The 4-Hour Body: (Quickly) Hacking The Human Body
mixergy.com
mixergy.com
Don't get me wrong; I understand that you're a journalist and want to keep an open mind. No question about the popularity of this person and his subject.
I just don't think that he or his message are very inspiring. While most of us here work hard building stuff for the benefit of others, this guy just hacks the system for personal benefit. Whether it's gaming the rules to win a martial arts contest, front loading phony book reviews, or making outrageous claims that spawn counterproductive behavior, I really don't want to know about it; I've read enough.
The world already has enough hustlers, charletons, and posers. I'd rather see you spend your time continuing to bring us the real inspiration the has given mixergy such a great track record.
Just my .02.
[EDIT: Just a quick follow-up to those who have disagreed. I don't hate Tim Ferriss. I don't accuse him of lying or deceiving. And I don't question whether or not his methods are effective. (Spam is effective, something else I would never do.)
When I read his last book, I was totally turned off when he claimed winning a martial arts contest by finding a loophole in the rules and shoving his opponent out of bounds. I have never done anything like that and have no intention of learning anything similar.
There's so much inspiring stuff to read here and in books that I see no need to follow up on something I've already ruled out. I was just a little surprised to see Tim Ferriss and mixergy in the same post. That's all.]
WHY I INTERVIEW TIM:
1) Eric Ries once told me how a tiny change to a marketing page is worth hours of recoding. I believe there are little changes that have big significance and Tim is good at identifying and explaining them.
2) There are loads of books about health, but his is going to be a top seller. I'm curious about what it is about the way he presents & markets ideas that help him stand out.
3) Tim Ferriss gets a lot of attention. This response would be incomplete if I didn't admit that Tim's name got my other work a lot of hits, and it will continue to. He has fans that still tweet about an interview that I did with him over a year ago.
WHAT I COULD HAVE DONE BETTER:
1) I should have addressed some of his health claims. It's outside the scope of my work to talk about health, but if we brought it up, I needed to talk about opposing research.
2) I might have been too fawning at the end. I always love my guests, but at the end of an interview, when someone sits for 1 hour and answers questions, I'm prone to gushing out of gratitude.
Yet I wonder how I could have become so cynical as to doubt the "socially redeeming value" of an ~author~ who gets a book published by including claims such as:
> YOU WILL LEARN (in less than 30 minutes each):
> How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails.
> * How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
> * How to increase fat-loss 300% with a few bags of ice
> * How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
> * How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
> * How to produce 15-minute female orgasms
> * How to triple testosterone and double sperm count
> * How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks
> * How to reverse “permanent” injuries
> * How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months
> * How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit
I enjoy fitness. I've worked out four to five days a week for the past seven years, first at a climbing gym, and then with Crossfit. I've competed in fitness competitions. I've know a number of well-respected high-level Crossfitters. I would call myself, at the very least, a fitness enthusiast.
I think some of these claims are at best, laughable, and, at worst, will give false hope to people who might truly be interested in fitness. Fitness is hard work!
> * How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
Muscle memory will allow people to gain significant amounts of muscle in short periods of time, if that muscle has been trained before.
It's why athletes who take rest periods or have injuries are able to come back just as strong in only a few weeks.
It's the source of many of the before/after pictures for "health foods" and supplements.
If you're actually interested in gaining muscle and weight, the easiest way is to eat tons of food and do heavy, compound exercises three to four times a week.
> * How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
Anecdotally, a friend of mine ended up in the emergency room for severe dehydration after trying the Uberman's Sleep Cycle for three weeks.
> * How to triple testosterone and double sperm count
I imagine he's be talking about various supplements here. Supplement science is sketchy, and should always be taken with a grain of salt.
The best way to take supplements is to not take them, but rather, eat more fruits and vegetables.
> * How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks
Pretty simple, actually. There are progressive running plans in almost any running book.
Also, the difference between five and 50 km, at least to your muscles, is much less than the difference between 400M and 5K. It's just training your aerobic system and converting more of your muscle tissue to slow-twitch muscle fibers.
