1 PREFACE Using medicine to enhance human performance is an art and discipline that has been dominated by two schools of thought; doctors trained to treat disease, and self-styled “gurus” who have very little training in human physiology and pharmacology, if any. Both camps are trying to meet a common demand in the athletic community, “help me get stronger.” While nobody can hold a candle to their work ethic and scholarship, the medical community tends to be too conservative in their approach with the rallying cry of “primere non nocere,” (first do no harm,) cutting them off from providing the best possible results to athletes. PEDs - Performance The second group is found in the Enhacing Drugs Drugs that help the human body shady corners of the supplement meet or even exceed it’s industry and internet and is echoed in natural athletic potential. gyms all over the world. “Bro science” carelessly spreads a mix of accurate information and dangerous misinformation without any real attempts at academic rigor or due regard for the potential for harm. It is this community that has shaped our collective knowledge of supplements and PEDs. 2 Clearly another approach is needed, and AUGMENTED attempts to bridge that gap by providing quality, rigorously derived information on athletic enhancement without the unnecessary safeguards that are needed to treat sick people. There is a new academic discipline that is well- suited to the task of applying the tools of medicine to optimize athletic performance called “bioengineering.” Typically bioengineers are tasked with developing powerful new medical techniques for doctors to use in treating disease. But that’s not their only function. Just like an automotive engineer can design both a box truck and a sports car, bioengineers can help treat disease or make a human stronger. I am a bioengineer. After a roughly ten year career consisting of two terms of service in the Army and a brief stint in law enforcement, I decided to pursue a Master’s in Pharmaceutical Bioengineering at the University of Washington. Afterwards I struggled to find a fulfilling role as a pharmacologist - the snail’s pace of producing scientific evidence while complying with both corporate and FDA regulations 3 proved entirely too frustrating. I had always been the person my military and police colleagues came to for advice on supplementation or staying in shape in spite of a medical condition, and I realized I now had the education needed to create a powerful system for getting in shape. Life building a family while working full time had taken a toll on my fitness and I wanted a path back to how I looked and felt in my “glory days” as a military officer and street cop. Taking what I already knew, I started reading scientific journal articles and cobbled together a system which I believed could get an out of shape person to automatically build muscle and burn fat with minimal diet and exercise. Of course, my first test subject had to be myself. Over a period of roughly 18 months I did manage to reduce my body fat by roughly 15% and replace the weight with muscle making no conscientious effort to eat clean. Exercise was occasional at best. Yet it was effective. People began to notice my weight was dropping. I continually had to buy new pants and ultimately had to drill holes in my belt so it would fit properly, until my wife made me buy a new one. People who saw me only sporadically would 4 involuntarily look me over when I walked in the room, surprised at how I had changed in so little time. Those who had been eager to dismiss me when I had been out of shape and in clear poor health started subconsciously paying me more courtesy in our interactions. The contrast was stunning. One Halloween, watching my little kid trick or treating in the kind of neighborhood I would like to live in, I made the decision to create protocols around the system I had honed and start a business based on them so others could experience what I have. This book is the touchstone for that system and the beginnings of the business I intend to build. The most challenging aspect of writing this book isn’t the science; that comes very naturally to me. I am a gifted bioengineer and love my field of study. What’s been difficult is communicating complicated biology in a way that’s easy to understand. I’ll admit I haven’t been entirely successful in this regard, which is why I launched an educational website; humanfrontiers.com as well as a facebook group of the same name to help my readers and clients engage with me and each other directly. 5 Some housekeeping notes - it is extremely hard to understand a concept or learn something when you don’t know what the words mean. Italicized: My way of letting When new words or concepts are you know an important concept has been introduced. introduced, they are italicized and Look for a text box for further explained further in a text box. explanation when you see this. I also haven’t added citations. It’s not that I’m making things up, I’m writing for a novice audience and the busyness of official citations can be cognitively overwhelming. If you want to validate or refute my claims, google or better yet NCBI searches are your friend. My readers are always welcome to challenge or update me. Please, literally I welcome it. This book is a labor of love and I truly hope you find what you need to achieve the health and fitness level of your dreams. There’s a LOT of information out there, and I hope the knowledge you gain from this book helps you tell the difference between valid claims and what is frankly, bullshit. And if you need help, you know where to find me 6 INTRODUCTION Biology and chemistry are powerful and complicated sciences. The ability to understand how you work at a chemical level, and knowing how to chemically alter the structure and function of your body to do what you want it takes years of study. The field is constantly expanding making continuing education a must. Biochemistry has a language nearly all its own. While this allows scientists to communicate with one another clearly and concisely, these terms also have the unintended effect of making it difficult for outsiders to do their own research. Alongside this elegant, complicated science a $40 billion dollar supplement industry has sprung up and with it, a marketing machine that relies heavily on the language of biochemistry for scientific credibility. Sadly, many of the claims made by the supplement industry are misleading if not laughably false. This has resulted in an entire generation of athletes and coaches that have been educated almost entirely by marketing campaigns. Everyone from elite athletes to gym novices have heard locker room conversations that sound like a graduate seminar on 7 what supplements, pharmaceuticals, nutritional strategies, etc. get the best results. Hair splitting, navel gazing speculation over which creatine salt is the most effective or EAAs vs. bovine protein without truly understanding the biological relevance. Due to some deceptive advertising that presents itself as cutting-edge science, many people have purchased expensive products or committed themselves to programs that ultimately produce poor results. This has harmed the reputation of the industry which is a damn shame. If people seeking to improve their fitness had access to accurate, accessible, and practical information they could use that knowledge to get fantastic results. As an added benefit, it would be very difficult for unscrupulous companies to benefit from misleading marketing. This book attempts to begin addressing this problem. You will notice something right away; this book doesn’t begin by discussing particular chemicals and how they benefit you. Instead, it tells you exactly how YOUR body grows stronger, then discusses multiple, effective ways to manipulate these biochemical systems in efficient, effective, and usually inexpensive ways to get the exact results 8 you want. We are taking three decades of blended marketing and science that have morphed into common gym lore and throwing it all away. We are replacing it with authentic, cutting edge science from a ‘first principles’ standpoint. We are discarding all old assumptions, ignoring what others have done in the past, examining the best information we have available and creating a new and better way of understanding how to nudge our bodies into getting even stronger than what diet and exercise alone can provide. The human body, in fact your body right now where you sit, is an incredible network of biochemical reactions all happening in an orchestrated chain that gives rise to life, consciousness, strength, and ultimately you. It is so complicated that tens of thousands of the brightest minds in the world are working in concert to reverse engineer and decipher how it functions at a molecular level. There is so much still unknown, and so much effort being put into discovery, that new advances are made every day and the scientific community is still decades away from a complete picture. 9 That said, science has learned things - important things. We now have a portfolio of work complete enough where we can begin to 'connect the dots' and see how biochemical effects form a living being as the body goes about its daily business. This better understanding of how our biochemistry works allows us to understand disease with higher resolution, making it easier to cure. We have cloned entire animals, conceived babies in test tubes, created crops that are resistant to disease and famine, harnessed genes from organisms in the most extreme habitats on Earth, and even created technology that could feasibly reverse death in limited circumstances.