The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman - Review
I've just finished reading The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman - by Tim Ferriss .
It's an interesting guide that contains a lot of techniques to improve your body - such as a diet, exercises and concepts for gaining muscle, strength, speed, and improving you swimming, running or baseball performance.
I thought it was quite interesting. Do the ideas make sense? Many seem to, and confirm published studies. Other seem a little crazy.
The diet he proposes, the slow-carb diet, which has plenty of protein and vegetables, but no carbs with high glicemic content (rice, bread, etc), seems to make sense.
There a few interesting ideas I'm already trying:
You might have heard of drinking 500 ml of cold water when you wake up. I had, but since I didn't heard a good explanation I completely ignored it.
According to the book, in at least two studies this increased resting metabolic rate 24-30%.
Cold Showers: at short durations, increased adiponectin levels and glucose uptake by muscle tissue. On longer durations (30 minutes) - fatty acid release and possibly GLUT-4 increase. Improved immunity. Effective treatment for depression (?!?!?).
Brief Muscular Contraction (60-90 seconds) before major meals: increased GLUT-4 to the surface of muscle cells. That should help putting on muscle instead of fat.
There are a lot of minor things like those, as well as complete protocols and guides to adding muscle, perfecting sex or sleep, running, etc.
There are also a whole bunch of extra articles. I can't figure out how to access them, though - it requests a password (a word from the book), but only provides proper positions for the print version and the audio version - not the Kindle version. I've e-mailed their support about it.
One interesting thing to keep in mind that while there are plenty of footnotes and plenty of mentions of studies (in the form "studies say..."), actual references to those studies are rare to non-existent.
It's an interesting guide that contains a lot of techniques to improve your body - such as a diet, exercises and concepts for gaining muscle, strength, speed, and improving you swimming, running or baseball performance.
I thought it was quite interesting. Do the ideas make sense? Many seem to, and confirm published studies. Other seem a little crazy.
The diet he proposes, the slow-carb diet, which has plenty of protein and vegetables, but no carbs with high glicemic content (rice, bread, etc), seems to make sense.
There a few interesting ideas I'm already trying:
You might have heard of drinking 500 ml of cold water when you wake up. I had, but since I didn't heard a good explanation I completely ignored it.
According to the book, in at least two studies this increased resting metabolic rate 24-30%.
Cold Showers: at short durations, increased adiponectin levels and glucose uptake by muscle tissue. On longer durations (30 minutes) - fatty acid release and possibly GLUT-4 increase. Improved immunity. Effective treatment for depression (?!?!?).
Brief Muscular Contraction (60-90 seconds) before major meals: increased GLUT-4 to the surface of muscle cells. That should help putting on muscle instead of fat.
There are a lot of minor things like those, as well as complete protocols and guides to adding muscle, perfecting sex or sleep, running, etc.
There are also a whole bunch of extra articles. I can't figure out how to access them, though - it requests a password (a word from the book), but only provides proper positions for the print version and the audio version - not the Kindle version. I've e-mailed their support about it.
One interesting thing to keep in mind that while there are plenty of footnotes and plenty of mentions of studies (in the form "studies say..."), actual references to those studies are rare to non-existent.
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