Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Body #MentorMeTim

hello believe nation I started the mentor me series the hanger-on people who've done a lot more than us and hopefully some of their their values that way of thinking their mindsets kind of seep into us to help us become the best version of ourselves so today we're going to learn from Tim Ferriss on creating the 4-hour body as always if Tim says something that really really deeply resonates with you please leave in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well the 4-hour body is really meant to be a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the human body a hacker's guide to improving every facet of your physical appearance and performance whether that's ultra endurance superhuman strength rapid fat-loss sleep sex you name it it covers it all and for every chapter I did experiments on myself and also tested all the science the best science in the field with as many as 200 test subjects this video will show you some of the results and some of the findings so how did you get from the 4-hour workweek to the 4-hour body so it seems like a complete non sequitur but the reality is the 4-hour workweek just gave me permission to write this book the 4-hour body which is a much clearer reflection of my my deepest obsession which is physical tracking so I've recorded just about every workout in all details since age 18 or so including food logs everything you can possibly imagine but just explain a little more detail what does that mean every time you meet the meal you write it down these days that's true in some cases that means that I would put let's say a medical device an implant into my side and track my blood glucose 24/7 and correlate it to the foods that I eat but if you were to visit my house for example there's very little about time management in my house which is what most people associate me with but my entire kitchen my living room it looks like an ER I mean I have medical devices galvanic skin response meters you leave it because looking at the data I gather the data and look at the patterns I can figure out which meals make me fat I can figure out which meals I should eat before working out to hit personal records and by deconstructing things in the same way that people associate me with the 4-hour workweek and deconstructing work you can do things like my father for example sixty-five years old he lost close to 90 pounds of fat gained about 30 pounds of muscle and did it with very very small changes so the book is really intended to be a hacker's guide to the human body why is bodies so important to you because it is either the force multiplier for performance it can either be the greatest performance enhancer or the greatest handicap and there's an anecdote that I'm fond of telling that was told to me by a friend of mine about Richard Branson so he was visiting Richard Branson on Necker Island and at some point there was a group of 20 people potential icons and business and one of the questions came up how do you become most productive and Richard Branson sat back thought for a second and he said work out as I said was work out so he started every day by swimming around Necker Island and he said by working out I gained an additional three to four productive hours per day and I think that in Silicon Valley where we are right now and elsewhere there are a lot of people who have accepted this partial completeness their kick ass as an employee or as a CEO they're incredibly good at everything except for something physically related and they just accept that being overweight or being too skinny or being slow whatever it might be is genetically fixed and in most cases it's not fixed at all so I'd like to provide the tools for people to change those things very quickly and that was one of the goals of the book and I remember very early on in the 4-hour workweek what what triggered my conviction that I had had to write this was an interview with Clive Thompson of Wired and we were joking around in the preamble before the interview and I said that the two fears of modern man could be boiled down to too much email and getting fat and I think that's pretty accurate and but people view getting fat is completely unavoidable and I don't think it's true so the guiding tenets for all of this is whenever you find yourself on the side of majority it's time to pause and reflect so the the best way meaning the most effective way the most efficient way is seldom what you find in best practices that are widely known this is as true for ultra endurance running 50 100 kilometres hundred miles it is for language learning I'm going to cover just four first principles because it would take far too long to go through the various tactics and details but these principles our guiding principles that are a flexible they can be they can certainly be applied not only to changing your physical body which is the bedrock of everything else so as a force multiplier you can even either improve your performance everywhere else business relationships by improving your body or you can do the opposite these can also be applied like I said to your startups or to your company's the minimum effective dose in the context of exercise and diet is treating both of those things like a drug so if someone prescribes you a drug you're given a specific dose for a specific outcome if you have less than that dose you don't get the desired result more than that dose and you have side effects so striving to test by gathering data which need not be complicated what the minimum effective dose is and that can be very very little so this is Tracy again at the bottom of a kettlebell swing and she lost like I said 120 pounds on the right-hand side you have an example of what I would call a slow carb meal and a slow carb meal this has become popular among world-class tennis players among others there's a big piece on it just in the last few days really just eliminates white starches and and carbohydrates for a period of six days out of every week it also avoids fruit which is very controversial because of fructose and how it's converted by the liver in any case losing 20 20 to 30 pounds in a given month in the first month is not unusual at all and that's primarily fat so here are a few sample meds all right minimum effective doses so five minutes forget about 20 minutes we're doing one set of kettlebell swings 50 to 75 total repetitions with a maximum weight three times per week five minutes the second if you want to lose body fat it's very very easy to do the only change you have to start with and I always recommend starting with one