The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [78]
Captain’s chair 212%
Exercise ball 139%
Vertical leg crunch 129%
Torso track 127%
Long arm crunch 119%
Reverse crunch 109%
Crunch with heel push 107%
Ab roller 105%
Hover 100%
Traditional crunch 100%
Exercise tubing pull 92%
Ab rocker 21%
TIPS AND TRICKS
BOSU Balance Trainer (www.fourhourbody.com/bosu) The BOSU looks like half of a Swiss ball with a flat plastic base attached to the underside. I use it for myotatic crunches and the torture twists featured in “Effortless Superhuman.”
GoFit Stability Ball (www.fourhourbody.com/stability) If preferred to the BOSU, this 55-cm “stability” ball (usually referred to as a “Swiss” ball) can be used. It’s less than half the cost of a BOSU, but I found such balls hard to store in the home and less versatile.
Crazy Hitchhiker from There’s Something About Mary (www.fourhourbody.com/hitchhiker) The classic scene that inspired the title of this chapter. “It’s Brie time, baby!”
FROM GEEK TO FREAK
How to Gain 34 Pounds
in 28 Days
Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.
—Dean Karnazes, ultramarathoner who, in 2006, ran 50 marathons in all 50 U.S. states in 50 consecutive days, finishing with a 3 hour and 30 second time at the New York City Marathon
Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
—Mark Twain
On July 6, 65-year-old John’s biceps measured 14½″ in circumference. Six weeks later, his biceps measured a full ¾″ larger at 15¼″.
It seems like magic, but it wasn’t.
He reduced his workouts from three per week to two per week. It was all planned. Progressive reduction.
You see, most of the conventional wisdom about muscular growth is just dead wrong.
Prelude: On Being Genetically Screwed
I come from a family of lightly muscled males. The only exception is a dramatic bubble butt on my mom’s side. Not a bad look if you’re a Brazilian woman.
In August 2009, to confirm the obvious, I mailed DNA samples to the Gist Sports Profile laboratory in Australia for testing of the ACTN3 gene, which codes proteins for fast-twitch muscle fiber. Fast-twitch muscle fibers have the greatest potential for growth, whereas slow-twitch fibers have the least potential.
Just a smidge of helpful science: muscle fibers are composed of myofibrils, which are in turn composed of two filaments—actin (thin filaments) and myosin (thick filaments)—that slide over each other to cause muscles to contract, a literal shortening of the muscle. Actin filaments, which are necessary to this process, are stabilized by actin-binding proteins. One actin-binding protein called alpha-actinin 3 (ACTN3) is expressed only in fast-twitch muscle fiber, the crown jewel of shot-putters and bodybuilders worldwide.
It turns out that both of my chromosomes (one from Mammy and one from Pappy Ferriss) contain the R577X variant of the ACTN3 gene, a mutation that results in a complete deficiency of our most desired ACTN3. This variant, amusingly called a “nonsense allele,” is found in more than a billion humans worldwide.
Sad Christmas.
The cover letter from Gist Sports began with the following headline, which, in good humor, lacks an exclamation point:
Congratulations Tim Ferriss. Your Genetic Advantage: Endurance Sports.
This is a diplomatic way of telling me (1) I’m not likely to win an Olympic gold medal in sprinting, and (2) I am not genetically pre-programmed to gain a lot of muscular mass.
I hadn’t won the fast-twitch lottery for bodybuilding,8 and chances are that you haven’t either. Looking at family photos, this result wasn’t surprising. What is surprising is how well you can override genetics.
I have gained more than 20 pounds of fat-free mass within four weeks on at least four occasions, the most recent in 2005. Two of these experiments were done in 1995 and 1996 at Princeton University, where Matt Brzycki, then Coordinator of Health Fitness, Strength and Conditioning, nicknamed me “Growth.”
This chapter details the exact methods I used in 2005 to gain 34 pounds of fat-free mass in 28