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Comment by teye | Hacker News Reader

4HB reads like a hacker's book, and that's why I loved it.

Conventional wisdom says you kill yourself at the gym to bulk up. But a muscle isn't strengthened by fatigue -- it's strengthened by the body's response to that fatigue. So shouldn't your goal be triggering the response?

That makes for an exciting read. The book is full of it -- tracking down the extraordinarily successful in a given field, taking their advice himself, and sharing the results.

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Working four hours a week is revolutionary. Working out four hours a week is ... average. If you spend four hours a week doing any sort of strength training in a semi-competent manner, you are going to look good after a period of months. (And you won't even need to weigh your feces!)

I fail to see why we need 571 pages of rebelling against conventional wisdom here.

I believe it's working out 4 hours a month, not a week.

I believe it's 4 hours a month.

Indeed, he claims he achieved his results by working out 4 hours in 28 days.

Even so, working out 4 hours per week without changing your diet or just working out in a "semi-competent" manner will probably not bring you the results he claims to have gotten.

You should at least familiarize yourself with the claims before denying them.

Somehow a gym subscription that you're going to use for 4 hours a month seems like a waste of money.

Derp? If you're getting the damn results, who cares how many hours you spend?

Someone who would like to spend their money more efficiently.

The problem is how it's measured.

Is that measured as door to door at the gym? Weight room door to weight room door? Or time on the iron?

If you measure time on the iron, it is very short. The reality is a lot of your time is spent between sets, recovering, and then showering and changing afterwards.

Same as his "4 hour work week" measurement...

A 20-30 minute workout a few times a month is much less than anyone expects to spend on exercise for dramatic gains, no matter how you slice up the time and how much ancillary stuff you include in the "time at gym" equation. All of the classes at my gym are ~60 minutes. I'm doing Occam's Protocol from the book, and I get in, do my lifts, shower, and get back out, long before those classes finish their workout. And, I go much less frequently than I thought was necessary: a couple times a week. I haven't been doing it long enough to know what the results will be, but the science is solid.

Because, according to him, >90% of what you'll do in the gym isn't necessary.

So he offers training programs for a bunch of different goals (speed, strength, vertical, etc) while citing elite coaches that work with some of the most extraordinary and accomplished athletes for each case.

Very hacker like, I was excited about the pilot of his show, Trial by Fire, that ran a year ago but unfortunately it didn't catch on so it never went beyond the pilot episode.

The approach of looking at an end result, deconstructing it and then rebuilding from scratch (even with a few shortcuts to expedite the process) is a great way to reverse engineer a product, behavior or as shown in the pilot, a new skill.

The trailer for Trial by Fire if you missed it last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09_YaUw9Rm8

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