> * How to reverse “permanent” injuries
Eat right and exercise correctly.
If you read the forums for crossfit, or stronglifts, or a number of other fitness websites, or diet websites, you'll see people who miraculously cure their bad back, bad knees or diabetes, just by eating right and exercising correctly.
> * How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months
This is almost guaranteed to happen when someone goes from an untrained state to the beginning of a trained state. It has to do with muscles learning to be used, rather than significant strength gains.
When I started Crossfit three years ago, I could barely deadlift 135#. Three years later, my last 1RM deadlift was 455#. Going from 135# to 300# was _so_ much easier and faster than going from 300# to 455#, because my body had always been able to do it, it just didn't know it.
You're talking 5 intense months to safely train minimum, for a person who can run 5 km.
Training for a 50 km isn't "just aerobics", it's also about strengthening your bones and ligaments and developing the mental tools you'll need to finish. It's about learning what your body needs to stay hydrated. Learning how to minimize calorie use. Learn how to run through the walls (yes, plural, there's normally two of them on a 50 km run). How to eat on the run without throwing it all up or squirting it out from your shorts. Aerobics is the least of it, IMHO.
12 weeks is a laughable claim.
And yes, I've run 50km (and far beyond) in one go.
You aren't going to go from a 5k to a 50k in 12 weeks and remain injury-free, sorry.
5 weeks training, 43 marathons in 50 days.
This is more akin to hiking a flat version of the Appalachian Trail than running 50 km straight.
It's more complicated than that. Actual muscle mass has less to do with being strong than leverage and nervous system development.
Leverage is genetic and there's not much you can do about having long arms.
What you call "muscle memory" is the strength and frequency of nervous system signaling - most strength gains come from changes in the nervous system.
That's why there's tons of drug-free power and weightlifters who don't have a ton of muscles but are extremely strong. Conversely, there's tons of bodybuilders using steroids who can't actually lift all that much. This is because muscle mass is mostly dependent on hormones.
You don't gain muscle by lifting weights so much as you raise your testosterone level by lifting weights, which promotes muscle growth.
So athletes can come back quickly in terms of strength, but not so much size.
From what I read about Tim's "muscle gain" advice (he posted the story on his blog) it was mostly just water and fat. I bet he started out by dehydrating before the experiment, too. Assuming you start out slim it's very easy to gain 34 pounds in a month by drinking water, eating a ton of high-carb foods and taking creatine (I've done ~20 pounds in two weeks this way to go up a weight class). The only way you're going to gain any muscle that way is with weightlifting (a lot more than 4 hours) or steroids, and preferably both.
Then the book isn't telling how to "gain 35 pounds of muscle". It's telling how to restore 35 pounds of muscle you recently had.
Which is significantly different from "add 35 new pounds of muscle".
My favorite thing about Tim Ferriss are the video podcasts that he does with Kevin Rose. They're posted on his blog ("Random episode X"), and they're usually pretty interesting (the one they did when traveling around China comes to mind), though not mind blowing.
As for the rest, I try to be inspired by his energy at trying new things and being methodical about learning, but I don't really follow him on most of the specifics of what he does.
I find that the best way to deal with self-promoting people is to ignore them. I have a limited amount of attention and brain space, and I really don't have time for Tim Ferriss trying to cram himself into every nook and cranny of it.
Besides, Tim Ferriss is a cunt. If you try to learn from his example you'll become a cunt too.
(Interesting: my spellcheck flags "cunt" as misspelled. How else would you spell it?)
I find Tim way more inspiring than "yet another discussion on how $TECHNOLOGY_X is {dead,the hottest thing since sliced bread}."
YMMV.
So are the Chinese dudes who put melamine in the milk and formula they sold, poisoning untold numbers of children while increasing their profits by selling watered-down milk. (The melamine tested as protein, covering up the dilution.)
That was a hack. Same with 'hackers' who use shoddy building materials resulting in buildings that collapse.
Hackers like that are a dime a dozen. It's not anything I'd want to emulate. And I certainly wouldn't want to hire someone who thought along such lines.
