The Case for Room Temperature Foods

I now order water without ice instead of water with ice. After taking your breads, pastries, and cakes out of the fridge, let them sit for a while before consuming: 

Miranda Kaplan:

“Smell and taste are both highly sensitive to temperature. Human perception of taste declines at temperatures above 35°C (95°F). Cold temperatures also seem to exert a muffling effect on flavor, whether due simply to reduced volatility of aromatic compounds or to independent factors involving a particular taste receptor that's more excitable at higher temperatures.

Salty, bitter, sweet, and sour stimuli were easiest to detect in foods within a relatively balmy range from 68 to 86°F—colloquially known as room temperature Once the threshold is surpassed, the effects of temperature vary, but heading toward the extremes frequently seems to knock the balance of flavors off kilter.

Perception of sweetness appears to increase with heat, which is why ice cream, notoriously, tastes overly sweet when melted.  Sourness increases at higher temperatures, while salty flavors may seem more or less pronounced with heat, depending on which of multiple salt receptors in the tongue are activated. Beer turns bitter when warmed from its typical serving temperature; coffee, on the other hand, has been found to taste less bitter when cooled down from piping-hot.

A 2013 study found that participants served ice water experienced diminished ability to sense sweetness, chocolatiness, and creaminess in dark chocolate. The study's authors propose that North Americans' unique preference for ice water may help to explain our predilection for more intensely sweet foods.

Existing research supports the idea that while a steaming-hot pot on the stove may waft tantalizing smells your way and an ice-cold glass may feel divine on a warm brow, neither is guaranteed to be delicious. If you’re the one cooking, always consider not just how you want something to taste, but what temperature you plan to serve it at. Only then can you compensate accordingly for best results.

We need our lamb chops, burgers, and duck breast to be heated beyond room temp, and remain that hot, not just to ensure that the meat is safe to eat but to warm those fats sufficiently that they liquefy and lubricate every mouthful. The fats in our favorite vegan-friendly dips and spreads, though—think guacamole, peanut butter, and hummus—achieve that desirably luscious state at room temp."

Cheese should always sit for about an hour outside the fridge before it's served. Soft cheeses, like Brie, need that time to take on their proper half-runny (or fully runny) consistency, but the flavor of even semi-firm or hard cheeses benefits when you take the chill off. Let them sit out too long, though (especially if they're thinly sliced), and they can start to sweat.

Not only are pies best unrefrigerated, they shouldn't be stored, period, for longer than necessary, as the crust will slowly absorb moisture and turn soggy. Many people still make the mistake of refrigerating breads, pastries, and cakes for storage, then not letting them return to room temperature before serving.

Chocolate is best consumed at temperatures approaching its melting point, which is roughly body temperature; it takes on a waxy feel if it's served much colder than that, and its flavor is dulled.”

2 Worksets Per Exercise (Reps in Reserve 0-1)

I try to avoid junk volume. Assuming worksets are performed to RIR 0-1, I think a lifter has milked as much as they can out of an exercise wrt the hypertrophy stimulus once they have to strip off significant weight to achieve the same number of reps or decrease significant reps with same weight for subsequent worksets. Many lifters will find that this threshold happens after 2 worksets.

I try not to get too hung up on how many worksets are performed per week. It’s hard to argue that you would need more exercises per week to maximize hypertrophy once these are fulfilled:

Chest: 3 presses, 1-2 flies.

Back: 1-2 vertical pulls, 3 horizontal rows, 1 deadlift variation, 1 shrug

Quads: 2-3 squats/presses, 1 leg extension

Hamstring: 1 romanian style deadlift, 1 leg curl

Biceps and triceps: 2-3 isolation exercises each

Shoulders: 1 overhead press, 1-2 laterals, 1 rear delt fly

Abs: 2 exercises

Calves: 2 calf raise variations

Glutes: 2-3 squats/presses with sufficient hip flexion

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I perform 2 worksets (reps in reserve 0-1) per exercise. I go by feel while pyramiding up on warm-up sets.

