The last couple of weeks have been a whirl.

Recap

1. Solomon Nelson¹ has published a video essay tearing down Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis².

2. Using Milo Wolf³ as a mouthpiece, Mike has made a response video . Mike claims that Solomon has reviewed an old draft of the document. This draft was allegedly—by no one’s mistake— uploaded by Mike to the University’s servers. Milo has read an alleged “much later version” where most of the mistakes were corrected.

3. Jeff Nippard⁴ commented on Solomon’s critique with a truly ignorant comment:

   Bro was out here adding semicolons to mikes rough draft from 13 years ago thinking he did something

   – Jeff Nippard

4. Greg Doucette⁵ has chimed in (because of course he did) suspecting that the “much later draft” was a forgery.

5. It turned out that the “much later version” was indeed a forgery and was even older than the version that Solomon has reviewed. Mike Israetel admitted this himself in an Instagram post.

Why does this matter

We could dismiss what is happening here as your Tuesday YouTube drama. However, I think that it has some larger impact.

Sports science peer review is bottom of the barrel tier. The field is already criticised for poor studies due to small sample sizes and bad methodology, while needing to deal with extreme inter and intra subject variance Adding abysmal review standards and the “science” label evaporates.

Jeff Nippard’s behavior also makes it clear that scientific method plays a second fiddle to the protection of the group.

What I’m saying that sports science is useless.

What I’m going to do

With more studies are being published⁶ disproving previously touted methods for optimizing training⁷, I am going back to the tried and tested methods of bros. Yes, bros have won.

The new, revised, training recommendations

1. Consistency – Showing up day after day, month after month, year after year is the only way to build reasonable amount of muscle.

2. Technique – Can’t lift if you hurt yourself.

3. Close to Failure – In order to grow muscle, the training has to be challenging.

4. Volume – The more you train, the better the results. No top end has been found, keep your technique in check so you don’t get hurt.

That’s it. Everything else (e.g.: progressive overload) is corollary of these four basic steps

If your email had the most important part at the beginning; I would not have to summarize it using AI.

We put so much value of convenience, that we send signal to the younger generation that learning basic skills is a waste of time.

Years ago there was this iPad app called “The Best Ceasar”, some bloke thought it was a good idea to make one whole app just about one recipe… he was right. The app is long gone but here is the gist of the recipe as far as I remember it.

Dressing

Ingredients

1. Anchovies
2. Garlic
3. Worcestershire Sauce
4. Red Wine Vinegar
5. Olive Oil
6. Parmesan Cheese
7. Salt
8. Pepper

Preparation

1. Smash the anchovies in a bowl into a fine paste.
2. Press in 3 cloves of garlic.
3. Add a dash of olive oil (depending on how oily your anchovies are).
4. Add a table spoon of Worcestershire sauce.
5. Add a table spoon of red wine vinegar.
6. Add salt and pepper to taste.
7. Mix it all together.
8. Add in parmesan to obtain a thick-ish dressing.

Croutons

Ingredients

1. Bread
2. Olive Oil
3. Garlic

Preparation

My current go-to recipe is to:

1. Press garlic into a bowl of olive oil.
2. Baste bread slices with the garlic oil.
3. Put the slices in an oven until crispy.
4. Cut the toasted bread into croutons.

Chicken

Ingredients

1. Chicken Breast
2. Salt
3. Pepper
4. Olive Oil

Preparation

If the chicken breast is thicker than about 15mm, cut it in half (to make it thinner).

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200ºC (or 180 with fan on).
2. Salt and pepper the chicken.
3. Put some olive oil in a pan and heat it at high temperature.
4. Sear the chicken on all sides until golden on the outside.
5. Put the chicken in the oven, cook until the inner temperature is a bit under 75ºC.
6. Dice the chicken.

Serving

Wash and dry (as much as you can) a couple of heads of romaine lettuce. Add the dressing and toss it properly. Mix in the chicken and croutons, toss it again, sprinkle with more grated parmesan.

The Apple Watch does not display its local IP address in the settings for some reason. Here is one way to get it, if you have a second Mac on the network.

1. Open terminal on the mac, run python -m SimpleHTTPServer.
2. Get your Mac’s local IP address (option+click on the network icon in the toolbar).
3. Send yourself an iMessage with text http://YOUR_MACS_IP:8000.
4. Turn WiFi off on your iPhone. This is important because the Apple Watch can use your phone’s WiFi.
5. Open Messages on your watch, find the message, tap on the link.

In the terminal on your Mac you will see something like 192.168.0.21 - - [12/Oct/2021 12:00:00] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -.

And there you have your Watch’s IP address.

I’ve been trying baking lately but making a large cake badly and then eating it isn’t much fun. Here is a recipe for a great muffin instead:

Ingredients

I’m using espresso cups for measurement, these doses are for four small muffins. Multiply as necessary.

1. One and half cup of plain wheat flour
2. One cup of brown sugar
3. One cup of grated carrots
4. About 25g of unsalted butter, softened at room temperature
5. A spoonful of apple sauce
6. One teaspoon of cake spices—this one in particular is a mix of dried orange, cassia, ginger, nutmeg and caraway from M&S
7. One large egg (separate yolk from white)
8. One teaspoon of baking powder

Preparation

Start by mixing the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, spices and baking powder) together.

Add butter, apple sauce, and egg yolk. Mix thoroughly together until you have a consistent batter.

Whip up the egg whites into snow.

Progressively add the snow into the batter, carefully mixing them together.

Pour the mix into small muffin forms.

Cooking

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Bake for 20 minutes at 180ºC (with convection on).