* Have you read the book?
* Do you have thoughts of your own about why Tim Ferris's methods cannot be applied to exercise?
If so, I would be genuinely delighted to read them.
That's not really my style either but it is a bit amusing that he did it.
I guess I just have a filter for those things. I'm mostly inspired by his unconventional thinking and the idea of non-conformity. Even if I don't agree with everything he says, I love that he's always looking for different and better (at least to him) ways of doing things.
One line from the 4HWW "Ask for forgiveness, not permission," can change the way you address challenges for the rest of your life. I'm really looking forward to seeing what insights he's put into the new book.
But overdo it and people will think you're an asshole.
Agree! Note this from the bottom of the page:
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I'm not sure I agree with him completely, but my goal in the interviews is to learn, not to argue for "my side."
My other goal here was to find out how he identifies that 5% that gets outsized results. The salient part of his answer was that he find people who achieve freakish results, then he mimics their approach.
(If you read those last 2 sentences, you may not have to listen to my hour-long interview, which strengthen's Tim's 80%/5% message.)
Diet: Not too many calories, many vegetables, enough protein. Cook your own meals. Fat is ok, as long as you don't get too many calories.
Exercise: Mostly running, and a little bit of strength training. The key is to do what you do to the max. Run 10 minutes but make sure run as fast as possible. Do this two times a week, this will take 40 minutes a week (20 minutes running, 20 minutes preparing & showering). Do 5 minutes of exercise when you get up/go to sleep 4 times a week.
If we assume 16 hour days then this will take 1/(7*16) = 0.9% of your time. Just to emphasize, that's less than one hundredth of your awake time.
This is what I do and it works very well, it is the best investment of my time I ever make. YMMV
When I eat with my friends they sometimes say how come you eat so much but are so lean. They've been drinking fruit juice or soft drinks with the meal whereas I drank water, they're eating less but consuming the same amount of calories. Later the night they'll feel hungry and start eating snacks. For example tonight I ate carrots, pasta with pork and cheese with a sauce based on creme fraiche. This contains a lot of fat but that's not so bad because it also makes you full (I ate it 6 hours ago and have no appetite for e.g. sweets whatsoever).
When you're hungry, bake an egg in butter with cheese and eat it with a slice of bread. This will be about 300 calories but you'll be full. Or you can eat one Mars and you'll be hungry again in half an hour (also 300 calories). Or you can drink 3 glasses of coke and be hungry in half an hour. Or you can eat 8 oranges and you won't be hungry (also 300). Or eat 25 big tomatoes. Or 100 grams of bread and you'll be hungry in two hours.
The following numbers may be handy:
Fat: 9000 kcal/kg (this holds for body fat as well as fat in foods)
Alcohol: 7000 kcal/kg
Carbohydrates: 4000 kcal/kg
Protein: 4000 kcal/kg
I think it is futile to try to lose weight or keep weight low trying to be hungry. Your body is much more powerful than your mind and will override your conscious efforts in no time.
This is what works for me. The caveat is that I've never had or tried to lose weight, but I started to eat this way because I think it's healthier. When I did so after a while I discovered I had lost 4 kg (which is a lot for me), and had to consciously eat more to gain some of it back. On the other hand I went on a very active sports / camping vacation with friends and we had to buy food a few days ahead, so we all ate the same kind of things. This was a mix between their and my diets (e.g. no coke/fruit juices just water from the lake). My weight went up slightly because I eat more but they each lost 1-2 kg in two weeks. So I think it works, but if you notice gaining weight when applying this, stop and look for something else.
It can't be the only thing I focus on, or else the interviews won't have depth and integrity.
But if I can pull that out, I can give my listeners a payoff for the hour they invest in my interviews.
"Tim Ferris is a charlatan. He's relies on spin and marketing to sell his products. His methods encourage people to be lazy and not make a genuine effort to reach their goals. His advice is counterproductive."
