Several years ago in late October I decided to undertake a personal challenge – the Million Pound November Challenge. I was already planning to participate in Movember the following month, but that wasn’t the real challenge. I figured as long as I am growing a mustache I might as well attempt a heroic feat of strength that can be accomplished only by someone growing a wicked ‘stache.

I failed at one of those tasks, but I succeeded spectacularly at the other. On a cold, dark night in mid-November, I had to cut short (pun intended) my goal of growing a wild and wooly mustache because of a photo shoot that came up.

But, I did lift a lot of weight.  In fact I lifted:

399,280 lbs of Sumo Deadlifts in 1550 reps
152,989 lbs of Kettlebell Rows in 2513 reps
97,539 lbs of Push Presses in 2694 reps
51,483 lbs of Chin-Ups in 272 reps
59,220 lbs of Push-Ups in 329 reps
14,580 lbs of Pull-Ups in 81 reps

Those lifts and the many others I did added up to a grand total of 1,066,554 pounds in 22 workouts from November 1st to November 30th.  In fact, I hit the one million mark on the 27th.

I will discuss the role of volume in training a bit more in a blog post announcing something exciting tomorrow, but suffice to say that volume is one of the main drivers of strength training. If there’s one thing you can do to see better results, it’s just simply do more work.

What did this do to my body?  From November 3rd to December 5th I gained 5 inches from head to toe:

Bodyweight: +5lbs

Waist: .75″
Neck: .1″
Shoulders: .8″
Hip: 1.25″
Thigh: 1.25″
Arm (Bicep): .63″
Forearm: .5″
Chest: .25″

During this period I maintained a body fat of around 7-8%.

What did it do to my strength? I didn’t specifically test any strength quantities directly before and after, but I can tell you that a few months later I hit my best-ever triple-bodyweight deadlift of 603 at 195. In addition to that, I was over all probably the strongest I have ever been.

What did I eat?  Pretty much whatever I felt like.  A couple times we went to Axel’s Bonfire and crushed bull bites, a half a chicken, sides, and the epic chocolate chip cookie with ice cream dessert.  I probably drank 4-5 quarts of chocolate milk during the month, usually a quart at a time.

Other times I just wasn’t all that hungry, so I ate when I got hungry.  That’s it.

Supplements?  Just creatine.  Jack3d on occasion.  I don’t think I had a protein shake all month.  Maybe a couple.  Nothing worth writing home about.

Did I feel crushed all month: no.

Did I feel tired all the time: no.

Was I sore: no.

Did I get hurt? No.  (In fact, I resolved a shoulder issue that crept up beforehand.)

Every movement I did tested well and I stopped all sets before the elements of effort set in.

Would I recommend to everyone that you set an external goal: NO.  It is too easy to get focused on the goal, and break your body when you stop listening to it. (But if you do tune in, it just might be possible.)

One more thing to consider is what was going on in the rest of my life at the time that I did this. In short, very little. I was able to direct much of my ability to resolve stress towards my training because I had much less stress in other parts of my life. While none of the training was distressful, it is likely that it wasn’t because of how much extra stress I could handle. I’ve attempted this amount of volume in a month one other time and I had to shut it down because I just couldn’t handle it, so context matters.

Walk into any GNC or nutrition store (which is in itself sort of ironic in that they don’t sell any actual foods, the best source of actual nutrition) and you’ll find a bright-eyed reasonably muscled twenty year old standing in front of a wall of pills, powders, and potions happy to tell you what supplements you’re totally missing to actually get results from working out.

By and large none of these do anything worthwhile.

But there is one supplement that is so overwhelmingly positive that I think every man, and some women depending on a caveat I will mention later, should be taking it.

That supplement is creatine. It is likely the most studied sports supplement on the planet, and is not in any way shape or form a steroid. Creatine is a naturally occurring organic acid that is synthesized from amino acids in the kidney and liver. Creatine is, at the risk of over-simplifying, used in the formation of ATP which is the actual energy source your muscles use directly to contract.

Creatine is not an essential nutrient, although you likely get a sufficient amount of it if you eat a balanced diet including animal protein, because it can be synthesized from L-arginine, glycine, and L-methionine. That being said low levels of supplementation, on the order of the typical dose of 5g/day, have shown numerous positive effects that indicate that dietary and intrinsically produced amounts are not sufficient to gain as much benefit as you can get from supplementation.

While creatine doesn’t make you magically gain muscle, in concert with a strength program you can improve your gains by a measurable margin. A 2012 review in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research of almost a hundred papers concluded that creatine supplementation effectively amplifies the effects of strength training for strength and hypertrophy, improves quality and benefit of of high intensity speed training, improves aerobic endurance performance in trials lasting more than 150 seconds, seems to produce positive effects on strength, fat free mass, daily living performance and function in young and older people, demonstrates a long-term up regulation of gene expression when creatine is administered together with resistance training and basically makes you a sexier beast as long as you actually lift when you take it.

In 140 characters or less: you can get a little more work or volume out of every training session.

In terms of fat loss, NY Times Bestselling Author John Romaniello says: “People often avoid creatine while they’re dieting because they believe it’s a muscle building supplement only and it’ll prevent them from losing weight. This is true in an obtuse way, where only the weight on the scale matters. It’s true that creatine might prevent you from having that “boner-inducing” experience of losing 10 pounds in the first week because you drop so much water weight. But I don’t care about water weight, I care about my clients losing fat. Creatine helps in a number of ways with this: The first of these are obvious in that it allows you to perform better in strength training. However, a secondary benefit is that it helps in the retention of lean body mass under a caloric deficit.”

