In our context: 80 seconds as a target is all you need to understand. That is the b.u.t.ton.
If, instead of 80 seconds, you mimic a glossy magazine routine-say, an arbitrary 5 sets of 10 repet.i.tions-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 liter). 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 20 lbs.
10:00 mins. of 54F 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.
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End of Chapter Notes 1. Credit is due to Dr. Doug McGuff, who"s written extensively on this and who will reappear later. 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, In fancier and more accurate terms, neuroendocrine neuroendocrine.
RULES THAT CHANGE THE RULES.
Everything Popular Is Wrong Everything popular is wrong.-Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest The Importance of Being EarnestKnow the rules well, so you can break them effectively.-Dalai Lama XIV "This is clearly a lie. Gaining 34 lb in 28 days requires a caloric surplus of 4300 calories per day, so for a guy his size, he must have eaten 7000 calories a day. He expects me to believe that he dropped 4% in bodyfat as a result of eating 7000 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 34 pounds of muscle, lost 4 pounds of fat, and decreased my total cholesterol from 222 to 147, all in 28 days, without anabolics or statins like Lipitor.
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 circ.u.mference to bodyfat percentage. My total time in the gym over four weeks?
Four hours.3 Eight 30-minute workouts. 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 business in Berkshire Hathaway?
The answer is "mental models," or a.n.a.lytical rules-of-thumb4 pulled from disciplines outside of investing, ranging from physics to evolutionary biology. 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 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.
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[image](Remember: skip the "GA" boxes if you don"t like the dense stuff.) Put another way, moving 100 kilograms (220 pounds) 100 meters (about 27 flights of stairs) requires 100 kilojoules of energy, or 23.9 calories (known to scientists as kilocalories [kcal]). A pound 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 burned during that kick-a.s.s hour-long Stairmaster session? Don"t forget to subtract your basal metabolic rate (BMR), what you would have burned had you been sitting on the couch watching The Simpsons The Simpsons instead. For most people, that"s about 100 calories per hour given off as heat (BTU). 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 stalks 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 appet.i.te.
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F*cking h.e.l.l, 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 "parking lot" 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 a.s.s 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 mean that something is safe or effective. Legal herbs can kill you just as dead as illegal narcotics. Supplements, often unpatentable 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 a.r.s.enic. 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.
Besides whole foods (which we"ll treat separately as "food"), anything you put in your mouth or your bloodstream that has an effect-whether it"s a cream, injection, pill, or powder-is a drug drug. Treat them all as such. Don"t distract yourself with labels that are meaningless to us.
THE 20-POUND RECOMP GOAL.
For the vast majority of you reading this book who weigh more than 120 pounds, 20 pounds of recomposition recomposition (which I"ll define below) will make you look and feel like a new person, so I suggest this as a goal. If you weigh less than 120 pounds, aim for 10 pounds; otherwise, 20 pounds is your new, specific goal. (which I"ll define below) will make you look and feel like a new person, so I suggest this as a goal. If you weigh less than 120 pounds, aim for 10 pounds; otherwise, 20 pounds is your new, specific goal.
Even if you have 100+ pounds to lose, start with 20.
On a 110 attractiveness scale, 20 pounds appears to be the critical threshold for going from a 6 to a 9 or 10, at least as tested with male perception of females.
The term "recomposition" is important. It does not not mean a 20-pound reduction in weight. It"s a 20-pound change in appearance. A 20-pound "recomp" could entail losing 20 pounds of fat or gaining 20 pounds of muscle, but it most often involves losing 15 pounds of fat and gaining 5 pounds of muscle, or some blend in between. mean a 20-pound reduction in weight. It"s a 20-pound change in appearance. A 20-pound "recomp" could entail losing 20 pounds of fat or gaining 20 pounds of muscle, but it most often involves losing 15 pounds of fat and gaining 5 pounds of muscle, or some blend in between.
Designing the best physique includes both subtraction and addition.
THE 100-UNIT SLIDER: DIET, DRUGS, AND EXERCISE.
How, then, do we get to 20 pounds?
Imagine a ruler with 100 lines on it, representing 100 total units, and two sliders. This allows us to split the 100 units into three areas that total 100. These three areas represent diet, drugs, and exercise.
An equal split would look like this:
________/________/________ (33% diet, 33% drugs, 33% exercise)
It is possible to reach your 20-pound recomp goal with any combination of the three, but some combinations are better than others. One hundred percent drugs can get you there, for example, but it will produce the most long-term side effects. One hundred percent exercise can get you there, but if injuries or circ.u.mstances interfere, the return to baseline is fast.
/__________/ (100% drugs) = side effects
//__________ (100% exercise) = easy to derail
Here is the ratio of most of the fat-loss case studies in this book:
______/_/___ (60% diet, 10% drugs, 30% exercise)
If you"re unable to follow a prescribed diet, as is sometimes the case with travel or vegetarianism, you"ll need to move the sliders to increase the % attention paid to exercise and drugs. For example:
_/____/_____ (10% diet, 45% drugs, 45% exercise)
The numbers need not be measured, but this concept is critical to keep in mind as the world interferes with plans. Learning diet and exercise principles is priority #1, as these are the bedrock elements. Relying too much on drugs makes your liver and kidneys unhappy.
The percentages will also depend on your personal preferences and "adherence," which we cover next.
THE DUCT TAPE TEST: WILL IT STICK?.
Eating at least one head of lettuce per day works well for losing fat and controlling insulin levels.
That is, if you"re a critical intervention patient, such as a morbidly obese type 1 diabetic. The options for such people, as explained by their doctors, are (1) change your diet with this prescription, or (2) die. Not surprisingly, adherence is often incredible. For someone who would like to lose 20 pounds but is more interested in how their a.s.s looks in a pair of jeans, the adherence will be abysmal. Chopping vegetables and cleaning the Cuisinart three times per day will lead to one place: abandonment of the method. Does that mean it won"t work for some people? No. It just means that it will fail for most most people. We want to avoid all methods with a high failure rate, even if you believe you are in the diligent minority. In the beginning, everyone who starts a program believes they"re in this minority. people. We want to avoid all methods with a high failure rate, even if you believe you are in the diligent minority. In the beginning, everyone who starts a program believes they"re in this minority.
Take adherence seriously: will you actually stick with this change until you hit your goal?
If not, find another method, even if it"s less effective and less efficient. The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.
DON"T CONFUSE PHYSICAL RECREATION WITH EXERCISE Physical recreation can be many things: baseball, swimming, yoga, rock- climbing, tipping cows...the list is endless. Exercise, on the other hand, means performing an MED of precise movements that will produce a target change. That"s it. It"s next to impossible to draw cause-and-effect relationships with recreation. There are too many variables. Effective exercise is simple and trackable.
Physical recreation is great. I love chasing dogs at the dog park as much as the next person. Exercise in our context, however, is the application of measurable stimuli to decrease fat, increase muscle, or increase performance.
Recreation is for fun. Exercise is for producing changes. Don"t confuse the two.
DON"T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSE AND EFFECT Want to look like a marathon runner, thin and sleek? Train like a marathoner.
Want to look like a sprinter, ripped and muscular? Train like a sprinter.
Want to look like a basketball player, 68? Train like a basketball player.
Hold on now. That last one doesn"t work. Nor does it work for the first two examples. It"s flawed logic, once again appealing and tempting in its simplicity. Here are three simple questions we can ask to avoid similar mistakes:
1. Is it possible that the arrow of causality is reversed? Example: do people who are naturally ripped and muscular often choose to be sprinters? Yep.