But while Tim makes every effort to support his claims using facts, anecdotes and citations these sorts of comments are rarely supported by anything other than the commenter's opinion. I'm not saying people shouldn't post Tim-hating comments, to the contrary I'm asking for Tim-haters to form a strong argument against his ideology by citing studies and literature that clearly contradict what he preaches.
And when he's talking about winning the martial arts fights, he goal was to "WIN", not to play the game. And like gursikh says, either put up or shut up. We need concrete examples!
Overall, I think Tim has done a lot for a lot of people with the ideas that he shares in his books.
All up, a call for "concrete examples" is exactly what should be going on. From Tim. Not from the unbeliever. The cliche is "the onus of proof is on the believer". Tim's extraordinary claims about drug-free muscle gain, for example, should have had a third-party drug test involved as well as being put in context with his previous and subsequent physique. His extraordinary claims to be a martial arts champion should come with names, dates and number of competitors in his division. Etc.
All I know is that when Ferriss's claims intersect stuff that I know about I can tell he's full of it. This doesn't raise my level of faith about anything else.
He didn't prove his ability to fight was superior. He didn't prove his mastery of martial arts was superior. He proved his ability to push his opponent over the line.
If there were no line, he'd be crushed.
But, by his definition, and by those set up by that martial arts sport, he did win, and he got the title/paper to prove it. What can you say, some people like titles/papers more than the actual process :)
http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=14095
For one thing, the strategy he came up with is not unlike the use of suicide bombers in real life conflicts. I expect something similar will apply when large numbers of small, cheap autonomous drones start being deployed. It has real-world applicability. It was also effective, I believe, in EVE Online. Plus, it was an interesting application of technology. It wasn't just "shoving".
By comparison, Ferris' shoving tactic is virtually useless outside of the context of a ring-based martial art competition. (Maybe if you got in a fight on the edge of a cliff, or on the roof of a building, or next to a pool of sharks...)
Has anyone ever bothered to verify those facts and citations? I mean, do his sources actually support his claims?
eg: Ann Coulter, http://mediamatters.org/research/200608070002
Most of the time nobody bothers to check. Reviews will mention "19 pages of footnotes" or similar to suggest the author's arguments are well-founded. But sometimes the footnotes are just a smokescreen.
If Ferris cites scientific papers, are they in credible journals? Have they held up? Do his sources actually support the claims? I dunno. I was wondering if anyone had checked.
http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Body-Uncommon-Incredible-Superh...
In the past few hours since the book was put on sale, there have been 90+ five star reviews.
Either this is one of the best book every published, of the publisher/author has been organizing or paying for reviews.
1) You didn't disclose that you received the book as a gift from the author/publisher and in advance.
2) That you were (I presume) asked to review the book on Amazon by the author/publisher.
3) That you didn't even read the book (only "several chapters") before giving it a 5 star "review".
4) You used a URL shortener on HN.
5) You used a URL shortener to obscure the Amazon affiliate tag in your link.
1) fair point, but devil's advocate says that is to be expected considering I posted it on launch day.
2) yes, I received a friendly reminder email that today was launch day and that tim would appreciate reviews. he did not specify positive in his wording. just that he would like reviews up.
3) The book actually _recommends_ not reading it in its entirety but rather selecting a few relevant sections based on what you want to do. I am not interested in the fat loss sections as I am already at 11.8% body fat, rather I am interested in the muscle building sections. Page 11 talks about 4 different "tracks" you can take with the book: rapid fat-loss, rapid muscle gain, rapid strength gain or rapid sense of total well-being (improving sex, perfecting sleep, etc). I quote from the book:
Do *not* read this book from start to finish.
Related: I had mentioned Tim and something he had said about metabolism downregulation in my popular "startup diet" post this year: http://paulstamatiou.com/programmers-startup-diet-how-i-lost...
The original edition didn't do quite as well, but it still has a huge quantity of great reviews: http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/p...
http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_trai...
It claims that your body can only synthesize about 2 pounds of dry muscle mass per month.
