In 4 Hour Body, Tim talks about utilizing the minimum effective dose to trigger muscle growth. Fortunately for those who don’t own the book, he published this concept on Gizmodo, too:

The minimum effective dose (MED) is defined simply: the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome. … Anything beyond the MED is wasteful. To boil water, the MED is 212°F (100°C) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it “more boiled.” Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive. … In the context of body redesign, there are two fundamental MEDs to keep in mind:

To remove stored fat, do the least necessary to trigger a fat-loss cascade of specific hormones.
To add muscle in small or large quantities, do the least necessary to trigger local (specific muscles) and systemic (hormonal2) growth mechanisms.

Knocking over the dominoes that trigger both of these events takes surprisingly little. Don’t complicate them. For a given muscle group like the shoulders, activating the local growth mechanism might require just 80 seconds of tension using 50 pounds once every seven days, for example. That stimulus, just like the 212°F for boiling water, is enough to trigger certain prostaglandins, transcription factors, and all manner of complicated biological reactions. What are “transcription factors”? You don’t need to know. In fact, you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven. Press a few buttons in the right order and you’re done.

He further describes this procedure as “Occam’s Protocol”, an oscillating pair of workouts done to-failure, triggering the necessary biological mechanisms required for rapid muscle growth. According to the book, 2.5 pounds a week is the goal – as long as I can get enough to eat. Going along with his assertion that I “don’t need to understand any of the biology” (because I don’t), I’ll assume that goal is reasonable for me, too.

2.5 pounds per week it is. If my math is right, that gives Jess 8 weeks.

And so it begins…

A week ago today, Monday 9 Jan 2012, my wife Jess and I started a wager of impossible odds: the first person to finish a 20-pound body recomposition wins dinner on the other’s dime. The financial intricacies of “who’s dime is who’s” aside, this becomes interesting when we throw in a little history (just a smidgen, I promise):

My wife’s target recomposition focuses on fat loss. In a manner that’s seemingly common with a lot of women, she has had no success in doing the same previously through changes in diet (including the Caveman Diet) and regular exercise.

Mine, on the other hand, focuses on muscle gain. While strength gain has come and gone, I’ve maintained a relatively consistent weight since leaving college three years ago, even through regular rock climbing and piling on caloric intake well in excess of my norms.

Enter 4 Hour Body. It’s a great read by a great writer, Timothy Ferriss, and the second of his “4 Hour” series. In Body, Tim breaks down the systematic changes required to “hack” your body into changing in a particular manner.

With the body hacks understood and in place, the bet/experiment is on…