Author: Timothy Ferriss
ASIN: B004M8S3Y6
I didn't particularly like this book. There's a lot of BS and details in this book that can easily take you astray. Everything useful is in the excerpts.
EXCERPTS
The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.
Did fatness genes get passed on, or was it overeating behaviour? After all, fat people tend to have fat pets.
Rule #1: It’s not what you put in your mouth that matters, it’s what makes it to your bloodstream. If it passes through, it doesn’t count.
Rule #2: The hormonal responses to carbohydrates (CHO), protein and fat are different.
You should eat and train for your desired outcome, not to accommodate your current condition.
FOR MOST OF us, the how-to books on our shelves represent a growing to-do list, not advice we’ve followed.
People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it. There are two reasons: Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no “Harajuku Moment”. There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioural change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers. But what is this all-important “Harajuku Moment”? It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. There is no point in getting started until it happens. It applies to fat loss as much as strength gain, to endurance as much as sex. No matter how many bullet points and recipes I provide, you will need a Harajuku Moment to fuel the change itself.
“If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply ‘go with the flow’ and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions towards that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.
DEXA Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), which costs $50–100 (£31–62) per session, ended up my favourite, as it is repeatable and offers valuable information besides body fat percentage. Among others it highlights muscular imbalances between the left and right sides.
NEVER COMPARE BEFORE-AND-AFTER RESULTS FROM DIFFERENT TOOLS.
One weakness of calipers and ultrasound is that they can only directly measure subcutaneous fat (under the skin) and not what’s called visceral fat (around the organs).
The question wasn’t so much how he did it. The real question was: why did it work? Simple. He’d made an agreement with a coworker: they would go to the gym together three times per week, and if either of them missed a session, that person had to pay the other $1 (60p).
Get an accurate picture of your baseline. It will look worse than you expect. This need not be bad news. Ignoring it won’t fix it, so capture it and use it.
measurement = motivation. Seeing progress in changing numbers makes the repetitive fascinating and creates a positive feedback loop.
Understanding this principle, IBM led the computing world in sales for decades. The quotas for its salespeople were the lowest in the industry because management wanted the reps to be unintimidated to do one thing: pick up the phone. Momentum took care of the rest, and quotas were exceeded quarter after quarter.
But why the hell would you want to do 60–90 seconds of funny exercises a few minutes before you eat and, ideally, again about 90 minutes afterwards? Short answer: because it brings glucose transporter type 4 (GLUT-4) to the surface of muscle cells, opening more gates for the calories to flow into. The more muscular gates we have open before insulin triggers the same GLUT-4 on the surface of fat cells, the more we can put in muscle instead of fat.
Don’t tell me it’s impossible, tell me you can’t do it. Tell me it’s never been done … the only things we really know are Maxwell’s equations, the three laws of Newton, the two postulates of relativity, and the periodic table. That’s all we know that’s true. All the rest are man’s laws. —Dean Kamen
(e-)Book: Anabolics
The Illustrated Guide to Extended Massive Orgasm by Steve and Vera Bodansky
The liver and muscles can only store 1,800– 2,200 calories of carbohydrates in the form of glycogen.
“It’s important to train the body to process food during movement, and you should practise this during your longer training runs. Aim to consume one gram of carbohydrate (CHO) per hour, per kilogram body weight.
5 MOST BEAUTIFUL U.S. MARATHONS
- Big Sur (www.bsim.org): Unparalleled coastal scenery.
- Boulder Backroads (www.bouldermarathon.com): If you’re lucky, there’ll already be snow covering the nearby mountain peaks.
- Myrtle Beach (www.mbmarathon.com): The course runs along the beach almost the entire way. Surf’s up!
- St. George (www.stgeorgemarathon.com): The bonfires at the start are unforgettable.
- Kauai (www.thekauaimarathon.com): The Aloha Spirit shines through all the way.
THE SUMO DEADLIFT (for running): Barry suggests the sumo deadlift instead of the conventional deadlift whenever possible. The pull distance is shorter and the lower-back position is safer.
MAXIMAL SPEED Finally, once Barry’s athletes are strong, he makes them faster.
The paradigm is shifting and the writing is on the wall: working smarter beats working longer, whether in the weight room or on the track.
Strength training cannot interfere with the practice of your [main] sport. This is the point—the most important point—that many strength and conditioning coaches somehow miss. The crucial principle is to lift heavy but not hard. This is where the “rule of 10 reps” can be applied:
- Use two to three “global” compound exercises (e.g., the deadlift and the bench press).