My routine as an example: 

Mon (chest & abs): Incline dumbbell press, flat dumbbell press, incline barbell press, flat dumbbell fly-press hybrid, rope crunches, ab roller

Tues (back): Pull-ups, bent over barbell rows, single arm dumbbell rows, seated cable rows, Romanian-conventional hybrid deadlifts

Wed (calves): Standing calf raises, seated calf raises

Thurs (arms): Cambered bar pushdowns, rope pushdowns, overhead rope extension (w/ low pulley attachment), standing ez-bar curls, cable ez-bar curls (w/ low pulley attachment), preacher curl machine

Fri (legs): Barbell back squat, smith squat (close stance with feet right under shoulders), leg press, leg extension machine, leg curl machine

Sat (shoulders/abs): Seated overhead dumbbell press, seated dumbbell laterals, standing dumbbell laterals (1 arm at a time), reverse pec deck, barbell shrugs, rope crunches, ab roller

Sun: Off

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Yes, this is more of a traditional bodybuilding body part split where many muscle groups are hit one time per week. I think there is a benefit to higher frequency programs for novices. Wrt advanced lifters, I am not convinced hypertrophy results would be significantly different when comparing a higher frequency to 1x/week program.

From a tendon and lower back recovery standpoint, I think there is something to be said for more complete days off with a 1x/week frequency compared to a higher frequency program even if the total worksets per week turn out to be the same. I also think there is something to be said for completing sufficient total worksets per session for the target body part to maximize the hypertrophy stimulus and I would rather err on overshooting than undershooting that.

Here are a couple excerpts from Chris Aceto’s Championship Bodybuilding I generally agree with:

2 exercises for hamstrings = romanian/conventional deadlifts and leg curls

3-4 exercises for chest = 3 pressing exercises and 1 fly

3-4 exercises for shoulders = 1 overhead press (preferably seated overhead dumbbell presses), 2 laterals, 1 rear delt

3-4 exercises for quads = 2 squat variations, 1 leg press variation, 1 leg extension

Generally 2 worksets to failure.

Do Students Remember What They Learn in School?

I’ll add that this piece and the arguments Bryan Caplan make in “A Case Against Education” are not really mutually exclusive:

Daniel T. Willingham:

“So do we forget much of what we learn in school? This is a glass-half-empty-or-half-full type of question. I find it impressive that we remember any course content a couple of decades later, in the absence of putting it to use. And bear in mind, memory will be better to the extent that a student mastered the material in the first place and had reason to revisit it in the intervening years. And with systematic review over several years, the memory of that material will be nearly indestructible. 

If memory for what we learn in school really isn’t all that faulty, as I’ve suggested, why do people think it is? There are two reasons. First, we underestimate what we know, and second, even when we recognize we know something, we may not realize we learned it in school. 

We may misjudge our knowledge because we are quick to conclude that a failure of memory means the memory is gone, unrecoverable. A reason people overestimate forgetting is that they don’t consider the most powerful method of determining whether something is in memory: relearning. Here’s what I mean. Suppose you started studying French in grade 6, and by grade 12 your French was good enough to engage in routine conversation. After graduation, however, you did nothing to maintain your proficiency of the language. Now, 15 years later, you’re planning a trip to Paris. Let’s pretend you take a French test and find you’ve lost about 75 percent of the French you once knew. Is that 75 percent gone, simply erased from your memory? It appears gone—after all, you couldn’t remember it for the test. Well, suppose you started studying French again. If 75 percent of your knowledge is gone, then for you to become as proficient as you were at the end of high school, you would presumably have to study 75 percent of the seven years it took you the first time. But that doesn’t seem right. Your intuition indicates you would relearn French more quickly than you learned it the first time. Your intuition is right. This phenomenon is called “savings in relearning”. Even if you cannot recall or recognize something you once knew, that doesn’t mean the knowledge is utterly gone; the residue of that initial learning is evident through faster relearning. 

One reason we think we forget most of what we learned in school is that we underestimate what we actually remember. Other times, we know we remember something, but we don’t recognize that we learned it in school. Knowing where and when you learned something is usually called context information, and context is handled by different memory processes than memory for the content. Thus, it’s quite possible to retain content without remembering the context. This problem is even more profound when we encounter the same information in multiple contexts. For example, if I ask you on which continent Egypt is located, you will quickly answer “Africa.” But if I ask you where and when you first learned that, you will probably have no idea. If you were a second-grader who had learned that fact the previous day, you could readily tell me “I read it”or“my teacher told me.”But as an adult, you’ve encountered that fact scores or hundreds of times in as many different contexts. The fact remains, but the contexts are lost.”