change is 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up really easy to remember you don't change anything else just change that my dad went from roughly 5 pounds of average fat loss per month to almost 19 pounds just by making that change that's the only change so 30 grams could be a number of hard-boiled eggs it could be whey protein as an example oh yes so the clitoris let's talk about the clitoris 1 to 2 p.m. on the clitoris this is the reason my book was pulled off the shelves of Costco by the way in the United States have some very graphic sexual chapters I'll cover this very briefly and then it could be homework men are pretty clumsy animals so I like to offer this flitters from the male perspective one to two o'clock is where it's going to be most sensitive all right so just practice please it'll save everyone a lot of grief 90 to 120 seconds of tension for most muscles what does this mean this means that rather than looking at changes in muscle and believe me just about everything that you want to change related your body's going to relate to muscle or fashio which connect everything slow cadence movement so you take a weight that allows you to reach failure where you can't move any further between 90 and 120 seconds that means five seconds up much slower than this five seconds down with maximum weight to failure once per week that's it that's all you need it's like hitting a microwave one minute high for boiling water that's it you need the prescription you don't necessarily need the how-to and then lastly about 1200 words for conversational fluency this can be applied to other things all right could be applied to viral coefficients could be applied to many many other things but striving to find the minimum effective dose is very very important to avoid any type of resource waste the extremes inform the mean not vice-versa on the left you see garden shears has anyone here seen the movie objectified okay we have a few people I highly recommend that everyone else see this movie objectified it was created by the filmmaker who produced Helvetica about the type font it's a wonderful movie about design and everyday life and frog design and we have frog design here is featured at one point because a client comes in to discuss with with them garden shears and they say well a client might come in and say our average user is a middle-aged woman she's this height this way this many years old and the response from frog design was we don't care about your average user we want the extreme use cases and if we can account for those extreme use cases let's say paraplegic and then maybe a bodybuilder who can't brush his own teeth because his arms are too big whatever those might be once you solve for those extreme use cases the middle takes care of itself all right in many cases but not vice-versa and an example from one of my experiments I didn't have video of this because I was too occupied but you can see a number of syringes there I flew stem cell growth factor over from Israel combine that with human growth hormone actually technically igf-1 along with many other things including a base of my own blood this is very interesting I had my blood taken out and then it was spun in a special centrifuge to take out all the growth factors concentrated and then use it the base for this cocktail then this was injected locally into sites of injury whether that was dislocations I'd had surgeries I had and I was able to reverse about 95% of my so-called permanent injuries in the span of six months I don't recommend that you do that necessarily but I did find that using Prolotherapy which is simply sugar water in effect dextrose in a saline solution could achieve nine out of ten times the same effect and that is something that I would encourage people who have let's say tennis elbow to actually look into tracking and loss aversion is more important than how to so I recall once in Silicon Valley very good friend of mine I won't mention him by name but the CEO of a very well known company said look I don't want the story I'm really busy he said look I just want to lose abdominal fat I want a six-pack give me the index card with the bullet points of what I need to do okay sure so I gave him the index card and I did the same thing for about a half a dozen CEOs and the success rate was zero the success rate was zero because giving a prescription the how-to isn't enough you need to set yourself up from a behavioral psychological standpoint to fail your proof the change that you want it's very easy to explain what I mean by that tracking will beat a prescription so if you were to take and this is very true if you look at the research of BJ Fogg at this Stanford persuasion lab as an example or just about anywhere else if you were to take two groups all right so here's Group A right down the aisle group B group A you guys all get personal trainers all right but you have to wander into your local gym and find a personal trainer and then group B all I want you to do let's assume we're talking about fat loss is take your iPhone or your smartphone take a photograph of every meal before you eat it every snack before you to every drink before you drink it this group I vote will have more success more compliance and more ultimate fat loss and tracking when you look at it is what to account for and that's called the flash diet cover in a second loss aversion is very important we're very keen at least in the United States we like to focus on positive psychology and positive reinforcement rewards game dynamics that reward us and I would offer at least if you look at the literature that shame humiliation all of these things are very very powerful in fact more so than the first group and you should use those it's a it's a fact not liking it isn't going to change it so you may as well leverage it to your advantage in the way you can do that is by using bets so let's say a small wager among four people five people who each contribute money that's how Tracy lost 120 pounds or it could be something as simple as a public display public accountability using a wiki for that and I've seen this used for people who could never lose weight never gained weight using that public accountability all of a sudden produces an incentive to change your behavior if you don't do your job at your job you get fired if you don't do your job and you fail on a diet typically nothing happens so if anybody out there wants to design a gym here's what I'd recommend and this is based on Yale research is you charge everyone 400 dollars a month and then for every visit to the gym they get 25 back and if they don't hit their goals