In terms of sport and athletic performance the data so far is astonishingly conclusive: creatine works and it works well.

But that’s not even the biggest reason I think you should take it.

A growing body of evidence is showing that creatine may have as many benefits for brain function as it does for skeletal muscle. For example, an Australian study using vegetarians (they tend to have lower creatine levels and as a result provide better test subjects – yes, you might be getting enough for these effects from eating meat) showed that in a working memory test people taking creatine were able to recall an average of 8.5 numbers compared to 7 for those taking a placebo. The groups were flipped after , washed out for 6 weeks, and then tested again and the effect persisted.

For those athletes playing contact sports that lead to inevitable concussions, a 2000 study showed that creatine may have neuro-protective effects in the case of traumatic brain injuries to the tune of 36% in mice and 50% in rats.

All of these benefits come at an exceptionally low cost. The European Food Safety Authority, which is significantly more stringent than United States regulators when it comes to food additives and supplements, published a memorandum stating that long-term intake of creatine at 3g per day is risk-free. While I don’t necessarily believe that anything is inherently risk-free, these are strong words from an authority with extremely high standards for safety and evidence.

The biggest risk from creatine seems to be in that it sucks a little more water into working muscle and may affect hydration in high heat – but this is easily mitigated by maintaining good hydration.

You get all of this for under two pennies per day. Creatine monohydrate, the only kind you need, is one of the cheapest supplements out there. From True Protein you can buy 500g in bulk, roughly a 3-month supply, for $7.45. (Or a kilo from Amazon for $19 and free shipping with Prime.) You can buy even more and get it even cheaper, or drop the dose to 3g/day and stretch it even further to under a penny a day. Especially relative to the amount of benefit you can’t find a better deal.

I mentioned a caveat with regards to women. The main issue is that due to creatine causing an increase in water retention some women may feel “bloated” or that creatine causes them to look puffy. This is an individual thing in both effect size and reaction to it, so the best thing to do is just to try it out and see if it works for you. If it doesn’t, simply discontinue taking it and you’ll return to your normal physiological levels of intramuscular creatine in a few days.

None of this is to say that it is impossible that some body of evidence in the future won’t reveal some unknown and long-term non-linear effects. Anything is possible. But as the evidence stands right now, creatine appears to be both the safest and most effective, both in terms of sports performance and other cognitive and neurological benefits, supplement available. And it’s pretty damn close to free.

In a world full of junk supplements, creatine is a shining beacon of truth and light. I strongly recommend testing it out and reviewing your training logs to see if you notice a bump in performance. If you use a cognitive training service like Lumosity you may be able to track the cognitive benefits there, although I would argue that the benefits are on the order of long-term small percentages that matter but may not be measurable. Either way, I think creatine is a solid “why would you not” supplement.

 

Baccarat is a game of chance. There is no skill involved in the game, which consists of betting on whether or not your hand or the dealer’s hand will add up to 8 or 9. Players’ strategy generally consists of betting on streaks, but given that each hand is an independent event the streaks are purely random chance.

So how did one of the best poker players in the world take a casino for $12 million dollars? Remember that it is not up for debate that baccarat is purely a game of chance and the house retains an edge.

Perhaps only by a stroke of chance, while poker legend Phil Ivey was playing baccarat in a storied London casino, Crockfords in Mayfair he noticed that there was a flaw in the deck of cards the casino was using. The flaw in printing and cutting the deck allowed him to tell one edge of the card from another. Returning the next night and playing up his belief in superstition by asking the casino to play the same dealer, with the same cards, and with his same lucky hat Ivey and his compatriot asked the dealer to turn the 7s, 8s, and 9s (the best cards) 180 degrees before returning them to the shoe. In this way, Ivey could see when they were going to be dealt and use this edge, no pun intended, to beat the house. The casino couldn’t imagine why this would matter, so they agreed.

When I heard this story I found it fascinating. Not because it’s a way of beating the house – that ship has sailed and Ivey is suing Crockfords because they won’t pay out his winnings – but because of the sensitivity to the cards required to pull this off.

Think of it this way: Even if I told you what to look for, that the razor-thin edge of some cards would have a slightly different pattern than others it would still take a serious effort for you to be able to perceive that difference and play on it. And even then you would have to do it nonchalantly without looking like you’re inspecting the shoe for differences in the cards. Only someone who has spent the better portion of his life in card rooms could pull this off.

Ivey was in the enviable position of preparation meeting opportunity, or luck as Seneca called it.

This sensitivity, or this eye, can only be developed over tens of thousands of hours. It’s the exact same thing that amazes people the first time their trainer says, “What’s going on with your right hip? You’re walking differently.” Great trainers have developed this eye for movement that can’t be taught – it has to be practiced.

You and I are never going to beat baccarat by edge sorting. But, there is something you’ve been doing for a long time that you do have the eye or the sensitivity to. You know it intimately and you can take advantage of an opportunity or an edge when it’s presented to you.

What is it? Will you know the opportunity when you see it?

And for god’s sake, if there isn’t something you’ve got the sensitive eye for you’ve got work to do.