Protocol / Methodology
Methodology
This is a public engineering log about one body. The unit of work is a weekly test: define the target, record daily observations, look for body signals, and publish the verdict. Experiments can be health, performance, or appearance-adjacent; the interpretation stays disciplined.
What Gets Tracked
- The weekly experiment target and whether it was hit each day.
- Sleep duration, resting HR, HRV, and recovery estimates from wearables.
- Mood, energy, anxiety, training quality, caffeine timing, and last meal timing.
- Confounders: stress, illness, travel, injury, alcohol, late meals, and unusual workouts.
- Experiment-specific measurement plans: supplement effects, skin changes, gym maxes, soreness, mobility, digestion, focus, or endurance output.
- Unconventional experiments are allowed only when they are measurable, bounded, reversible, and tracked for downsides.
- Materials, lead time, purchase status, and setup notes for experiments that require buying gear, supplements, tests, or tools.
- Study origin: literature-edge, original protocol, or control block.
- The weekly verdict: keep, modify, discard, or repeat with better controls.
Known Limits
- n=1 data is not science. It is a disciplined personal log with obvious external validity limits.
- Wearable sleep stages are noisy. HRV is useful, but single-day HRV is easy to over-interpret.
- Experiments are constrained by real life: training, work stress, travel, social plans, illness, and imperfect adherence.
- Training load, stress, illness, travel, caffeine, and regression to the mean can all masquerade as protocol effects.
Study Origin
Papers are guardrails, not a ceiling. Some experiments deliberately test the edge of published protocols. Others are original n=1 assays designed around a mechanism, a measurement surface, and stop criteria. The standard is not whether a perfect study already exists; the standard is whether the question can be bounded, measured, and interpreted honestly.
Privacy Boundary
The public log should still show metrics. The boundary is not "hide everything"; it is "publish experimental signal, keep medical-style raw readings private by default."
Public Footprint
- Adherence: hit, partial, miss, and streak/completion rate.
- Subjective scores: anxiety, calm, irritability, energy, mood, sleep, and soreness on 1-10 scales when logged.
- Sleep: rounded duration, quality bucket, wakeup/interruption signal, and direction versus baseline.
- Training: run/strength category, fatigue/soreness, new maxes when intentionally public, and performance direction.
- Appearance and side effects: acne/skin/vascularity notes, side-effect status, and whether the signal improved, worsened, or stayed noisy.
- Home lab: capture count plus trend or bucket summaries for BP, oxygen, grip, peak flow, sleep HR, and respiration.
Private By Default
- Exact blood pressure, SpO2/pulse, grip, peak flow, sleep HR/respiration ranges, and similar medical-style readings.
- Exact caffeine amount, exact training loads or paces, and messy raw symptom wording unless a value is deliberately chosen for publication.
- Anything that feels more like a health record than an experiment signal.
Interpretation Standard
Each verdict separates observations, plausible explanations, confounders, and next actions. Single-day wearable movement is treated as weak evidence. A null result is allowed.
Medical Boundary
Nothing here is medical advice. The artifact is the reasoning trail, not a prescription. Any risky or clinical intervention belongs with a clinician, not a blog cadence.