The 4-Hour Body
The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question: For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results? Thousands of tests later, this book contains the answers for both men and women.
Stats for nerds
32recommend
67mentions
62people
2010–2026years
49% recommend42% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I’m smiling, both because your wife is improving and because of the asymmetry thing.
After my second knee surgery, I asked the surgeon about physio. He didn’t really think it was necessary for the kind of surgery I had, but when I insisted he shrugged, said “sure”, and made a referral to the place on campus (surgery was through the university hospital). Physio folks did an assessment, basically said “you don’t really need anything”, gave me a few stretches and sent me on my way.
Soooooo ok. I could walk. I’d get gentle aching pain in my knee after less walking than I was ok with. I ended up putting together my own physio/rehab plan based largely on the concepts from Tim Ferris’s 4 Hour Body book. Before getting strength and endurance back, phase one was to assess and correct strength asymmetry.
Surgery was on my right knee. I’d been limping for a year before the surgery. I start doing “one-limbed” exercises to assess my strength and discovered that (not surprisingly) my left leg is much stronger than my right leg, but my right arm is much stronger than my left arm. I end up putting together a plan where I did:
- sets of 5-10 reps on the weak side, N/2 reps on the strong side. Once I can do 11 reps I increase the weight by 5lb.
- Every 10 days, do another asymmetry evaluation by doing each exercise to failure and tallying how many reps I did in each side. As soon as left and right match for a given exercise, start doing that exercise with both limbs at the same time instead of one at a time.
I do miss being in my 20s with the surging testosterone to help things. I went from limping constantly, to surgery, to getting sore after walking a few blocks, to running a 5km/3.1mi fun run in 24 minutes after 3 months of my homemade physio program, and still had lots of gas left in the tank.
- There’s so much conflicting advice out there. Reality is: When you want to go from overweight to healthy, nothing beats calories in/calories out. Beyond that, like if you’re on project “visible abs”, tweaks might make the difference: you could go deep into the rabbit hole of insulin, anti-nutrients, etc. but then: what works for you, is probably different than what works for others, so there’s a lot trial and error.
That being said, the key to all of this is discipline and consistency.
So, for a book, pick one that you find plausible, entertaining (in terms of reading and in terms of trying the recipes and protocols), and that aligns with your lifestyle or the rate of change you’re willing to accept.
For me, I started with 4 Hour Body. This might not not perfect from today’s knowledge but I liked the way, Tim is presenting the material, his way of thinking and the pragmatic approach. From there on, and after seeing significant and fast results, I went down the rabbit hole and tried almost every “biohack” routine i could find.
Try a couple of books, then pick the one that you enjoyed reading the most and then mercilessly stick to it to the letter. That should help. If it doesn’t, try the next one. Not a single human being in history lost weight from just reading. Take action!
- I see a lot of people mentioning counting calories and I've never had success doing that. I stick with Tim Ferris's 4 hour body method of only consuming meat beans and vegetables and getting the 1 cheat day or meal. There are a few other rules like eating 20g of protein right when you wake up, but I can't recommend his book enough to people that are struggling with losing weight. The biggest thing about his book is it makes you understand your body fat percentage and gives you more ways to measure weight loss than just what the scale says, which can be deceiving. Anyways, different things will work for different people, but everything takes time to adjust.
https://www.amazon.com/Hour-Body-Uncommon-Incredible-Superhu...
- Water fasting is by far the best, our body is naturally adapted to it. This "hacking" with oxygen tanks will just ruin your body. Read "The 4-Hour Body" if you want something that works.
- Off the top of my head no, most of my insight came from observing addiction in others, and experimenting over the course of a decade. However, the two books which I guess started me on this journey are Why We Get Fat by Garry Taube [0] and The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris [1]. Both of these books take a scientific approach to diet (which is governed by habit and addiction, after all).
I will say this, I am convinced that for a lot of addictions, all you can do is substitute one addiction for another. But if the new addiction is something healthy, then I think that is fine. But if you do become a diet addict, keep it scientific, don't follow every blogspam diet fad.
For social-media, I substituted a typing instructor game. So when ever I felt the urge to go doomscrolling or something, I would fire up a typing game instead. I keep a windows VM on hand just to play TypingMaster. It takes 3-5 minutes to complete one of the training sessions (which is probably less than you would have wasted on twitter). This helps kill the urge, and break the cycle. Plus it makes me a better typist. And when you can do 90wpm on QWERTY, switch to DVORAK.
If you have a common chemical addiction like smoking, coffee, pain killers, alchohol then the only safe approach is the taper/step down. Measure how much you take now and then commit to reducing that amount by about 10% per week. So you smoke 18 a day instead of 20 in your first week. That's not so hard, right? Whatever you do, NEVER try cold turkey quitting any chemical, at least not before seeing a doctor. Chemical withdrawals range from terrible headaches for coffee, to deadly DTs from alcohol.
- It depends on what you're trying to get out of it.
If you really want to work less and enjoy life more, the FIRE community (Mr Money Mustache is a good gateway) is a more sustainable/achievable path. The specific types of businesses that The 4-hour Workweek recommends (dropshipping, podcasts, Youtubing, blogging, consulting) are crapshoots. And we can't have a world where everyone's dropshipping and peddling their e-courses and newsletters to everyone else for a living - it makes no sense on a macro level.
It's still a fun, breezy read and opens your eyes to other possibilities.
IMO The 4-hour Body is way more useful and practical. Pretty much everyone who reads it can find something that will benefit them.
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