after 3 months when they sign up they give you photographs of themselves and their underwear and you put them on the internet after 3 months if they don't have their goals that will be the fittest gym you have ever seen in your life alright so the general rules of behavioral change that I encourage you to keep in mind you can make them very complicated but looking at the data set and the data sets that I have and we're talking about thousands of people over several years these these are the points that I would remember number one is make it conscious you have to be conscious of decisions that you're making subconsciously if you want to change them so the flash diet which I mentioned which has been studied at University of Wisconsin it's been studying in London is more effective than a food journal and what's important to note is that people who use food journals lose three times as much weight as those who don't that's a hell of a lot easier to take photograph there's a good application called diet snaps that you could use to make it even easier before pictures so if you look at the transformation challenges the last 20 years like the body for life challenge typically rewarding million dollars Lamborghini whatever it might be the I ate various the training berries the winners almost always used before photographs to make the pain painful enough alright you don't have to make those public you can put them on your refrigerator your dog's forehead wherever you'll see it frequently number two is make it a game so Peter Drucker has said very famous management the air is what gets measured gets managed and I would certainly agree with that five sessions if you look at the Nike Plus device what they found is to make a behavior stick you have to log five sessions it doesn't matter if they're five minutes long or five hours long so rigged the game so you can win if you're going to go to the gym you want to make that habit five sessions keep them really short five to ten minutes doesn't matter lastly make it competitive like I mentioned and then make it small and temporary so not only the meed but a two-week trial that's how I got my dad started after you failed many other diets in the past and last but not least keep improvement relative so it's about becoming the best you you can become in the process creating data they can help many other people it's not about being the best in the world and in this case the biggest guy in the world so keep a relative small changes can have huge impacts it doesn't have to be hard it doesn't have to be complicated just take it one step at a time and honest myth mas wouldn't see the measurement and objective I'll leave you with that thank you thank you guys for watching I hope you enjoyed I'd love to know what did you think of this video what did you learn from it what are you going to apply to your body to start making a difference leave it down in the comments I'm going to join in the discussion thank you guys again for watching I believe in you I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is much love I'll see you soon beans mm-hmm are you paleo paleo person semi okay so the question was why why do I recommend against consuming fruit for the most part and why do I allow beans on the slow carb diet so the first fruit fruit as it existed 100 200 years ago is very different from fruit as it exists today it's it's selectively bred and modified to have the highest level of fructose or fruit sugar possible and fructose is problematic for fat loss specifically so if you're not trying to lose fat I have no particular problem with consuming fruit but if you want to get the the best results possible from a fat loss program fructose is concerted converted to glycerol phosphate which is then converted to body fat very very efficiently it's like there's there's no more efficient pathway you could find just about same reason that high fructose corn syrup will make you really really fat another note same reason agave nectar will make you very very fat it's 90 percent concentrated fructose so looking at from again from an from an evolutionary standpoint the nutrient necessity of fruit if you get it once a week so I have the one day off the cheat day or the binge day once per week on this low-carb diet that's more than enough to satisfy any sweet tooth requirement as it relates to fruit if you absolutely have to have fruit and I'm experimenting with with with fruit again in very moderate doses using primarily berries because it does have a fascinating effect on blood glucose it flatlines your blood glucose so I do recommend fruit on your off day having it in the beginning of the day such as grapefruit which also includes an ER engine in which is interesting for extending the half-life of caffeine but when you implanted a Dexcom seven device in my side it's a continuous glucose monitor used by type 1 diabetics and I'm planted in my side to track my blood glucose 24/7 for about three weeks and what I noticed is when you have this small amount of fruit in the morning it allows you to keep your your blood sugar below I think it's 100 nanograms per deciliter milligrams per deciliter it allows you to keep it below this critical threshold for fat loss which is pretty fascinating but in general I would say just stay away from fruit from what I've seen and I haven't seen any deleterious health effects from that at all beans so beans if anyone here is a strict paleo eater beans and legumes are a big no-no for that same reason peanuts are a big no-no and cashews I love cashews but if you prepare beans properly so if you're soaking them let's say overnight I have just I simply haven't seen the digestive issues that one would expect based on how strongly they are avoided on the Paleo diet I haven't seen the problem so I I do recommend lentils and and other legumes and beans for the simple reason among others that if people are only consuming leafy vegetables or steamed vegetables and protein they're almost always hypocaloric and then they get irritable they get headaches and they quit so that would be that would be the main reason and I'm convinced someday I'll either be proven right or wrong as I supposes the case with everything lentils there's some property in lentils that is just incorrect a force multiplier for fat loss I cannot figure out I don't know what it is I have my speculations but lentils are amazing tastes pretty good too so sleep my opinions on sleep my opinions and sleep depend on how many sessions of sleep you get per day so most people in this room will be familiar with what's called monophasic sleep that's just go to bed wake up you get one