Next Level Preps

The most productive way I know to start a weekend: sit down with someone who actually knows what they are doing, and build something with enough detail that it survives contact with reality. No vague enthusiasm, no one pretending to understand things they have never tested.

I keep circling back to this as a longevity variable. Sleep, hormones, training and biomarkers all go in a spreadsheet. The people around you don't — but they reset your standards every single day. Good company is environmental control. Surround yourself with people operating at that level and there is no ceiling on what you end up attempting.

Then the other half of the weekend started: a run of massages with people I care about.

The rest of it was massages with people I care about. The nickname has a history involving Smurfs that deserves its own article and will not be getting one today.

I stopped treating recovery as the empty space between training sessions a while ago. If it only happens when I accidentally have spare time, it is not part of the protocol — it is wishful thinking. Bodywork doesn't cancel bad sleep or stupid training volume, and it doesn't need to perform miracles to earn its slot. It drops the tension I would otherwise carry into Monday.

By Sunday night I am recharged rather than merely rested. Those are different states. Rested means I stopped. Recharged means I am ready for the next controlled block — which starts tomorrow, and starts with nothing.

Three Days of Nothing, Round Two

Monday through Wednesday: zero injections, zero supplements. Nothing. The day before the draw the training and the sex stop too. Thursday 8 AM, at home, twelve hours fasted, a needle closes out the first three months.

I am not pretending three days turns my biology into a blank page. It doesn't erase the last ninety days and it doesn't clear every compound from circulation. I went through the whole rationale last time — the point was never purity, it is tighter conditions.

Bloodwork is a snapshot. Snapshots get comparable when fewer things are moving right before the shutter opens. A defined pause, a fixed hour, a fasted state. "Clean" bloodwork doesn't mean untouched biology — it means a sample taken under conditions I can describe precisely. It also removes most of the convenient excuses when the numbers come back.

Higher Inputs Demand Better Instruments

Then the next block gets planned: more testosterone, more Retatrutide, and some new compounds. I am not naming those yet — three months in I have learned to announce things after they have survived contact with my own bloodstream, not before.

Higher is not automatically better. A dose increase is a new bet with a different response curve and a different risk profile, not a trophy. The panel comes first and the plan bends to it.

But here is the trap I nearly walked into: raising several inputs while leaving the measurement quality exactly where it was. More variables demand better observation. Otherwise I am not running an experiment — I am accumulating interventions and telling myself stories about the outcome.

The Question From Belgrade

A physician friend in Belgrade got curious about the protocol this week, and after a long back-and-forth he asked one very simple thing.

Did you measure your body composition before you started?

No. I did not.

My gym has the machine. It has been sitting there the entire time. I started the intervention without capturing the before — which is probably the single most common mistake in self-experimentation. All the excitement is in starting. A baseline feels like paperwork, right up until the first result needs context and there is nothing to compare it against.

That baseline is gone. A photo, a bathroom scale and my memory are not substitutes. What I can still do is take a proper measurement at the ninety-day mark — this week, before the new cycle starts — and repeat it three months later. Two hard data points across six months, with the second cycle framed by both. Missing the first baseline changes the question. It does not excuse missing the next one.

Why the Scale Is the Wrong Instrument Here

Body weight is uniquely useless for a protocol like this, because it collapses two opposite processes into one number.

Testosterone plus heavy resistance training adds lean mass. A GLP-1-class fat-loss compound strips fat — and takes some lean mass with it. Weight can sit perfectly still while the body underneath changes substantially, or drop fast while a chunk of that "success" is muscle walking out the door with the fat.

This is not hypothetical for me, because Retatrutide is in the stack and the dose is going up. In its body-composition substudy, lean mass accounted for roughly 38% of total weight lost. Across the GLP-1 class the range runs about 25–40% — semaglutide came in near 40% in the STEP-1 substudy, tirzepatide near 25% in SURMOUNT-1. (Network meta-analysis of GLP-1 receptor agonists and co-agonists on body composition)

Those are group averages, not a forecast of my result. But they make the real question unavoidable: not whether I lost weight, but what fraction of it was fat. The known countermeasures are resistance training, enough protein, and — in my case — medically supervised testosterone. All three are already running. What I have been missing is an instrument capable of telling me whether they are working. A bathroom scale will happily congratulate me while I lose the exact tissue I am paying to keep.

What the Machine Actually Measures

Most gym body-composition machines are multi-frequency bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). A small current runs through you and the device measures resistance; fat, muscle and water conduct differently, and the machine works backwards from that to an estimate. Estimate is the load-bearing word — nothing in that box is directly measured.

DEXA is the practical gold standard. BIA trades accuracy for accessibility, and the trade is worth it if you understand what you bought. Validation studies put BIA consistently above DEXA on muscle mass — roughly 49 kg versus 47 kg whole-body in men in one comparison — with correlations above 0.97 but only moderate absolute agreement. Whole-body skeletal muscle estimates land within about 11–12% error against MRI; individual limbs degrade badly, to 20–29%. (DEXA vs BIA comparison)

Which gives the only rule that matters here: treat the absolute number with suspicion and the delta with respect. Consistently wrong is still useful. Inconsistently measured is worthless.

And none of it survives sloppy testing. BIA is exquisitely sensitive to hydration, food, glycogen, recent training, even skin temperature — which is why the studies standardize on a four-hour fast and ten minutes standing upright before the reading, just to let fluid distribution settle. Same machine, same hour, fasted, before training, empty bladder, comparable hydration, no alcohol the day before. The protocol around the machine matters more than the logo on it. An unstandardized second measurement is worse than no second measurement, because it hands you a confident, entirely wrong delta.

Two readings three months apart is still n=1 with plenty of noise in it. It is also infinitely better than a scale, a mirror, and whatever story I feel like telling myself that morning. This is the part of biohacking nobody posts about: the instrumentation, not the compounds.

Monday

Tomorrow everything stops for three days. Thursday starts with blood. The cycle after it starts with a body-composition scan — the one I should have taken ninety days ago.

This time the before will exist.