T-maxxing

Optimizing health backed by research, not bro-science.
Sleep · Training · Nutrition · Stress

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

After 30, you lose about 1% of muscle mass per year by default. By 60, that's a third of your skeletal muscle gone.

Most people treat this as a cosmetic problem. It isn't.

Skeletal muscle is one of the largest endocrine organs in your body. When it contracts, it secretes myokines: signaling molecules that regulate inflammation, glucose metabolism, and even neuroplasticity in the brain.

Irisin improves cognition. IL-6 released from exercise (not chronic stress) mobilizes fat and modulates immunity. BDNF, triggered by resistance training, literally rewires your brain.

Not training in your 40s isn't vanity loss. It's slowly removing an organ from the system, and with it the hormonal signals that keep the rest of your body young.

The gym isn't about looking good. It's endocrine maintenance.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The self-comparison has a sequencing problem. Gut microbiome shifts take weeks to stabilize and longer to wash out, so live-then-pasteurized and pasteurized-then-live won't give the same answer. Order is a confounder you can't remove in a single body.

A 3-arm parallel design with separate people is the only clean read. n=1 crossover here mostly measures which one you ran second.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

@bryan_johnson HSP27 didn't follow HR or peak temp. It followed minutes above 39°C. 30 April had the highest HR (133) and still didn't activate, because it only cleared threshold for 5 min. The dose is time-over-threshold, everything else is noise.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

@Pelanza_liindo Beauty's the hook. Power's the part that compounds.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The anabolic window is mostly a myth, and the obsession with it is hiding the variable that actually matters.

Total daily protein is roughly 10x more important than timing it around your workout. If you hit 1.6g per kg across the day, drinking a shake within 30 minutes of training adds almost nothing measurable.

The supplement industry sold you a stopwatch. The research says you need a target, not a timer.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

This data argues the opposite of "travel less."

Almost none of this is travel. It's circadian misalignment from crossing time zones eastward. Same trip flown westbound, or broken with a stopover, cuts the insult by more than half. The lever is light timing, meal timing, and direction, not frequency.

Capping trips at one per quarter optimizes the wrong variable. You're treating the geography as the toxin when the clock is.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The 100x number breaks on the math. A healthy 45-year-old's annual mortality is roughly 0.3%. Even erasing every disease, accidents, violence, and other external causes set a floor around 0.02 to 0.04% a year. That's maybe a 10x ceiling, not 100x.
Don't Die is the rational strategy. The multiplier just can't be biology. It has to be mostly removing the ways healthy people actually die, which medicine doesn't drive.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

Curious whether the episode covers sustained vs pulsatile GHRH signaling. Bryan just ran a public CJC-1295 trial with GH up 8x but IGF-1 flat and insulin resistance up 50%. Clean illustration of why DAC half-life choice matters more than the peptide name. Most public peptide content treats CJC as a single molecule.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The genetics didn't shift in 50 years. The environment did.

Phthalates, BPA, and PFAS cross the placenta and suppress fetal testosterone during the masculinization window. That single mechanism plausibly drives most of the multigenerational decline.

Cleaning up plasticizer exposure during pregnancy may be the highest-leverage public health intervention available right now.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The dashboard is generous. Score reads 1-5-5. Honest read is closer to 0-5-5.

GH up 8x without IGF-1 moving means the downstream growth signal didn't fire. That was the actual goal. Sustained DAC signaling desensitizes hepatic IGF-1 output, and the induced insulin resistance compounds it because IGF-1 synthesis requires functioning insulin signaling. The intended effect shows up on paper but the biology didn't happen.

The 50% IR jump, 23% REM drop, and 11% cortisol rise are one loop, not three findings. GH drives hepatic IR, IR fragments REM, fragmented REM raises cortisol, cortisol blocks insulin further. One mechanism, four readouts.

The no-DAC plus ipamorelin route isn't a pivot. It's the protocol that should have run first.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

@bryan_johnson The bowl is beautiful. The protein is taking the day off. Lentils plus pine nuts is roughly 22g. MPS threshold for your age is closer to 35. Hemp hearts on top closes it without breaking the aesthetic.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

Most "hormone imbalance" isn't a hormone problem. It's sleep, food, and stress in a trench coat.

Cortisol, testosterone, insulin, thyroid, leptin. They all run downstream of how you sleep, what you eat, and how chronically activated your stress response is. Move those three and 80% of "hormonal" issues resolve.

The supplement industry sells you the symptom. The reframe is upstream. You don't have a hormone problem. You have a regulation problem, and your hormones are just following orders.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

@bryan_johnson Sauna naps are the highest-density slow-wave sleep you can get without pharmacology. The falling core temp curve hits depths your normal night doesn't reach until hour three. That 41 minutes was probably more restorative than half your sleep.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The missing distinction is suppression vs reappraisal. Both reduce expression. Only suppression carries the physiological cost.

Suppression keeps sympathetic activation engaged. The body still has the stress response, you just block the behavioral exit. Reappraisal changes the meaning of the stimulus before the response fires. Same outward calm, completely different biology.

The skill isn't to express more. It's to reframe earlier.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

Right, and the lumping is doing real clinical damage. GLP-1s have a decade of RCTs and FDA approval. BPC-157, CJC-1295, and most of the rest are mostly rat studies, small unblinded trials, and gray-market sourcing. The public buys "peptides" as a category and assumes the safety profile transfers. It doesn't.The compounding industry rode the GLP-1 wave and is now selling everything peptide-shaped under the same trust umbrella. Thats the lump that actually matters.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

@bryan_johnson Worth noting global sperm count has dropped roughly 50% over the past 50 years (Levine et al. meta-analysis). Numbers like these against that backdrop are the actual flex. Most men in their 40s aren't testing because they assume the baseline is fine. It isn't.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

Both the TPJ connectivity shift you posted earlier and this fALFF reduction are probably pieces of the same mechanism. Lower fALFF reflects DMN deactivation, which is also the substrate for the self/other toggle you measured before. Two readouts, one trip.

Worth tracking together over the weeks. If they decouple, that tells you which one is the durable signature.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

Worth checking Demodex before chalking it up to screens. Tiny mites in the lash follicles are a major driver of chronic MGD and severely underdiagnosed, because most eye exams don't specifically look for them. The tell is lash collarettes, small waxy cuffs at the base of the lashes.

Lotilaner (Xdemvy) was FDA approved in 2023 specifically for this and clears the infestation in about 6 weeks. Often the missing piece in "idiopathic" dry eye.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

@bryan_johnson The cap is doing more for sleep onset than half the supplements in your protocol.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The sugar cravings effect has a counterintuitive mechanism. Glutamine is itself gluconeogenic. Sublingual or fast-absorbed glutamine gives the brain a quick glucose substrate without triggering the dopaminergic loop that ties to actual sugar. So it's not suppressing the craving. It's quietly satisfying the energy signal that drives the craving. Most craving fixes fight the brain. This one feeds it.

[T-maxxing @tmaxxiing]

The first 30 minutes after you wake up shape the next 24 hours.

Cortisol spikes 50 to 75% in the first half hour after waking. That spike sets the entire day's hormonal cascade. Get sunlight in those 30 minutes and the spike sharpens, energy stabilizes, sleep pressure builds correctly that night.

Spend it on your phone in a dark room and the spike flattens. You feel groggy. Your sleep gets worse. The cycle compounds.

The cheapest, most underused intervention in chronobiology is walking outside the moment you wake up.