forced break from the beach. During this forced break from the beach, let’s assume one week, someone else who heeded his natural 15-minute MED will be able to fit in four more tanning sessions. He is four shades darker, whereas you have returned to your pale pre-beach self. Sad little manatee. In biological systems, exceeding your MED can freeze progress for weeks, even months.

In the context of body redesign, there are two fundamental MEDs to keep in mind:

To remove stored fat → do the least necessary to trigger a fat loss cascade of specific hormones.

To add muscle in small or large quantities → do the least necessary to trigger local (specific muscles) and systemic (hormonal²) growth mechanisms.

Knocking over the dominos that trigger both of these events takes surprisingly little. Don’t complicate them.

For a given muscle group like the shoulders, activating the local growth mechanism might require just 80 seconds of tension using 23kg (50lb) once every seven days, for example. That stimulus, just like the 100°C (212°F) for boiling water, is enough to trigger certain prostaglandins, transcription factors and all manner of complicated biological reactions. What are “transcription factors”? You don’t need to know. In fact, you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven. Press a few buttons in the right order and it’s done.

In our context: 80 seconds as a target is all you need to understand. That is the button.

If, instead of 80 seconds, you mimic a glossy magazine routine—say, an arbitrary 5 sets of 10 repetitions—it is the muscular equivalent of sitting in the sun for an hour with a 15-minute MED. Not only is this wasteful, it is a predictable path for preventing and reversing gains. The organs and glands that help repair damaged tissue have more limitations than your enthusiasm. The kidneys, as one example, can clear the blood of a finite maximum waste concentration each day (approximately 450 mmol, or millimoles per litre). If you do a marathon three-hour workout and make your bloodstream look like an LA traffic jam, you stand the real chance of hitting a biochemical bottleneck.

Again: the good news is that you don’t need to know anything about your kidneys to use this information. All you need to know is:

80 seconds is the dose prescription.

More is not better. Indeed, your greatest challenge will be resisting the temptation to do more.

The MED not only delivers the most dramatic results, but it does so in the least time possible. Jones’s words should echo in your head: “REMEMBER: it is impossible to evaluate, or even understand, anything that you cannot measure.”

80 secs of 9kg (20lb)

10:00 mins of 12.2°C (54°F) water

200 mg of allicin extract before bed

These are the types of prescriptions you should seek, and these are the types of prescriptions I will offer.

1. Credit is due to Dr. Doug McGuff, who’s written extensively on this and who will reappear later.

2. In fancier and more accurate terms, neuroendocrine.

RULES THAT CHANGE THE RULES

Everything Popular Is Wrong

Everything popular is wrong.

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.

—Dalai Lama XIV

“THIS IS CLEARLY a lie. Gaining 44.5 kg (98 lb) in 28 days requires a caloric surplus of 4,300 calories per day, so for a guy his size, he must have eaten 7,000 calories a day. He expects me to believe that he dropped 4% in body fat as a result of eating 7,000 calories? …”

I took a big swig of Malbec and read the blog comment again. Ah, the Internet. How far we haven’t come.

It was amusing, and one of hundreds of similar comments on this particular blog post, but the fact remained: I had gained 15.4kg (34lb) of muscle, lost 1.8kg (4lb) of fat, and decreased my total cholesterol from 222 to 147, all in 28 days, without anabolics or statins like artovestin.

The entire experiment had been recorded by Dr. Peggy Plato, director of the Sport and Fitness Evaluation Program at San Jose State University, who used hydrostatic weighing tanks, medical scales and a tape measure to track everything from waist circumference to body fat percentage. My total time in the gym over four weeks?

Four hours.¹ Eight 30-minute workouts.

The data didn’t lie.

But isn’t weight loss or gain as simple as calories in and calories out?

It’s attractive in its simplicity, yes, but so is cold fusion. It doesn’t work quite as advertised.

German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe had the right perspective: “Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.” To do the impossible (sail around the world, break the four-minute mile, reach the moon), you need to ignore the popular.

Charles Munger, right-hand adviser to Warren Buffett, the richest man on the planet, is known for his unparalleled clear thinking and near-failure-proof track record. How did he refine his thinking to help build a $3 trillion (£2 trillion) business in Berkshire Hathaway?

The answer is “mental models”, or analytical rules-of-thumb² pulled from disciplines outside of investing, ranging from physics to evolutionary biology.

Eighty to 90 models have helped Charles Munger develop, in Warren Buffett’s words, “the best 30-second mind in the world. He goes from A to Z in one move. He sees the essence of everything before you even finish the sentence.”

Charles Munger likes to quote Charles Darwin:

Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.

In the 4HB, the following mental models, pulled from a variety of disciplines, are what will separate your results from the rest of mankind.

New Rules for Rapid Redesign

NO EXERCISE BURNS MANY CALORIES.

Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you’re a 16st (98kg) male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.

(Remember: skip the “GA” boxes if you don’t like the dense stuff.)

Put another way, moving 16st (98kg) 100 metres (about 27 flights of stairs) requires 100 kilojoules of energy, or 23.9 calories (known to scientists as kilocalories [kcal]). 450g (1lb) of fat contains 4,082 calories. How many calories might running a marathon burn? 2,600 or so.

The caloric argument for exercise gets even more depressing. Remember those 107 calories you burnt during that kick-ass hour-long Stairmaster™ session? Don’t forget to subtract your basal metabolic rate (BMR), what you would have burnt had you been sitting on the sofa watching The Simpsons instead. For most people, that’s about 100 calories per hour given off as heat (BTU).

That hour on the Stairmaster was worth seven calories.

As luck would have it, three small sticks of celery are six calories, so you have one calorie left to spare. But wait a minute: how many calories did that sports drink and big post-workout meal have? Don’t forget that you have to burn more calories than you later ingest in larger meals due to increased appetite.

F*cking hell, right? It’s enough to make a lumberjack cry. Confused and angry? You should be.

As usual, the focus is on the least important piece of the puzzle.

But why do scientists harp on the calorie? Simple. It’s cheap to estimate, and it is a popular variable for publication in journals. This, dear friends, is referred to as “car park” science, so-called after a joke about a poor drunk man who loses his keys during a night on the town.

His friends find him on his hands and knees looking for his keys under a streetlight, even though he knows he lost them somewhere else. “Why are you looking for your keys under the streetlight?” they ask. He responds confidently, “Because there’s more light over here. I can see better.”

For the researcher seeking tenure, grant money or lucrative corporate consulting contracts, the maxim “publish or perish” applies. If you need to include 100 or 1,000 test subjects and can only afford to measure a few simple things, you need to paint those measurements as tremendously important.

Alas, mentally on your hands and knees is no way to spend life, nor is chafing your arse on a stationary bike.

Instead of focusing on calories-out as exercise-dependent, we will look at two underexploited paths: heat and hormones.

So relax. You’ll be able to eat as much as you want, and then some. New exhaust pipes will solve the problem.

A DRUG IS A DRUG IS A DRUG

Calling something a “drug”, a “dietary supplement”, “over-the-counter” or a “nutriceutical” is a legal distinction, not a biochemical one.

None of these labels means that something is safe or effective. Legal herbs can kill you just as dead as illegal narcotics. Supplements, often un-patentable molecules and therefore unappealing for drug development, can decrease cholesterol from 222 to 147 in four weeks, as I have done, or they can be inert and do absolutely nothing.

Think “all-natural” is safer than synthetic? Split peas are all-natural, but so is arsenic. Human growth hormone (HGH) can be extracted from the brains of all-natural cadavers, but unfortunately it often brings Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with it, which is why HGH is now manufactured using recombinant DNA.

drug