Mark Sisson on Self-Experiments

Mark Sisson on Self-Experiments:

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• Start with a sensible premise drawn from reliable sources.
  
  Like your own experience, another’s, or results from clinical studies.
  
  An example: you forget to eat breakfast and feel stronger during the afternoon lifting session. Was it the lack of breakfast? Maybe; test it.
• Eliminate outlandish premises.
  
  I wouldn’t advise testing whether the trans-fats in Crisco are actually harmful by eating a tablespoon every morning,
  
  and breatharianism [life without food] almost assuredly won’t work; the literature is quite consistent.
• Be prepared to discard a hypothesis.
  
  Things won’t always work.
  
  And things that seemed to work for a while might suddenly stop working.
  
  Or, things that seem to work won’t actually work, or they’ll be working for entirely different reasons than you supposed.
  
  In other words, you’re probably never going to know with absolute certainty that something is working for the reason you thought it was.
  
  Just be ready to ditch failed hypotheses and change them on the fly.
• Don’t extrapolate to others.
  
  Just as your experiences didn’t jibe with results from randomized controlled trials, the solutions you discovered from your own experiments may not always work for other people.
  
  They’ll have to test it on themselves.

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