- Lift three times a week (e.g., Monday, Wednesday and Friday). Do your conditioning and supplementary work on separate days, practise your sport skills six days a week, and take one day off completely.
- Focus on sets of two or three reps. Two reps is the most preferred rep choice of the Russian National Weight Lifting Team.
- In all cases, complete approximately 10 reps per lift per workout (e.g., three sets of three, five sets of two, etc.).
- Never train to failure, and always leave at least one to two reps “in the bank”.
- Rest for five minutes between sets.
- Finish your workout feeling stronger than when you started.
The goal is to build as much strength as possible while staying as fresh as possible for your sport.
But what about less frequent training? Less frequent training than Monday, Wednesday and Friday (i.e., once a week) is not ideal for an athlete, even if it builds strength and consumes less time. U.S. powerlifting records in the 1980s and 1990s leave no doubt that you can achieve a world-class squat by trashing yourself once a week. But you will not walk well afterward. Every time you lift, you will get as sore as a newbie. This isn’t a big deal for a powerlifter, but it’s very bad news for a boxer or someone who needs to train in the subsequent 48 hours. Can more volume build strength? Of course. But it takes its toll. You will be so sore and exhausted that the only “sport” you could practise at the same time is chess.
Nikolay Ozolin, one of the founding fathers of Soviet sport science, recommends cutting back in-season lifting volume to 2/3 of off-season lifting volume without reducing weight.
Francis did the opposite of most coaches: “Ninety percent of my time is spent holding athletes back to prevent overtraining, and only 10 per cent is spent motivating them to do more work.”
- 2–3 is a great rep range to emphasize throughout an athlete’s programme.
- 4–5 is where neural training and muscle-building meet, which means you could end up with some hypertrophy. This is out of the question in weight-class-based sports like boxing.
Steve Baccari, strength coach extraordinaire to top fighters like the UFC’s Joe Lauzon, agrees with the heavy but not hard approach: “In my opinion, ‘easy’ strength training is the only productive way a competitive fighter can strength train. … But most people think if you don’t break a sweat, it must not work. This used to bother me a lot, but not any more, because I think it is one reason why my fighters win so much.”
“Strength training is like putting the money in the bank to take it out on the fight day.” Save the fatigue for your sport.
It takes a 10% increase in lean muscle mass to net a 50% increase in strength, and that’s being optimistic. Period.
Experience has shown time and time again that after an athlete has completed a successful 12-week cycle, gains need to be solidified. Engaging in yet another power cycle immediately after a successful initial cycle is doomed to failure.
If you want to be more confident or effective, rather than relying on easily defeated positive thinking and mental gymnastics, learn to run faster, lift more than your peers, or lose those last 10lb (4.5kg). It’s measurable, it’s clear, you can’t lie to yourself. It therefore works. Recall Richard Branson’s answer to the question, “How do you become more productive?”: work out. The Cartesian separation of mind and body is false. They’re reciprocal. Start with the precision of changing physical reality and a domino effect will often take care of the internal.
Job not going well? Company having issues? Some idiot making life difficult? If you add ten laps to your swimming, or if you cut five seconds off your best mile time, it can still be a great week. Controlling your body puts you in life’s driver’s seat.
Computer scientist Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. —Richard Feynman
From my acne research I learned that self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote that “justice too long delayed is justice denied”. In the world of self-experimentation, where the outcomes are of personal importance, results too long delayed are results denied. This doesn’t mean being haphazard. It’s more than possible to tinker without hurting yourself. It means, however, that waiting for perfect conditions often means waiting forever. In the world I live in, people want to lose fat or improve sexual performance now, not in five or ten years. Let the journals catch up later—you don’t have to wait.
HOW DO I GET ENOUGH PROTEIN ON A VEGAN DIET … WITHOUT SOYA? Answer: first, we must define “enough”. By most carnivorous standards, the endurance athletes profiled in this chapter consume insufficient protein, yet they are able to compete at the highest levels in their sports. It’s not limited to running, either. Mike Mahler, one well-known vegan strength athlete, consumes 100–130g (3½–4½oz) per day on training days and approximately 90g (3¼oz) per day on non-training days. Given his bodyweight of 14st (89kg) and assumed lean body mass of 80kg (177.3lb) (10% body fat), this computes as a high end of 0.73 grams per kilogram of lean bodyweight on training days and 0.51 grams per kilogram of lean bodyweight on non-training days.
Keep in mind that this list is for a peak training period, when Scott would be consuming 5,000–6,000 calories/day at approximately 60–70% carbohydrate, 20–30% fat and 15–20% protein.