34 pounds in 28 days is roughly a pound of muscle per day. I've always found myself wanting more evidence to back that up, or even just seeing more examples of people saying they've done that. The closest I've heard to getting that kind of result are people who add drinking a gallon of milk in addition their regular diet, and even then they gain a fair amount of fat in addition to muscle and it's way less than that number.
The purpose of GOMAD is to pair a intense workout program (Three or so lifts per workout, workouts every other day, 3 rounds of 5 reps per lift, adding 5lbs to your max each workout), with more resources than the body can possibly utilize. GOMAD + a normal diet comes out to roughly 4000-5000 calories a day. This is typically enough to allow your body to fully recover from every workout in such a short period.
The system is designed so calories are "left over," which adds fat. Then after you're done with GOMAD, many people typically go on a paleo-style diet and then lose that fat they gained.
Just some info from someone who's done it!
This is how athletes can return from injury in a few weeks. It's also how most before/after shots for health products and supplements are made.
I've done GOMAD (Gallon of Milk A Day). It's tough to drink that much milk. In the end, I gained ten pounds of muscle over a period of two months.
Do you have a link to that by any chance?
It does make sense though. Perhaps that's what happened with him, but without that key bit of info it's fairly misleading.
Anecdotally, here's one guy's attempt at repeating the Colorado experiment. http://www.placeintheground.com/2008/07/21/testing-out-the-c... http://www.placeintheground.com/2008/09/25/colorado-experime...
Re-reading this makes me think that Tim Ferriss is probably advocating the Colorado Experiment's methods in his book. One of the other comments mentioned five-seconds-up, five-seconds-down.
Some people are just predisposed to bulking up. It's interesting to peruse body-building forums and see tons of people very dedicated to their sport all following the same recommended training regimens yet getting vastly varying results. It's not that the effort isn't there.
I know, I should be providing links to back-up my claim, but I should also be working to meet my company's big milestone due tomorrow. :-)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1955784
The discussions on Ferris always seem to turn to personal attacks, nor, citations on how Ferris is a "charlatan." Like any other information, I absorb what I feel will be helpful, and ignore the rest.
For the Four Hour Work Week, he gives highly simplistic and to-the-point advice on starting your little business (or as he says, muse). People love fluff it seems and rail against very blatant simplistic advice. His older blogs (from the HN discussion I linked above, which references his blog post) is all about That simplicity.
The most highly ranked comment in this discussion is only in regards to his self-promotion or personal dislike of the man himself. Not conducive to conversation.
It's also important to note that there's a difference between dry muscle mass and what you read on your scale after you've taken away body fat (that's presumably "wet muscle" - I don't know the exact word for it). So in your case, you might've gained a bit of fat (let's say 2 lbs for sake of argument), which means you gained 15-2/3 = 4.3 lbs of "wet muscle", which is entirely possible according to this article. You'll definitely gain more weight if you doubled your rations, but I suspect that will shift your muscle-to-fat gains ratio much more towards gaining fat.
I've also made similar gains at one point, going from 140-155 in 3 months. I did this through a diet of ~3600-4500 calories, and I gained a bit of fat too probably from overshooting my caloric intake near the end at 4500. Granted, my diet wasn't perfect, but it was pretty regulated so that's why the original claim's rate of muscle gain draws my attention.
I switched to HST after a long time of doing typical weight training routines and now do 1-2 sets per body part each time I'm in the gym. It's not nearly as extreme as what he's describing but I've cut my workouts down to 3 40 minute sessions each week and my gains have increased a LOT. Of course when I tell people that they freak out because there's an irrational belief that you have to put in tons of sets to see benefits.
Interesting stuff.
Enjoy it!
"Gaining" (actually regaining) large quantities of muscle in a short period of time is an old Iron Game trick (the "Colorado Experiment" with the Nautilus guy and Casey Jones IIRC). You can't gain nearly as much muscle as someone else can regain.
As for the other strategies to 'gain' this much 'muscle' while 'clean', the high points are (a) dehydration, (b) steroids and/or exogenous testosterone and (c) a modicum of fat gain (which on a normal muscular physique won't be that notable and, most importantly, (d) a willingness to claim that you haven't done a/b/c whether it is true or not.
