Back in the fall of 2004, a British technology journalist named Danny O’Brien gave a talk entitled Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks, and single-handedly launched the life hacking movement.

Life hacking was initially about the programming world – about using things like clever shell scripts and command line utilities to make coding easier – but the concept quickly expanded to the non-programming (though generally tech-savvy) internet at large. Soon, the term ‘life hack’ came to mean any clever, non-obvious way to solve an everyday problem. Like, for example, leaving an item you need to take to work tomorrow in front of the door the night before – you won’t miss it, because you’d otherwise have to step over it on the way out. Or, at a higher level, something like David Allen’s Getting Things Done time management system, which retrofits your humble to-do list to encompass tracking all the open commitments in your entire life.

Sites like Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com and Gawker Media’s Lifehacker.com sprung up to further / cash in on the life hack trend, as did dozens of books, conferences, and podcasts. But the apotheosis of life hacking was surely Tim Ferriss’ bestselling The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, which brought together basic productivity ideas (like time-boxing and the Pareto principle) with a step-by-step plan for small-scale internet entrepreneurship, to the ostensible end of making every reader an independently wealthy, uber-efficient, world-traveling iconoclast.

The book may have fallen short of that goal, but the hype never did, largely due to Tim himself. The man, whatever else people may think of him, is a marketing genius. So I’m not surprised that his next book, the shortly upcoming The 4 Hour Body is on trend with its new body hacking angle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, it’s 2004 and 2005, the life hacking world is cranking ahead, and geeks and tech-dorks of all stripes are more productive (or, as was joked, at least more theoretically productive) than ever. They have a sense of boundless power – figure out the tricks, and you’re made! And, at the same time, per usual, they’re not getting laid.

Enter Neil Strauss (and with him, Mystery), via The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. And lo! It’s their own story! A dorky guy who’s terrible with women, who learns the hacks, the tricks, the secret moves, and suddenly he’s up to his neck (and perhaps other parts) in ladies.

It’s life hacking all over again. Think of it as sex hacking.

Of course, like life hacking, it had its own problems.

Life hacking was ostensibly a way to allow people to do ‘thought work’ more creatively, by keeping them from getting swamped by the mundane detail of their lives. Yet constantly tweaking and hacking the hacks becomes an awfully effective form of procrastination, and a particularly good way to never quite make it to the creative thought work after all. For too many people, it was less Getting Things Done, and more Getting Things Overly Organized in a Interconnected Array of Complex Lists.

Similarly, while the young pick-up artists (or PUAs) devoted to Strauss and The Game quickly developed a ruthless, video-game efficiency at ‘scoring’ with the ladies, most still had no idea what to do next. They couldn’t quite swing the dynamics of a real relationship, and were as lonely and unhappy as before, albeit now with wildly more exciting STDs.

Still, victory! Or as close as could be hacked. Yet things seemed to be falling apart at a most fundamental level. Our life hacking sex hackers pushed into their 30’s, 40’s, or 50’s. They had back pain and knee pain and shoulder pain. Their mid-section bulges continued to expand. Their parents looked even worse. Their mortality, in the form of an ever-increasing stream of alarming news coverage (like the New England Journal of Medicine‘s “this generation could be the first in the history of the United States to live less healthful and shorter lives than their parents”), smacked them in the face.

Couldn’t that hacking savvy, that shortcut-focused, outside-the-box, cleverer-than-the-mainstream thinking, apply to our bodies, too?

Indeed. Enter Ferriss, on point as always, with the upcoming 4-Hour Body. In it, he assures us, you’ll learn:

* How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
* How to increase fat-loss 300% with a few bags of ice
* How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
* How to reverse “permanent” injuries
* How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months

Etc., etc., etc. Whole new vistas of hackery, yet still firmly rooted in the life hacking (note that the four-hour gimmick remains) and sex hacking (with chapters like ‘How to produce 15-minute female orgasms’ and ‘How to triple testosterone and double sperm count’) worlds.

The difference is, in this case, many of the hacks might actually live up to their billing.

In the creative thought-work realm that life hacking addresses, there isn’t an array of powerful secrets, there’s just a single unfortunate truth: making interesting things is hard and painful and it sucks and none of us wants to do it (and god knows I can find cleverer ways to avoid it than most), but eventually work gets done by actually doing it, and sooner or later you’ve got to suck it the fuck up and get down to that work.

