Lately I haven’t had a lot of ambition to train. Between coming off a powerlifting meet in the spring, it being hotter than hell in the gym during the summer, and wanting to skydive as much as humanly possible all summer I just haven’t had a whole lot of extra time or ambition to train.

So I’ve been experimenting with the question of “how little is enough?” Usually when we talk about training there’s an almost obsession with maximizing outputs. How much muscle can you gain, how many PRs can you hit.

But there are lots of situations where that’s not really what you want. Sometimes the situation or your desires don’t call for maximizing output, they call for minimizing input and maximizing effectiveness or efficiency.

And yet, despite only training heavy twice a week, I’m not only maintaining body weight and composition, but my strength is staying relatively stable if not increasing incrementally. Of course I’m not pushing my absolute 1RM all time bests up, but my working weights are increasing gradually even with the low frequency.

One of the things I’ve learned from the mountain of data I’ve gathered having every member at my gym track their workouts is that the minimum weekly frequency to make good progress is about 2.1 workouts per week. In other words, two isn’t enough so three is just about right.

But, I think if you keep some guidelines in mind you can maintain or even progress very slowly in times when progress isn’t a priority:

• Train mainly with full body compound movements.
• Train the whole body each training session, no body part splits.
• Go heavy, for moderate reps. You’re not getting a lot of frequency, so the intensity of the stimulus needs to be higher.
• Don’t push things that don’t feel right or get hurt. This might sound obvious, but if you’re already only training at the lower bound of minimal effective amount you can’t afford to have to take time off because you tweaked something.

At some point, probably later in the fall after my travel schedule settles down I’ll go back to training more often and with more purpose towards moving forward. But for now I’m enjoying this little experiment and I’m learning a lot about what does and doesn’t work. I’ve always thought creating a program for the person who wants to train the absolute minimum would be fun, so I’m learning a bit towards that end.

I’m sorry, but I’ll never get tired of mocking the “one weird trick” advertisements.

Here’s a puzzler for you though. Why do people living at higher altitudes tend to live longer, with significantly lower rates of cancer than people at sea level?

If you’re familiar with the concept of the blue zones, five areas of the world where people live the longest, you may have noticed that most aren’t at sea level, and in fact many are quite mountainous. Weinberg et. al. (1987) looked at rates of death from cancer and heart disease as it correlates to altitude and found that altitude seemed to more than make up for increases in radiation you have at higher altitudes to the extent that the reduced oxygen at altitude may in fact be protective against those causes of death.

But wait you say, isn’t oxygen good for you? Don’t you want as much oxygen as possible?

The answer it seems, contrary to pop belief, is not exactly.

Oxygen, you’ll remember from basic chemistry, is an oxidizer. If you have a fire burning, and you blow oxygen on it, you get a much, much hotter fire. In fact, with acetylene or propane as the fuel and oxygen as the oxidizer you can cut through inch thick steel with just a flame.

Controlled oxidation, such as the oxidation of some fatty acids in the body is an important chemical process that is necessary and helpful. Uncontrolled oxidation, not such a good thing. Rust on a car for example is a form of runaway oxidation. Anti-oxidants, such as those found in fruits and vegetables, slow down this oxidative process.

But of course, as with anything in the body, it’s never as simple as good and bad. A decade or two ago the popular idea was that the more antioxidants you could get the better. More research was done and we realized that overdoing the antioxidants actually caused more cancer. Over and over again we learn that these single-factor interventions don’t tell the whole story, but every time we think this time is different.

So that brings us back to living at higher altitudes with lower oxygen fractions. At this point, all we know for sure is that it looks like living at higher altitude may decrease your risk of cancer or dying from all causes. But, we can’t say with certainty that it’s because of the oxygen. Maybe it’s just more pretty scenery.

Maybe, or maybe there’s some convincing biochemistry that the reduced oxidative stress helps to live longer.

So what can you do other than moving to the mountains? Increasing carbon dioxide production in your body is one way. You can do that by increasing your overall energy input and output. John Berardi coined the term G-flux in the late 200s, and my friend Jade Teta calls it EMEM – “Eat More, Exercise More”. Essentially instead of trying to reduce your caloric intake you actually want to try to increase the amount of energy you can take in and subsequently utilize. Aside from increasing carbon dioxide levels this is also going to increase overall tissue turnover which has every indication of being beneficial to health, body composition, and performance.

Lately I’ve been noticing a trend that is deeply disturbing to me and I think is really dangerous.

In the past few years, testosterone replacement therapy for men has become far less stigmatized and more doctors are becoming aware of the indications and benefits, thus prescribing more broadly.

In general, this is a good thing. There was a stigma surrounding low T and the idea that you were less of a man if you had low T. This prevented a lot of guys from getting treated and living a better life.

But what’s happening now is that the pendulum is swinging so far in the other direction that you have a lot of fitness professionals promoting TRT and other exogenous hormone treatments as if you are missing out if you aren’t partaking. It’s even to the point where you’ve got amateur endocrinologists making recommendations.

I can’t overstate how reckless and irresponsible this is. Besides being outrageously out of their “lane” the potential for harm is far too great.

Look, the modern hormonal environment we live in is a toxic cauldron as it is. We have none of the proper stimuli for healthy hormonal function (natural photo rhythms, exercise and activity mediated responses, healthy diet signals), we have tons of dysfunctional signaling (overly stressful jobs, bad sleep, bad diets), and we literally bathe in chemicals that are known hormone disruptors.

It should come as no surprise that our hormones are messed up. In fact, as I was talking this over with my good friend and integrative physician Dr. Jade Teta the environment is so toxic that low testosterone levels are now being observed in teens.

So on top of this you want to try to modulate the hormonal environment through exogenous hormones?

Good luck!

Talk about putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.

None of this is to say that there aren’t circumstances in which TRT and other therapies are totally appropriate, and a good doctor or endocrinologist is the one who is qualified to make those assessments. And if that doctor is good, they will be looking at the big picture and making sure they address the root causes, not the symptoms.

My own T level isn’t particularly high, so about a year ago I consulted with Jade and sent him my labs. He basically said, “Dude, your T may not be that high, but big picture you couldn’t be healthier. Do these few things because they’re easy, cheap, and might improve things further.”

So yeah, absolutely if you struggle with energy, sex drive, fat loss or muscle gain see a good integrative doctor who is going to look at the big picture and if you need to go the route of hormone therapy then do it.

But, big picture, if your local fitness bro is the one telling you that you’re missing out, you should be extremely wary.

You may be surprised what you can accomplish if you actually address the big rocks like sleep, diet, and exercise first without entering into a delicate biochemistry balancing act.