Tim is a master of 'hacking' these kind of demos but it would be more impressive if he tried doing something more sustained where there isn't a short-cut to success. For example, compete in a sport where there is a lot at stake and a high number of well-prepared competitors. Not, for example, by finding a rules loophole in some obscure Chinese kickboxing event and winning it through a combination of extreme weight cutting and pushing other people over (one of his claims to fame as a martial artist).
[1] fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/01/18/how-to-cut-weight/
I think I see here 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days. How did you do that?
Timothy: So that was just so people know the circumstances. I was supervised by a Ph.D. at San Jose State University, and we used hydrostatic weighing, which is underwater weighing, for body composition. The way I did it was with two 30-minute workouts per week, which means it was literally four hours for the month. So in this case it is the 4-hour body. And there were a number of protocols that I followed.
The first was the exercise protocol, which was and we’ll talk about this I’m sure more, following the minimum effective dose. So how many seconds of tension with a specific weight or load do I need to trigger muscular growth in certain body parts? And you can figure this out. So I was using a very slow safe protocol to achieve that eliminating momentum to the extent possible, tracked everything like a scientific experiment.
And then the second protocol was the eating protocol. So you have to eat a lot to gain 34 pounds of muscle. I also lost three pounds of fat and lowered my cholesterol from 222 to 147. And that involved eating, but improving insulin sensitivity so that was preferentially put into muscle tissue as opposed to fat tissue. Then also taking supplementation to improve protein synthesis and things like that.
So at the end of the day it was a combination of very small things used together.
I was unfamiliar with hydrostatic weighing so I looked it up. Hydrostatic weighing appears to measure water displacement to figure out the body's density and hence fat to muscle composition. The density of muscle is 1.06 g/ml and fat is 0.92 g/ml. [1]
A gain of 30 pounds of water (1.0 g/ml) would show up as roughly equal gains in fat and muscle since water's density is about at the midpoint between fat and muscle. Ferriss's claim is +34 pounds of muscle and -3 pounds of fat.
I'm certain Ferriss gained lots of muscle in his four-week trial. His methodology isn't all that different from Gallon Of Milk A Day (GOMAD) plus the Starting Strength workout plan, both of which I've personally used to some success. That said, the freely available quotes don't give all of the necessary information. If you happen to buy the book, please share with us.
2 hours weights + 2 hours cardio will get you in shape like him. Not drinking milk and expecting to lose 10 lbs = fail.
the guy is a sales/marketing genius.
If you're a hard-gainer (I am), you will need to:
* Do the right kinds of exercises (squats, deadlifts, bench press, pullups, inverted rows, etc)
* Rest enough in between sessions (2 days between sessions at least)
* Eat enough, including enough protein from a variety of sources
If you do those things, you will put on muscle no matter what your body type. Exercise 4 hours a day, and you will only put on muscle if you have awesome genetics.
" 1 point by swombat 3 minutes ago | link | parent
A great many people (also known as "hard-gainers") will not gain any muscle whatsoever by exercising every day - let alone exercising for 4 hours every day.
If you're a hard-gainer (I am), you will need to:
* Do the right kinds of exercises (squats, deadlifts, bench press, pullups, inverted rows, etc)
* Rest enough in between sessions (2 days between sessions at least)
* Eat enough, including enough protein from a variety of sources
"If you do those things, you will put on muscle no matter what your body type. Exercise 4 hours a day, and you will only put on muscle if you have awesome genetics."
exactly; the same kind of "superhuman" genetics tim ferriss (and me) already have. thing is; if we don't do 4 hr/day, we get fat just like most of America!
This on top of an incredible claim caused my informational immune system to close the tab. If any reasonable person made such a discovery, they would be concerned about skepticism, about looking like a huckster. And about being wrong! They would look for some way to validate their work and would see if they could convince someone credible in the field before they started pitching it to the general public. This guy is going out of his way to look like a charlatan. Conclusion: he's looking for suckers and is weeding out everyone else right up front.