Better Than Ever: Seven Protocol Changes That Compounded

There's no single magic bullet. Over the last few weeks I changed seven things in my protocol — none of them exotic, none of them clever. On their own, each one nudged the needle. Stacked together, they compounded into something that genuinely feels better than it ever has. Here's the rundown.

1. Carbs are back — and I'm not going back

I reintroduced carbohydrates after a long stretch of keto, and it isn't close. Energy, stamina, muscle fullness — a completely different level. I made the full case in Carbs Are Back, and It's Fucking Awesome, and a few weeks later I'm even more sure of it. My lifts feel fuller, the pumps are back, training volume went up, and recovery between sessions got faster. Glycogen does what glycogen does.

I'm not going back to long-term keto. Maybe one month, max, from time to time — a short cut block for extra shredding and a metabolic reset — and then straight back to carbs. Keto is a tool I'll pull off the shelf occasionally, not a place I live anymore.

2. Progressive overload — heavier every week

With carbs actually fueling the work, I started pushing the weight up on every exercise. Progressive overload — the oldest, most reliable strength principle there is: add a little load, force the adaptation, repeat. It isn't fancy. It just works — and it only works if you're recovered and fueled enough to keep adding. The carbs are what make that possible. Fuller muscles, bigger lifts, week over week.

3. Quadrupled my creatine

I bumped my daily creatine to four times what I was taking — every single day, no cycling. Creatine is the most-studied, most-proven supplement there is, and for good reason: more phosphocreatine means more raw power on the heavy sets, plus cell volumization that pulls water into the muscle and keeps it full. Paired with the carbs the uptake is even better — insulin shuttles it straight in. Strength up, fullness up, recovery up. Boring, cheap, and it just works.

4. Cardio — every day, non-negotiable

I made cardio obligatory. Every single day, no excuses, no skipping. This is the engine that lets the rest of it work: it's what keeps fat dropping while I eat carbs and lift heavy, it pushes blood and nutrients through the muscle for recovery, and it builds the work capacity that makes everything else sustainable. Daily cardio isn't the punishment for eating carbs — it's the thing that lets me eat them and stay lean.

5. Doubled the Retatrutide

I stepped my Retatrutide up to the next tier — double the starting dose, from 0.5 mg to 1 mg weekly — the next step in the plan I laid out in Retatrutide: The Off Switch. No side effects, and I feel amazing. Appetite stays in check, body composition keeps moving the right way, and the jump itself was a physical non-event — which is exactly what you want from a dose escalation.

6. Fixed my sleep

I found the bottlenecks in my sleep, adjusted them, and I'm back to sleeping like a baby. I broke down the whole approach in Sleep: The Free Biohack Everyone Keeps Underestimating — the short version is you debug sleep one variable at a time until you find what's wrecking it, then you kill that variable. And better sleep is never just better sleep: readiness climbs, recovery climbs, mood and energy follow. It's the multiplier on everything else. Get this one wrong and the carbs, the iron, and the peptides all quietly underperform.

7. The Shadow, inverted

Dorian Yates — six-time Mr. Olympia — was known as "The Shadow." He earned the nickname because he withdrew entirely from the public eye between competitions, training alone in a hardcore gym in Birmingham, then reappearing on stage in condition nobody could touch. Pure monk mode.

By default, I lean that exact way. Head down, door shut, output. And lately that's precisely what I did — one of my most productive stretches ever, several projects running at once, and I deliberately put a few things on hold to protect the focus. One of them was socializing. I cut it to the bare minimum, just a handful of people, on purpose.

This time, though, I inverted The Shadow on the back end. Most of the big projects are shipped, so I deliberately brought socializing back — frequent, like before — but curated: like-minded, high-quality people only. And it turned out to be as good a call as any of the physical ones. I feel great.

It isn't soft, either. Social connection is one of the most robust longevity signals we have — the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked it for over 80 years, and large meta-analyses put weak social ties in the same risk neighborhood as well-known killers. Good relationships aren't the reward for the work. They're part of the protocol.

The compounding

None of these is exotic. Carbs, heavier lifts, more creatine, daily cardio, a scheduled dose bump, fixed sleep, real connection. Each one is modest on its own. Stacked, they compound — and right now the whole system runs better than it ever has.