How Long Does it Take to Hit Your Natural Genetic Potential?

I’ll give you my take on this topic as someone who has dieted down and bulked up ~8 times now, and being involved in the drug free bodybuilding community. 

“It must have taken you so long to build that physique.”

There’s some truth to that statement, but fulfilling your natural genetic potential does not take as long as most people think. 

And I feel like the bodybuilding community is really disingenuous on this topic, claiming to be making progress every year as they repeatedly bulk up and cut down, when they actually do not look all that different. 

Hypothetical scenario (assuming OPTIMAL nutrition and training, preferably under the guidance of a competent coach):

Novice trainee with no experience in nutrition or training. Set up a MAINTENANCE diet with at least 1 g of protein per pound of lean body mass. Develop skill in resistance training. Do this for about 3 months. Trainee can gain muscle and lose fat during this honeymoon period. 

After the honeymoon period, if body fat is too high, spend 4-6 months leaning out; create a clean slate to bulk from. If body fat is reasonable, proceed to ~2 years mostly focused on gaining muscle.  Push the envelope a bit with the body fat. 

Diet down to very low body fat in 4-6 months.

At this point, you are now in the ballpark of your genetic ceiling. 

Bulk up 25-30 lbs over the course of 6-8 months.

Diet down to very low body fat in about 4 months again. You should look better than the first time you dieted down.

Bulk up 25-30 lbs over the course of 6-8 months.

Diet down to very low body fat in about 4 months. You’ll probably look slightly better than the second time you’ve dieted down. At this point, you’ve mostly hit your natural genetic potential. 

The idea here is the first time you diet down, it can be such a shock to the body that you will tend to lose a significant amount of muscle. Then your body acclimates on subsequent fat loss phases—it becomes easier for your body to hold onto muscle as you diet down. 

This tends to bear out with athletes—they almost always look better after their second prep (compared to the first), less so on the third, and then progress really tapers off.  

The only time I really see people make noticeable improvements in their physique from for instance—the fourth to fifth prep—is if they were doing something really subpar with their nutrition (e.g. no refeeds) or training (e.g. backing off training intensity too much, rep range too low, subpar exercise selection, subpar exercise technique). 

Recommended rate of weight gain for bulking when trying to gain muscle: 1 lb per week

Recommended rate of weight loss when trying to lose body fat (starting from reasonable body fat levels): 1-2 lbs week. When very lean, .5-1 lbs per week. 

In total, around ~5 years to hit natural genetic potential. Again, this is under ideal circumstances with optimal nutrition and training guidance from the get-go. 

Constrained TEE, 30 minutes of cardio, Bioplausibility

With regards to Constrained TEE (Total Energy Expenditure)—Herman Pontzer hypothesizes that the body adapts to increases in daily physical activity expenditure by reducing energy expenditure on other tasks (e. g., immune response, reproduction, somatic repair/maintenance), maintaining TEE homeostatically within some narrow range. 

In theory, the body COULD also reduce energy expenditure on immune response, reproduction, somatic repair/maintenance in response to decreases in calorie intake—thereby ALSO constraining TEE. 

I’m beginning to think that Pontzer’s hypothesis is not really accurate. 

We already know that drastically reducing calorie intake DOES in fact reduce energy expenditure on immune response, reproduction, and somatic repair/maintenance. Yet, experience tells us that reducing calorie intake is much more effective than increasing physical activity with regards to fat loss. There’s something else going on to explain why the body so readily constrains TEE in response to increases in physical activity compared to decreases in calorie intake. I’m not sure what can explain this discrepancy. 

Even though we don’t have a bioplausible mechanism for why reducing calorie intake is so much more effective than increasing physical activity with regards to fat loss, we still know that the former is much more effective in improving endpoints (fat loss) we actually care about. That’s what matters. 

I usually only recommend 30 minutes of moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise. I think there are benefits to cardiovascular exercise: psychological, CV benefits, improves resistance training work capacity. However, with multiple lines of converging evidence, I find it difficult to recommend greater than 30 minutes of cardio, especially when the athlete is already resistance training (assuming their goal is getting lean as fast as possible while maximizing muscle retention).

