Behaviors

For hypertrophy, pre-fatigue a target muscle with an isolation exercise before compound work if you want to guarantee that muscle gets emphasized.

Do not lump the entire lower body into a single 'legs day' while splitting the upper body into many separate days; account for multiple lower-body muscle groups.

When tallying hypertrophy volume, count work for muscles acting as primary or secondary movers, but generally not tertiary movers.

If you struggle to activate your lats, keep training them and concentrating on them rather than giving up; it may take months or years to learn.

In asymmetrical sports, deliberately train the non-dominant side to reduce asymmetry; examples given were learning to ride switch in skateboarding and switching stance in martial arts.

If you want both strength and hypertrophy, train fairly hard in the 4–8 rep range.

If soreness is around 3 out of 10 or less and improves with warm-up, training is probably okay.

If chronic excessive muscle damage is suspected, assess biomarkers such as creatine kinase, LDH, myoglobin, ALT, and AST.

A marked drop in motivation to train can be used as a practical sign that recovery may be inadequate.

Judge recovery by trends over at least 3 days, preferably 5, rather than one off day.

If recovery is poor but hypertrophy is the goal, do a lighter, easier session rather than canceling entirely; examples given include using about 6/10 RPE, reducing range of motion, switching to machines, or doing about 50% effort for sets of 10 for roughly 3 sets to get blood flow and aid recovery.

When combining endurance work with leg hypertrophy, cycling is preferred over running because it creates less eccentric damage and interference.

Best-case scenario for minimizing interference is to do endurance work on a separate day from hypertrophy training; if separate days are not possible, do lifting in the morning and cardio at night, and if it must be in the same session, do cardio after lifting rather than before.

High-intensity cardio may aid hypertrophy via metabolic disturbance, but do not do so much that it compromises subsequent training or glycogen recovery.

Doing a block of aerobic endurance training before a hypertrophy phase may improve later muscle growth; the example given was 6 weeks of steady-state long-duration endurance before hypertrophy training.

If poor conditioning is limiting your ability to tolerate enough hypertrophy work, improve conditioning first.

During phases aimed at maximizing hypertrophy, avoid recovery methods that blunt overload signals rather than trying to maximize recovery around every session.

Maintain a neurobiologically consistent routine aligned with dopamine and motivation circuitry for at least 5 days per week. Consider taking time off on weekends.

For intrusive thoughts that are repetitive but not especially disturbing, direct attention to external stimuli and engage in activities that strongly capture attention to pull focus away from the thought; the background loop may persist at first but should wane over time.

To extinguish disturbing intrusive thoughts, write them out extensively in a structured format. Script as much detail as possible about the thought and surrounding context, ideally in complete sentences. Include the worst possible outcome you fear to get close to the underlying basis of the thought, and repeat the exercise multiple times if one session is not enough.

Strive for the best sleep possible, specifically including sufficient REM sleep, because REM helps remove the emotional load of traumatic experiences and intrusive thoughts.

If the intrusive thoughts fit classic OCD, see a psychiatrist; medication may not be necessary, but effective tools exist.

For severe alcohol addiction and in some cases opiate addiction, immediate sustained abstinence may not be appropriate; work with an addiction specialist, and tapering rather than abrupt cessation may be necessary.

For addictions where the goal is not total elimination, set constraints around the behavior in space and/or time so it occurs only in appropriate amounts or contexts, including only engaging in the behavior in certain places and at certain times when context-appropriate.

Do not use the 100 mg/kg bodyweight dose from the studies; he explicitly does not recommend it.

If using L-tyrosine, pay attention to whether you are combining it with caffeine or other stimulants.

After using L-tyrosine, watch for a crash later that day or the next day.

Guard activities you already enjoy by not attaching extra rewards or additional dopamine-releasing behaviors, substances, or compounds to them, or do so only infrequently, in order to preserve intrinsic pleasure and motivation over time.

Maintain a short list of about five safe but effortful or painful activities you can use whenever you feel amotivated or are procrastinating.

When amotivated or procrastinating, deliberately do something safe but more effortful or painful than your current state to steepen the trough and return to normal or elevated baseline dopamine faster and more robustly.