Biohacking Protocols: What the Evidence Shows

At 4:58 in the morning, in the year 2049, a voice called Soma wakes a man named Dale Mercer and tells him he slept seven hours and fifty-one minutes, nine minutes under target. The deficit, Soma says, has been logged. Dale peels off his mouth tape, stares into a 10,000-lux light panel for ten required minutes, and lowers himself into a cold plunge at 39 degrees for one minute and thirty-four seconds, his weekly share of an eleven-minute allotment (02:14). A tray slides out of the wall holding 31 capsules: magnesium threonate, lion's mane, two NAD precursors, deer antler velvet, and, hidden in the back because cheap things hurt morale, a single capsule of creatine (02:41). He injects an unlabeled peptide, drinks methylene blue, and gets his protein by IV at exactly the nineteenth second of a thirty-one-second anabolic window after his workout (05:36). Later he rides a stationary bike while Soma lectures him about mitochondria, sits in a sauna at 174 degrees for nineteen minutes, and limps home. When he finds an unlocked door, steps into real sunlight, and eats an unwashed fig off a tree growing through cracked concrete, a drone kills him for the unlogged glucose spike.

This is the cold open of a Barbell Medicine Podcast episode built around a short story, written in the style of a 1984 motorcycle column by Rick Seaman called 'Sunday Morning Ride,' about a rider grateful for his government-rationed motorcycle time (16:13). The host borrowed Seaman's structure: a person so grateful for the scraps of freedom a system allows him that he never questions the system. Then the host says the quiet part.

Pretty much everything that Dale did in this episode is something that people are doing right now and paying for it. [16:59]

What follows is forty minutes of fact-checking, protocol by protocol, against the people actually selling these ideas: Dr. Andrew Huberman's sunlight advice, cold plunge culture, the NAD and peptide supplement industry, HRV-based readiness scores, and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs, the wearable sensors that track blood sugar). The host grades each one on a zero-to-five pumpkin scale, Halloween-themed, where five means real evidence and zero means it does nothing or can hurt.

The Pumpkin Scale

Morning light does set the body's circadian clock, the internal roughly 24-hour timer that governs sleep and wakefulness. That part is well established in lab studies. But those studies used doses nothing like the popular protocol: one classic trial used about three hours of bright indoor light starting an hour before normal wake time, not ten minutes outside (18:00). The strongest evidence for timed light therapy is in diagnosed circadian rhythm sleep disorders, like delayed sleep phase, where a teenager cannot fall asleep before 2 a.m. (18:20). For people who already sleep fine, a UK Biobank analysis of about 400,000 people found that spending more time outside overall, not morning light specifically, correlated with less insomnia and depressed mood (20:27). That is observational data confounded by the fact that healthier, less busy people go outside more in the first place. The host's verdict: one pumpkin for healthy sleepers, three if a doctor has actually diagnosed a circadian disorder (21:28).

Cold plunging fares worse. The oft-cited dopamine study had young men sit neck-deep in 57-degree water for an hour; their blood dopamine rose 250 percent, but blood dopamine is not brain dopamine, and nobody measured mood (21:56). A meta-analysis of 61 randomized trials and about 1,200 people found cold water no better than doing nothing for recovery after hard exercise; everyone returned to baseline within three to five days regardless (23:30). Worse, in the best single trial on it, lifters who cold-plunged right after training grew about a third as much quad muscle over twelve weeks as lifters who skipped the plunge (23:49).

Cold plunge was no better than doing nothing at all. Everybody was back to baseline in three to five days anyway. [23:30]

The supplement tray gets picked apart capsule by capsule. Magnesium threonate and lion's mane each have one or two small positive trials, usually funded by the company selling the branded version, with no independent replication (24:57). NAD precursors like NR and NMN reliably raise blood NAD levels but have failed in trials to improve muscle mass, grip strength, insulin sensitivity, or, in a 2025 JAMA trial of 410 Parkinson's patients, to beat placebo at all (27:51). Deer antler velvet testing found four of six commercial products contaminated with human growth factor banned in sport (28:34). The one real winner, buried at the back of the tray, is creatine monohydrate, which reliably adds about one kilogram of lean mass when paired with lifting (28:53).

Skip the tray. If you're gonna take one thing, take three to five grams of creatine monohydrate a day whenever you remember to take it and lift. [29:37]

Gray market peptides, drugs like BPC-157 sold as unregulated research chemicals, get a blunter verdict. Nearly all the supporting data is in animals or petri dishes, lab testing of commercial vials keeps turning up the wrong drug or dose, and the host notes that an FDA advisory panel recently voted to let compounding pharmacies make BPC-157 anyway, over the objection of the FDA's own scientists (32:10). Methylene blue, an old drug used for a blood disorder called methemoglobinemia, is also a potent MAO inhibitor that can trigger serotonin syndrome in anyone on common antidepressants (34:18).

If you can sell something without proving that it works and is safe, who's going to pay for the trial? [33:25]

What Held Up

Not everything gets zero pumpkins. Training advice fares better once the host strips away gimmicks. Eccentric-only loading, the idea that slowing the lowering phase of a lift builds extra size, shows no real long-term advantage over normal lifting in a 2025 meta-analysis of 49 studies and about 770 people (35:52). The so-called anabolic window, the idea that protein must arrive within minutes of a workout, also collapses once studies control for total daily protein: a review of 65 trials and roughly 2,900 people found no timing effect once intake is matched, with most of the benefit coming from hitting about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight across the day (37:41).

Sleep trackers introduce a new problem: a Fitbit tested against a full sleep lab caught actual sleep 96 percent of the time but missed wakefulness 40 percent of the time, meaning it usually overstates how well someone slept (39:22). Sleep doctors have a name for people who fixate on the resulting score anyway: orthosomnia, first described in 2017, where chasing a perfect number can itself worsen sleep (40:16). Continuous glucose monitors carry a similar irony. Healthy, non-diabetic people spend less than half a percent of their time above 140 mg/dL, the normal post-meal range, and when CGM readings were checked against actual blood draws in healthy people, they were off by nearly 18 percent on average (44:33). HRV-based readiness scores fare no better: a meta-analysis of eight small trials found effects too small to distinguish from zero, and there is almost no data on using HRV to guide training in lifters at all (41:24).

The famous Finnish sauna study, often cited for a 40 percent drop in mortality, turns out to be an observational cohort of 2,300 men followed for 20 years, with randomized heat trials since showing a modest blood pressure drop but nothing on heart attacks or death (50:28). Zone two cardio, the moderate-intensity training zone many endurance athletes favor, is not uniquely better for building mitochondria than harder efforts, according to a 2025 review, and a panel of fourteen sports scientists could not even agree on how to define it (48:05).

The pattern across every protocol is the same. The exotic version promises precision and delivers noise, while the boring version, lift something heavy, eat enough protein, sleep seven-plus hours, move your body, keeps showing up as the thing that actually works. Dale Mercer dies for stepping outside a system built on thousands of small, unverified rules. The host's closing argument is that the real risk is not Soma. It is anyone willing to hand over their judgment, one subscription at a time.

Take your judgment back, lift something heavy, and eat the fig. [53:04]