And, in the love realm that sex hacking ostensibly addresses, there isn’t a simple secret either. Women don’t just appear strange and mystifying, they are strange and mystifying. They’re full of more thoughts and concerns and desires and neuroses than our simple guy brains can usually even comprehend, much less boil down to ‘up up down down left right left right B A select start’ secret codes.

But in the realm of health, the problem actually is extraordinarily simple, and easy to address: we’re meant to be wild animals; instead, we’ve entirely domesticated ourselves. We’re zoo animals, and we have all the same problems that other zoo animals have as compared to their counterparts in the wild.

We’ve avoided this insight for a very long time, in a slew of different ways. For a while, we thought technology would save us. Advances in modern medicine would cure cancer before the cigarettes killed us. The nanobots would repair us at a cellular level, extending our lives indefinitely. We’d reach Kurzweil’s Singularity, transcending biology entirely. But, like jet-packs, flying cars, and intelligent robots, those miracles seemed to always be just a bit further than expected down the line.

So we thought small and concrete, and we listened to what the health experts told us. We cut our fat intake (30% less as a country than we ate 30 years ago) and we ate more fiber. We took statins and we took the stairs. And in the end, we’re fatter than we’ve ever been. We have more Type II Diabetes, more heart attacks, more Metabolic Syndrome.

So, it turns out, the experts suck. There’s vast room for improvement. And there are endless interpretations of the simple ‘be a wild animal not a zoo animal’ solution that we’ve so long ignored, especially when that idea is put through the empirical wringer of even “n=1” self-experimentation.

Which, basically, is Ferriss’ new book in a nutshell. And, as a result, I suspect it will do very well. As will, for example, John Durant‘s upcoming book, a slightly different lifestyle / fitness book to be published by the same Random House / Crown imprint. And, in their wake, I think we’ll see a fast-increasing tide of body hacking content, of mainstream interest in finding smarter, more efficient, more effective ways to be and feel healthy.

Which is to say, body hacking: it’s the next big thing. You heard it here first.

If the Mobile Chicken Sex post left you wanting to join CrossFit NYC, here’s your chance to do it on the cheap:

CFNYC is Bloomspot’s deal of the day until Wednesday at Midnight. One offer is already sold out, but the other has a few slots left, and will get you up and running with CrossFit at a substantial discount.

[Also, as many of you live outside of New York, and many more of you (including the New Yorkers) are far too busy and lazy to head to a gym either way, I’ve been experimenting with shooting iPhone videos to teach a few short workouts that you can do on your own, anywhere. They may fall short of the full CrossFit experience, though they also doubtless beat sitting on the couch as your ass slowly expands all winter long. Stay tuned.]

About a year ago, members started showing up at my gym wearing shoes like this:

And my first reaction was, these guys look like assholes.

But, over time, more and more members showed up wearing them.

At the same time, I kept coming across articles on the advantages of barefoot running technique. I bought and wore my way through a pair of Nike Frees. I started reading journal articles on the underlying science of shoe-less life. I even perused the website for those crazy shoes I kept seeing, the Vibram Five Fingers.

So, this past week, when City Sports put Vibrams on sale, I swooped in and picked up a pair. Or, rather, two pairs – the KSO I’d intended to buy, and a lighter weight, indoor-only pair of Mocs, because I knew I loved these crazy Five Finger things the moment I put them on.

So, yes, now I look like an asshole. But I promise you, if they ever come out with a line of pants, I’ll at least pass on those.

After a month of my limping around, Jess finally shamed me into visiting an orthopedist, who confirmed that, much as I’d suspected (given my wincing at self-conducted McMurray tests), I’d torn the lateral meniscus in my right knee.

As usual, the cause of the injury is a bit short of spectacular: near as I can tell, I did it by planting my foot weirdly while carrying a box of bottled water. Though, this time, I was at least carrying that water to refill the refrigerator at CrossFit NYC, so I can say I injured myself in the gym. [That’s a fair step up from my prior left-ankle disaster, which owed simply to stepping off the curb. While sober.]

At this point, there’s a reasonable chance that I can resolve the tear by rehab rather than surgery. And, if nothing else, it’s a relief to know that – unlike, say, with a partially torn LCL – any pain simply means that my knee hurts, rather than that I’m further damaging it, en route to total immobility.

It also reinforces something I’ve long considered: that a bunch of movement dysfunctions – like, in my case, walking duck-footed – aren’t simple human variations, but symptoms of muscular imbalances that predispose people to experiencing a predictable group of related injuries, again and again and again.