During my first prep, I worked with a coach who ramped up my cardio to 2 hours/day (this is IN ADDITION to resistance training). We started at 30 minutes/day and increased cardio in increments of ~15 minutes. We never implemented changes to diet and cardio at the same time. After every incremental increase in cardio, then waiting a couple days to monitor changes, the needle never moved. The only intervention that moved the needle on fat loss was decreasing calorie intake. 

Also, see below:

“In humans training to run a half‐marathon, TEE plateaued (black line) as workload increased over the course of a year rather than increasing linearly as predicted by Additive TEE models (gray line). Men and women in this study also exhibited a small decrease in BMR (dotted line).”

Look at where the TEE is capping out. At a measly 30-40 minutes of running/session. 

Lastly, decreases in NEAT do not explain why Constrained TEE occurs:

“Tests of the constrained TEE hypothesis suggest that behavioral changes are insufficient to account for the observed stasis in TEE (Pontzer, 2015a; Pontzer et al., 2016b).”

Midwits. IQ > 130 or Bust

Tyrannny of the Midwits:

“Those truly comfortable with their own knowledge and experience seldom see a need to be insecure about it. It is the midwit, the person who is moderately more intelligent than average, and thus has had years of smoke blown up his ass about his relatively high intelligence, who is most vulnerable to such insecurity. And, in turn, superficially intellectual philosophy is appealing to him.

Flattery and negging, in turn, are the weapons used to convert the midwit into the service of Marxism. You’re stupid if you believe in the Christian sky wizard, and the ‘invisible hand’ of Capitalism. You’re dumb if you think you have freedom. But you’re smart if you understand Marxian dialectic. You’re smart if you see through to the great wisdom of Socialism. Only the educated and wise, you see, are capable of understanding the nuance. Your own insecurity is a weapon in their hand. Your desire to be perceived as intelligent is soon used against you.

The city boy with a 125 IQ who gets his 4 year degree, on the other hand, is extremely vulnerable. He’s intelligent enough to notice that he’s above the norm, but will likely always feel small in the presence of greater men. Academia can easily mold him into a good Socialist by playing the flattery/negging game.  He is invested in his status as better than others, and that is the easiest lever with which to move him. Yes, you’re smarter than the average bear. But don’t get in over your head. Just because you were the best basketball player on your middle school team doesn’t mean you’re going to go pro. And don’t let folks falsely flatter you and manipulate you because, deep down, you’re insecure about this.

Of course, the highly intelligent, highly educated folks tend to be relatively immune to this sort of thing. If you are very secure in your intellectual capacity – and this is more a matter of knowing your limitations than anything else – the lever will not move you. Only truth will do. Fooling such a man is extraordinarily difficult.“

Reading: The Sine Qua Non of Exceptional IQ

An individual’s reading habits and ability says a lot about their intelligence. High IQ’s tend to have a thirst for knowledge. Compared to video and audio, reading is the most efficient method to acquire said knowledge.

Ethan Hillman:

"At the highest end of this scale of intelligence, a child may learn to read in just a few months, less than a year. Reading above your age group typically denotes a higher verbal IQ. This is partly why vocabulary is so highly correlated with g, because those who are more verbally precocious read earlier and read more books and so learn more words.

By ‘learning to read quickly’, you mean the speed at which one reads words at rather than the age of which one learnt to read then that is also an indicator; it’s an indicator of processing speed — which is how fast you can process and then respond to information.

The average reading speed of a person is 200 words per minute. The top readers, who’ve had a lot of practice and presumably are uneven in their cognitive profile allowing for incredibly good processing speed, read about 1000 words per minute. Since processing speed has a high enough correlation with g that it’s an index on IQ tests, it’s a semi-reliable measure. I’ve read an account of someone who’s profoundly gifted who reads at 800 words per minute. In general, most gifted people would read faster than 200wpm but not that much faster, say 300wpm or 400wpm.

By reading above your age, this is highly indicative when talking about non-fiction. A young teenager, say around 12 years old, may have an interest in physics and so start reading up on it. They may also gain an interest on psychology and so browse around the internet, reading studies. They may gain an interest in economics and learn the basics then get more specific and then teach themselves by observing others on how trading works.