session of sleep if you're doing that or speaking from a personal basis if I'm doing that I like to get 9 to 10 hours of sleep I sleep a lot if on the other hand you're doing what's called polyphasic sleep where you break it up into multiple segments per day and that can be taken to an extreme and something called uberman which is I believe two and a half hours of total sleep per day which is comprised of 20-minute naps not terribly social as you can imagine that can be sustained and there's a lot of debate about this there are long articles online about why it's impossible I can't divulge it yet but I can say right now I'm using some along with a few other groups some pretty sophisticated Emin straight that it is possible we're tracking people using EGS while they sleep on uber map so it can be done should you do it that's a separate question for most people it's going to be completely untenable and unsustainable but there are people like Matt Mullenweg usually called the lead developer or one of the lead developers of WordPress and while he was working on WordPress he had his most productive year of coding probably produced I'm just speculating here but 60% of the wordpress code in one year and he was falling over man to most people if you feel like you have to sleep 2 hours a day to get more done I would say let's let's look at the time management first before we start cutting you back to two hours but those would be my feelings so as far as I can tell from the quick look through the book it pretty much concentrates on what we would normally consider physical attributes do you have any research or anything interesting on minimum effective dose either for balance and coordination because I didn't see much there and also uh you know mentally nootropics or you know diet is as opposed to mental yeah good good question so the have I found anything for the minimum effective dose for balance agility or mental performance like no tropics so I was I was as an undergrad first a neuroscience major primarily because I wanted to focus on smart drugs I've seen a lot there are many different approaches you can take as far as balance goes there's quite a lot of debate in the PT and athletic training community about whether balance is a general skill you can train just like an if there exists of general intelligence usually people would segment it out into into for example muscular symmetry so one of the fastest ways to improve general agility and balance I would say is by doing an assessment called the FMS the functional movement screen and I'm sure there are people in SF who can do that and that will assess imbalances from left to right or cross contralaterally and when you fix those it's pretty astounding it's in the prehab chapter but if you identify using for example there's a movement called or there two movements called the Chop and lift we're using generally speaking a cable and you're doing this type chopping diagonal movement and then you're reversing it and going up and so you test your four quadrants and you'll generally find that one quadrant is extremely weak relatively speaking and when you fix that it's incredible how many aches and pains how many problems how many injuries just disappear so I would say that from a functional standpoint that would be one if we're talking about equilibrium I haven't found anything to be particularly effective for for general balance for mental performance this is something that I I really debated quite a lot because I I'm a huge fan of cognitive enhancement and I didn't improve I didn't include any chapters specifically on that because I found looking at the literature that improving physical performance what most people would divorce from their mind or brain is actually the best way to improve cognitive performance and there's a great book called spark which is written by a Harvard MD about that looks at physical education and some very sophisticated programs for improving academic performance specifically by making students perform in a certain heart rate immediately prior to their worst subjects really fascinating stuff but if we're talking about drugs I'm sure there are a few people in this audience who probably tried modafinil among others so provigil which is an anti narcoleptic anti narcolepsy drug there are a lot of drugs that will improve short-term memory working memory reaction speed vasopressin which is an antidiuretic hormone that's used in let's say bedwetting and children in some cases also can improve short-term memory the reason that I have ended up staying away from any of these drugs is that I've realized in the course of doing all this research and all this testing that the brain is a very sensitive instrument and the brain like well the body likes homeostasis so if you interrupt any of the feedback loops you can cause some really significant long-term problems that's certainly true if you look at let's say anabolics use if you're using super physiological high dose let's just say testosterone Sippy innate then you can screw up your HHH PTA access and if you if you screw up your hypothalamus boy you're you're going to have a lot of issues so I've ended up staying away from the smart drugs most recently the exceptions would be gear Beaumont 80 I love your Beaumont a and it contains a handful of stimulants that all have different pharmacokinetics so you end up getting this nice extended like three to four hour buzz which is great for writing among other things and the other I would say for mental performance would be a hunger so when you when you are in a fasted state whether that's through intermittent fasting or otherwise you you will experience a heightened level of cognitive function I think that does reflect back to evolutionary from an evolutionary standpoint if you're hunting and gathering it's a good idea to have better visual acuity if you're really hungry and you need to find food among other things but that's that's somewhat speculation hopefully that helps

Channel: Evan Carmichael

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Keywords: Tim Ferriss, Tim Ferriss Evan Carmichael, Tim Ferriss motivation, motivation Tim Ferriss, Ferriss Mentor, Ferriss Mentor Me, how to find a mentor, Tim Ferriss motivational speech, Tim Ferriss podcast, Tim Ferriss mentor lesson, 4 hour body, 4 hour body summary, 4 hour body advice, 4 hour body excerpt, tim ferriss body, tim ferriss wired, ferriss minimum effective dose, tim ferriss sleep schedule, 4 hour body interview, ferriss body hacks, slow carb diet tim ferriss

Id: 336mqI0k-Sg

Length: 25min 1sec (1501 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2016