I’m still trying to figure this last point out, reading dorky kinesiology texts and articles on muscle fascia. But I’m convinced it’s time well spent. Otherwise, by the the upward progression, I think the next joint to go would be my hip, and from the eighty year-olds I’ve spoken with, I hear that one’s a bitch.

The best thing about owning CrossFit NYC is getting to know our members. From stay-at-home moms to FBI Swat Team members, sixty-five-year-old retirees to twenty-five-year-old FDNY firefighters, I’m immensely proud of them all. They come in at all different levels of fitness. But they all work their asses off equally hard. And, slowly but surely, they all see results. By now, on balance, I’m sure they’re the fittest gym crowd in all of New York.

I’m particularly proud when any of our members take that fitness and put it to good use. Take, for example, Keith Zeier. Keith served in Iraq as a SpecOps Marine. At least until July 17th, 2006, when he was hit by an IED. The explosion took out a sizeable chunk of Keith’s quadricep, and he was told he’d never walk again without a cane.

This past weekend, however, Keith did more than just walk. He ran. For 31 straight hours. A 100 mile ultramarathon from Key Largo to Key West. He did it as a fundraiser for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, a non-profit that provides college scholarships to children of fallen special operations personnel, and immediate financial assistance to badly injured special operators. It was a grant from the foundation that allowed his mother to travel to his bedside when he was severely wounded.

By any measure, Keith’s run has been a great success – as an example, as an inspiration, and as a real impact on the foundation’s bottom line, for which he’s raised nearly $48,000. But given the strong cause, and his even stronger effort, I hope you’ll consider donating a small amount yourself. And I also hope that you’ll watch the short video his support crew put together; if this doesn’t get you off your ass, out the door, and on your way to changing the world, I don’t know what would.

Back in the 1890’s, dentist Weston A. Price became an early subscriber to National Geographic Magazine. He ordered it initially as waiting room reading for his patients, but quickly became obsessed with it himself. In particular, he couldn’t help but notice that the indigenous people featured in its photographs all had excellent teeth. Healthy, straight, excellent teeth. Whereas, his patients, and the patients in most practices in the American Dental Association (for which he chaired the research section), emphatically did not.

So, when he retired from dentistry, Price headed out around the globe, studying native cultures everywhere he could find them: Switzerland, Scotland, Alaska, Canada, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, Sudan, Australia, New Zealand, Peru.

And, in every case, he found that those indigenous groups were remarkably free from the diseases that then (and still now) plagued Western civilization – from cavities and impacted molars, through to allergies, asthma, heart disease, and cancer.

During the time he studied them, the younger generations of many of those cultures began to abandon their traditional diets in favor of Western foods like refined flowers and sugars, and canned goods. And, inevitably, that new-diet-eating younger generation would suddenly manifest the same ailments as the rest of the Western world. Even down to crooked teeth, which apparently are the result of jaw growth and structure – something, not surprisingly, that’s hugely driven by pre-natal and childhood diet.

To this day, research comes out constantly to support the same idea: that eating food rather than ‘food products’ has a huge impact on our health. That if we contrain our diet to unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods like meat, seafood, fruits, nuts and vegetables, we’re far, far healthier.

Problem is, that stuff is expensive. And US food policy – which heavily incentivizes production of corn and wheat to the exclusion of nearly everything else – only makes it more so. So, in short, it’s not your fault that you eat badly. It’s the US Government’s.

Or is it? Turns out, eighty years ago, people spent nearly 25% of their income on food; now, we spend barely 10%. In other words, people are quite literally no longer putting their money where there mouths are.

So what, exactly, is the above graph telling you? Basically, that your high blood pressure and your fat ass are both the result of your being a cheap bastard.

I remember once hearing a talk by the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, about how the decline of instrumental music instruction in schools inevitably led, years later, to a decrease in symphony audiences. Simply put, the people who most appreciated classical performance were usually those who had done some of it themselves.

Which seems to me particularly true in the parallel world of watching the Olympics. Prior to CrossFit, I had never tried to clean, jerk or snatch a weight, had never played on rings, parallel bars, or a pommel horse.

So, while I watched and enjoyed both the Olympic lifting and men’s gymnastics events at Athens, Sydney, and Atlanta, I didn’t until this year appreciate how really, really, holy shit I can’t believe what I’m seeing, good these guys are.

I mean seriously. It’s almost like all of these guys are Olympic-caliber athletes.