Reading above one’s age is indicative of verbal IQ, which has a 1.0 correlation with g — the highest out of any other intelligences like spatial because they have noise which we don’t quite yet understand. They have the ability to logically understand the more abstract concepts, above a certain point may think in anologies emphasising their abilities. The larger vocabulary allows them to understand the words. “

Warm-up and Worksets

You should go by feel when pyramiding up with warm-up sets. This encompasses weight selection, how big you want your weight jumps to be, how many reps to perform. You shouldn’t take your warm-up sets to failure.

For the sake of efficiency, work-sets should be taken to an RIR (reps in reserve) of 0-1 (arguably, 2 should be fine). 

I generally perform ~5 warm-up sets for big compound exercises like barbell back squats. ~3 warm-up sets for smaller isolation exercises like curls.

After the first exercise for the body part I’m training that day, I usually only perform 1 warm-up set for all subsequent exercises for that same body part.

YMMV.

Winners

Set your boundaries:

Why Can't We Tell the Truth About Aging?

Wisdom doesn’t naturally follow. Looks tend to take a precipitous decline. Cognitive decline. If I’ve ever read something that lit a fire under my ass to prioritize nutrition and training, this is it:

“No wise man ever wished to be younger,” Swift asserted, never having met me.

If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.

Even if you’re single, can you ever feel again the rush of excitement that comes with the first brush of the lips, the first moment when clothes drop to the floor? Now we dim the lights and fold our slacks and hope we don’t look too soft, too wrinkled, too old. Yes, mature love allows for physical imperfections, but wouldn’t we rather be desired for our beauty than forgiven for our flaws? These may seem like shallow regrets, and yet the loss of pleasure in one’s own body, the loss of pleasure in knowing that one’s body pleases others, is a real one.

I can already hear the objections: If my children are grown and happy; if my grandchildren light up when they see me; if I’m healthy and financially secure; if I’m reasonably satisfied with what I’ve accomplished; if I feel more comfortable now that I no longer have to prove myself—why, then, the loss of youth is a fair trade-off. Those are a lot of “if”s, but never mind.

According to a 2011 Gallup survey, happiness follows the U-shaped curve first proposed in a 2008 study by the economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald. They found that people’s sense of well-being was highest in childhood and old age, with a perceptible dip around midlife. Lately, however, the curve has invited skepticism. There may be a simpler explanation: perhaps the people who participate in such surveys are those whose lives tend to follow the curve, while people who feel miserable at seventy or eighty, whose ennui is offset only by brooding over unrealized expectations, don’t even bother to open such questionnaires.

The so-called epigenetic clock shows our DNA getting gummed up, age-related mitochondrial mutations reducing the cells’ ability to generate energy, and our immune system slowly growing less efficient. Bones weaken, eyes strain, hearts flag. Bladders empty too often, bowels not often enough, and toxic proteins build up in the brain to form the plaque and the spaghetti-like tangles that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Not surprisingly, sixty-eight per cent of Medicare beneficiaries today have multiple chronic conditions. Many older men have to pee right after they pee, and many older women pee whenever they sneeze. Not a lot of grace, force, or fascination in that.

Normal aging is bad enough, but things become dire if dementia develops, the chances of which double every five years past the age of sixty-five. Applewhite, however, citing recent research, no longer thinks that dementia is “inevitable, or even likely.” May she live long and prosper, but, for those of us who have cared for spouses or parents with dementia, it’s not always a simple matter to know on whom the burden falls the heaviest. (One in three caregivers is sixty-five or older.)

I have my doubts about whether the piling on of years really does add to our understanding of life. The years may broaden experience and tint perspective, but is wisdom or contentment certain to follow?

When Socrates declared that philosophy is the practice of dying, he was saying that thought itself is shaped by mortality, and it’s because our existence is limited that we’re able to think past those limits. Time has us in its grip, and so we devise stories of an afterlife in which we exist unshackled by days and years and the decay they represent. But where does that get us, beyond the vague suspicion that immortality—at least in the shape of the vengeful Yahweh or the spiteful Greek and Roman gods—is no guarantee of wisdom? Then again, if you’re the sort of person who sees the glass as one-eighth full rather than seven-eighths empty, you might not worry about such matters. Instead, you’ll greet each new day with gratitude, despite coughing up phlegm and tossing down a dozen pills."